This week thursday, December 15, 2016 the Berlin Institute of Health will feature a lecture by Thomas Südhof. The lecture will be held on Thursday at 2 p.m. at the 'Paul Ehrlich Hörsaal' in Virchowweg 4, next to the CCO.
Let's have a look what he told us in an interview for our March 2015 issue.
CW: The discoveries that led to you being awarded the Nobel Prize together with Jim Rothman and Randy Scheckman happened at nearly the same time. Was it a collaborative or competitive landscape?
TS: My overlap with Scheckman’s work is minimal. He is a yeast geneticist. His primary contribution is the identification of lots of genes that are somehow involved in secretion. Which was an important contribution and helpful for the field for sure. We had much more to do with Jim Rothman; Jim traditionally works on the reconstitution of membrane fusion in vitro. We on the other hand have never worked on in vitro fusion. We only worked on in vivo function of genes, identification of genes, cloning of genes, purifications of proteins, and manipulation of genes that are involved in neurotransmitter release as a form of vesicular transport. So there were many complementary results but I am not sure whether there ever was a real competition.
What do you consider your personal success, has there ever been an “Aha-moment”?
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| Photo by Lisanne Schulze |
Fewer Nobel Prizes are awarded for addressing biological questions. Those Nobel Prizes usually reflect a continuous amount of work, which often extends over decades. And each individual experiment in that continuous amount of work is incremental. Science’s very nature is incremental. I know that if you submit a paper and it is rejected it is usually because it is incremental. Obviously, it is a nonsense criticism of a paper because in science, we always make progress in understanding a question step by step. You don’t understand a question with one experiment but hundreds of experiments. In my own career, there was no single experiment that I could point out that solved the question of neurotransmitter research.
Have you felt impatient at some point because you could not immediately see success?
I had many experiences of frustration and unhappiness because of failed experiments, rejected papers or fighting colleagues. Those types of feelings or stages are very common place in my career as they are in another one’s. But you know we can’t always expect it to be right what we do. We can’t think that everything we are going to do will be a success. It is part of the process. I think that overall, those types of experiences are unpleasant, but they are not bad for the progress of science. Because that is part of the corrective mechanism that allows us to pursue truth.
Did you ever feel so frustrated that you thought you would give up?
No.
Did you ever consider giving up on a project?
Sure, you have to do this all the time. You try many things but some things just don’t work. It is just one of the many advices that I would give young people: TRY OUT A LOT. But give it up as soon as possible if it is not progressing. Don’t get married to your projects. Go for a quick divorce.
Did you think at some point of your career of taking up a position outside of academia?
I decided only to become a science professional when I started my own lab. After I had become a faculty member, I never thought of not being a faculty member. It is a wonderful job. It is very hard work, yes. It can be frustrating but it is a terrific opportunity to do something useful.
How did you know this was the right choice? What should one look for when choosing a lab?
I think it is very different for choosing a lab as a student or as a Postdoc. When you are a student, the importance of publishing is not as pressing. It is nice to publish a paper, it is rewarding, but it is not essential. What is essential is to learn: To learn from your mentors, colleagues, to learn science, to learn approaches to science, how to read papers, but also to learn new techniques. I am not sure whether learning techniques is one of the most important things. The most important thing is really to become familiar with the process of science – of good science.
For a Postdoc you have to keep in mind that you have to make a career choice, you have to try out where you want to be. You have to publish papers if you want to go into academia and, and, and. I think for a Postdoc, the most important criterion is the quality of the mentor. It is not the field and not the technique, it is not the location; It is the quality of the mentor! That is crucial for the chances of success in the long term.
"DON’T GET MARRIED TO YOUR PROJECTS.
GO FOR A QUICK DIVORCE."
For the students, what I think is more important than the quality of the mentor, even is the environment. The people you are going to deal with all along. It is of course important to have a good mentor, but it is more important – I think – whom you are going to work with and what the intellectual environment is. What other influences you can have.
For example, the most important thing for students is to learn how to read papers. That has become even more important than it used to be. When you had a certain journal, the papers were generally reliable. And I think this is not true anymore. Many papers that are published these days that are just bullshit. So it is much more important to actually judge a paper, to learn how to evaluate the science in it. This is something you have to learn as a student.
What are your criticisms of the current scientific system?
We live in a time where the high impact journals are really no longer truly peer-reviewed. Let’s face it. That is the problem. They are not peer-reviewed because the selection of what articles to send out for review in the first place is so stringent that the peer-review afterwards for the few papers that are sent out. I think it depends on the selection of the reviewers before the papers. You could say that the system is broken. So in view of this, the most important goal should be to find the best possible avenue to bring the paper to your readers. Because it doesn’t really matter that much if the journal has a high or low impact. Personally, I think the journal of neuroscience is just as good as long as it can really provide a story in a sense that represents progress.
What would you change about the scientific publication process?
I would change many things. I would take away the power of the editors. I would solve the issue of free access and all this stuff by having people pay for submission of papers. The current system is you can send your stuff anywhere you want. You only have to pay if it is accepted. That is a bad system because predatory journals will accept anything because they want to be paid, right? Serious journals get thousands and thousands of papers that are not really serious. That provides a kind of pretend reason for editorial selection.
What really should happen and what happens in Journal of Neuroscience is that anyone who submits a paper has to pay submission fees that will cover the cost of a well-evaluated paper. And that would cut out a lot of frivolous articles. I also think that we need a mechanism to evaluate editors of journals. I think journal editors have zero accountability. I was shocked by the responses of the journals when it turns out that papers are wrong, faked or irreproducible. Journal editors usually blame the reviewers. But they selected the reviewers. They evaluated the reviews. And therefore, it really should be the journal editors who are to blame and not the reviewers. The reviewers are just the pretence.
Thank you very much for the interview! Earning the Nobel Prize really shows that you are so dedicated to your work. Do you have a last advice for young scientists how to stay equally focussed and disciplined in their research?
I don’t feel disciplined. I just enjoy what I do! I don’t have any discipline (laughing).
Claudia Willmes, PhD Student AG Eickholt / AG Schmitz
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