Phone+business

I never use my phone for work.  The only thing I have in it is Busy/Available synced to my work Outlook so I don't mess up my scheduling for tests/dinners/etc.  Also, since I travel for a lot of studies and corporate portfolio meetings I need to make sure I'm not in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The email on my phone is personal.  No one, but a select few from work, have my cell.  Not even the president of my company (my boss). I don't even do web searches on it for work.  Here's my open tabs:

Cracked
NPR News
AV Club
Food Network
Amazon for watches
Wikipedia for Frozen (Film)
The homepage for my new department<-this is kind of work related, I know....

Nothing related to my current work.  Something about work encroaching on my real life bums me out.  My entire group is like this.  There should be work-life balance; not work-life integration.  We all realize that if you don't have time to switch off then you'll burn out.  Some people can handle it, we just would rather be hiking or hanging out with friends.

But my soon-to-be-successor asked me today how to get his phone on the 'network'.  Then he was shocked and started passing judgement on us when we said we didn't know.  First, he said we were luddites!  Then he said it made us seem undedicated!  We work on the cutting edge of technology.  We have created complicated implants that can manipulate the body into doing what we want.  We've written software that Google would drool over. But because we don't want to constantly be connected to the office we're undedicated and dumb?  Our group of a few has impacted more lives than the thousands of other groups in our company combined even though we switch off at the end of the day.

I understand some people like to be connected, but don't insult us when we want to have separate lives from work.  There's a conference next week where he'll be showcasing some of our technology with me to some MDs.  I guarantee he can't answer the first question they ask him.  And when leadership hears this I'm certain he'll be moving groups.  Probably through a promotion...

My replacement

A year into my job out of grad school I proposed the idea for the creation of my group. It was a new idea for research and medical device development that has proved to be very successful for the company and for patients. We started off in leftover lab space with a dedicated, smart, but inexperienced team (I was the oldest...and only a year out of grad school...). We slowly developed into the best group in the company and a little over a year ago started working in a custom-built lab that we designed down to the border on the windows. It has all the equipment I wanted, with the exact layout I thought would be most condusive to doing great research. I love it. And I love my team.  It's incredibly fun; a start-up feel with big company name and dollars.  And the concept has worked out so well that a year ago I was made the international representative for this kind of group.  Every division across the world now has a group similar to mine.

When I accepted my academic job I started to talk to management about cultivating my right hand person to take my position. They've been with the group since the beginning and is only second to me in patents/year in the company. Leadership agreed this was the best move. 

But today I was given some troubling news. Leadership has found someone they want to join my group and shadow me to pick up everything they can in the one+ year before I leave. This person has a very good track record as a leader in other biomedical companies, but doesn't know much about applications.  Mr. MBA, as I've been calling him. Also, we've all talked with this person and our personalities don't match at all. Our group dynamic is one of the most important things about our team, and I'm pissed that leadership wants to mess with this dynamic.  He tells very different types of jokes, and comes in thinking he knows everything.  He worked in the old-world way of biomedical development, and very different from how my group does R&D; focused on money not lives.  And we can all tell that he's here to move up the ladder.  I would have never left my group if not for academia.  Even if they offered me the CEO position.  I love my group too much, and he's definitely here to leave.  Honestly, I think leadership put him here to quickly get experience in leading the best team in the company before moving up the ladder with that 'experience'.  There's no way this is going to stop me from leaving, but I'm suddenly fearing that the group will go downhill when I leave. And my group has been responsible for the vast majority of the company's recent success. I've got nothing to lose so I'll DEFINITELY be voicing my opinion.  My #2 isn't upset they're getting pushed back, and they definitely won't leave because the group is too important to them, too.  The rest of the team is sticking around, too.  But they definitely aren't happy about this.

I already hated business-types. I'm about to hate them more. 

My beef with patents

In a lot of biomedical companies, you are judged by the number of patents you hold. So we seek out every type of patent we can. I've been asked to file three patents today that I know will never be worked on by my company because we already have a ton of products in our pipeline. We're taking up the patent in order to prevent our competition from working on it. Or they can work on it, and we'll license the patent to them. But all we're doing is making a couple crappy sketches and filing. No actual R&D work. However, if you file lots of patents you get pats on the back, promotions, and $2000 per patent.

Let's say this product could have saved 100,000 lives. Now it won't, because no one can work on it, and we're not planning on developing it. This is contrary to journal publishing. We can steal, build-upon, and refocus from one another, but ultimately, nothing useful happens with the data...just like with some of these patents (by the way, my legal department says this isn't patent trolling, even though I think it is). So which is worse?

I'd say patents for a few reasons. First, in publications, nothing's happening with it (the time spent on my medical device patents will save more lives in a year than all my publications combined for the rest of the timespan of humankind), but at least you're letting anyone use it, including a company if they want to. A patent is locking up the idea. Second, patents don't contribute anything. They only take away. Patents are often written as broad as possible and very little engineering and science go into them. So no one can learn too much from them. This is on contrast to most manuscripts, where they are filled with all sorts of intellectual awesomeness that other researchers can build on. In addition, most of the claims are substantiated by data.  So someone else could potentially take the broad idea to market and save lives, but they can't without paying crazy license fees for a patent the issued company isn't using.  Patents have data, but it's not as scrutinized as most academic papers.  The change that the USPTO has made where you don't have to prove due-diligence and the patent is awarded to first-to-file is only going to make things worse (I can explain more on the patent cycle and medical device IP if any of you want to read a post on it).

Ultimately, I despise locking up an idea that could save lives if we don't intend on utilizing it. It's a defensive move that only helps shareholders. We could use these defensive patents as offensive weapons against the competition and the diseases. But ultimately, they sit back with their pitch and arrows just preventing anyone else from reaching good. 

Your research is too applicable?

I got my first official rejection letter.  From my top school.

In my company, when I hire one candidate over another, I can only tell the rejected candidate that we had to go with someone else.  A very generic statement since legal says we can't give reasons (I'll never understand this legal shit).  My rejection letter today was interesting.  It said a bunch of generic crap then, "The search committee determined your research was is too clinically applicable."  The job posting was for a bioengineering faculty member that could work directly with the local medical school to develop new therapies.  This is perfect for me since I've already launched medical products that are saving, on average, 200 lives per hour (according to statistics I got last week).

I have very strong opinions about the difference between science and engineering.  My views might be misguided but I consider scientists as those that search for a better understanding of the universe.  Engineers apply this understand with existing technologies, and scigineers perform some combination of understanding the universe and building things outside of just research devices.  PhDs in bioengineering usually fall into either science or scigineering.  The ones that fell into bioscience may have well just majored in biology.  These bioengineers piss me off because I feel like it should be a requirement that if you have a PhD in ANY type of engineering, that you should be able to solve a first-order differential equation.  Those that do only core biology research for their PhD in bioengineering don't deserve it.  Sorry, you should switch majors.  I've met far too many that can't solve dy/dx=x.  And that really pisses me off if you have a PhD in engineering.  It's a personal opinion that a lot of people hate, but good math skills and engineering are supposed to go hand-in-hand.

My application packet had a lot of scigineering: using new experimental techniques and the data from the novel techniques to drive new types of medical device design.  A strong marriage (non-Hollywood) of science and engineering.  Shit, my official job title is Senior Principal Bioengineering Scientist.  I work in hospitals, develop new therapies, pitch them to the board, do science to understand the problem, and create therapies and save lives.  This is what I'm great at.  So why does the search committee think my research is too applied for a position that works with hospitals to create new therapies?  I understand the search for knowledge, and I have a shitload of fun doing those types of projects, but as engineers, aren't we supposed to have applied research?  Isn't the current biomedical funding landscape better built for applied research?  I was certain this school would be interested given the clinical collaboration they're looking for!  Oh well...

Saying 'hello' to my soul again

Sooooo, I finished my PhD a couple of years ago in a bioengineering-type field. I had always been industry-focused because I wanted the real-world relevance. I even took a break between my undergrad and grad educations to get a few years of industry experience.

About a year from graduation I started to apply for industry positions in the medical field. I lined up an offer very quickly for one of the most publically reputable companies in the world in a fast-paced laboratory. It was my dream job. Was. About 6 months before graduation a lot of my results came together and I learned more about academia and I realized I made a huge mistake. I wanted to enter academia. I wanted the freedom, the mentorship and teaching of students, the core search for good, expanding my knowledge-base beyond what is needed for profits, and working with people who are genuinely brilliant. I don't mind the politicking and endless committees and egos because I'm going to have that stuff anywhere. I had all these good things in graduate school (self-funded through my own research grants) and I didn't realize how much I liked it until too late. I ultimately decided to continue on the industry track because I knew it would give me experience beyond what a typical post-doc would have. And the pay. I am easily making 2x my old advisor. 

I've already developed a couple products in my industrial R&D lab and feel like I've gotten all the real-world experience I want. To be honest, I feel like I'm getting dumber in industry. I'm learning a lot about one little field and how to think like an evil business man, but I don't have exposure to anything else. I've been reading all I can, but there's only so much time. The academics out there are thinking "duh. Of course we're smarter". And I would say "you're not all smarter, but you're definitely less evil than industry scientists." I'm looking at you, Monsanto. 

With that, I'm going to make the shift to academia. So far, I have applied for 20 R1 universities and will talk about the hardship of the transition and my application process if it happens this year. If it doesn't I'll just continue on the journey to next year's application season. So I've been kissing a lot of butt, and trying my hardest to switch mindsets to creating an academic application package those already in the ivory tower will like. Here's to a year of depression in an overpaid job if I don't get any offers!