The Scientific Big Leagues
It's been an interesting week as I started up my posting at MIT. The day I showed up (last Thursday), I was immediately signed up for a weekend-long conference honoring my new research supervisor. It was exhausting (9AM until 11:30PM on Saturday of solid conferencing, including about five hours of my very favourite activity - "networking"), but did give me a great opportunity to meet a lot of the people in the lab. This is no small feat - there are 110 people associated with the lab in some way, with about 70 of those people actively doing research (undergrad/grad students or post-docs such as myself). The conference speakers were kind of the who's-who of the field, a pretty crazy lineup you would virtually never find at any other conference, and congratulatory letters were received from everybody from the Red Sox (my boss is throwing out the first pitch at a Sox game in a few weeks) to Dubya himself. To put this guy into perspective, he has 890 publications in the literature and 550 issued or pending patents. The publication total is impressive in academia, although not unprecedented; the patent frequency, on the other hand, is unprecedented. Somebody in their "tribute" presentation mentioned that he ranks number three in U.S. history in terms of number of patents issued, behind Thomas Edison and somebody else whose name I didn't actually recognize. So, it was an interesting but somewhat intimidating/exhausting start to MIT.
This past week was perhaps even more interesting. I had a bit of a surreal conversation with one of the sub-project leaders (i.e. one of the five guys who actually runs the research in the lab while the Big Boss does his own thing) who warned me to be careful who I talked to about research ideas lest they be "stolen" from me prior to my being able to try them out. I was also basically told to avoid one of the project leaders entirely because "he things he owns you". The moral of the story (combined with all the glad-handing witnessed at the conference last weekend): a successful lab brings in people who are driven by doing genuinely interesting good science (me and many others I've met) and people who are driven to fame and fortune no matter who they have to step on along the way. So, amidst the opportunity comes what is obviously a bit of a political minefield where you have to be careful who you talk to and what you say. Indeed, the culture of the lab has made it very hard for me just to find out what is going on so I can decide where I want to spend my time - nobody really wants to tell me too much in terms of exactly what is happening under their domain. On the other hand, I basically have an unlimited budget to do whatever I want, which is not a bad thing. I think I have a pretty reasonable research idea now, extending on my controlled insulin release work from my PhD, but I definitely want to do some more reading first before jumping in. I also have a couple more meetings with project leaders this coming week to try to figure out what other opportunities might be out there before I commit to anything.
Anyway, the church hunting is continuing today - off to Park Street Church for an evening service (good news: get to sleep in; bad news: seems a little odd not to go to church on a Sunday morning).
