Scaling the Scientific Eigernordwand: Part 2

Preparing the previous post reminded us of a description of abseiling as the second fastest way down a mountain. However, becoming a Senior Pharma Fellow is not the only way up. Another way is to get in at the start.

Or at least it used to be. This strategy only works in an expanding organisation so, given the global credit crunch and the current state of the pharmaceutical industry, it’s probably not something around which you want to plan your career. Nevertheless there are plenty of Pharma people whose important-sounding job titles are largely consequences of having got in early.

The transition from Scientist to Manager can prove difficult for some individuals. The manager of a systems biology group who started as the only member of the group will typically feel a little possessive of the group. Early on when there were only two other people in the group, this was not too much of a problem. However, there are now 15 people in the group and a little problem has cropped up. The Top Gun who joined the group following 3 years in the lab of a Massachusetts-based, Key Opinion Leader, funded by a prestigious fellowship, is preparing a manuscript for publication. And this is causing a slight problem.

Why should this be a problem? Well, Top Gun doesn’t see why she should include Group Manager as an author since Group Manager has made no contribution to the this piece of work. This is a real break from tradition because Group Manager is always listed as an author on anything that anyone in the group publishes regardless of whether he has actually contributed to the work in question. It has always been this way ever since the group was just Group Manager and nobody else.

You’ll all have seen similar examples be they in systems biology, proteomics, informatics, molecular modeling or protein crystallography. Then there's the Med Chem manager with a remarkable ability to appear on patents. Be wary of the offer to ‘take a look at your manuscript’ since the comments that come back may well include a couple of completely re-written paragraphs representing Group Manager’s ‘contribution’ to your article. Frequently, Group Manager’s boss will just let him get away with it since to do otherwise would require a degree of moral fibre that is rarely encountered at that level of the organisation. Sometimes Group Manager’s boss is actually in on the scam and is also getting on papers. However, we should not be too hard on Group Manager because he really does think that he is equivalent to a professor in a university and that the members of the group are his post-docs.

A similar situation can exist in small companies except that Group Manager may now be Chief Technical Officer (CTO). In some cases the company grows too fast for CTO to maintain his grip on publishable material within the company. There will be pain all round when somebody makes CTO realise that it’s not totally reasonable to expect to be listed as an author of work that he had no awareness of. So if you see CTO pulling up weeds in the car park, he’s probably just sulking because one of The Great Unwashed managed to slip something into a journal without him knowing.

They are like monkeys. The higher they climb, the more revolting are the parts that they display.

Any similarity between the characters in this Crapshoot and real people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No animals, children, Senior Pharma Fellows, Group Managers, Key Opinion Leaders or Chief Technical Officers were harmed in the preparation of this Crapshoot.