November 17, 2017 Friday
Bedtime Story
On Publishing Papers
Of my entire forty four years of my life so
far, I have spent just three in doing serious scientific research.
Most others were spent in becoming a
specialist physician and in my case micro surgeon.
Those three years were enough to teach me
how painful it can be to do pure science.
Not that microsurgery is less painful or
less demanding in terms of discipline and focus; yet pure science is not a
stuff that most men are capable of.
That precious experience made me fully
aware what it feels like to be rejected when you have spent months
experimenting and days writing a paper for I have faced a fare deal of
rejections myself though eventually getting nearly all my/our work published.
Remarkable enough, my most fundamental
research work that involved transfer of genes into retinal cells using virus as
vectors never got published, at least by me.
Partly because I did not last long enough
in that laboratory at Wilmer Eye Institute but more importantly I think I did
not have a supervisor who had enough time to dedicate to research and his post
doctoral fellows.
Dr. Peter Gehlbach, M.D. and Ph.D. who is a
retina specialist is currently Director of Wilmer Echography Center and an
Associate Professor of Ophthalmology is perhaps more busy with his
responsibilities as a physician and surgeon.
That perhaps took away most of his time and
whatever little was left over was hastily imparted for scientific research.
Moreover, my incompetency in science too
has to be pointed out as my years of training in medical school and residency
training was never aimed towards me a scientist.
So it was perhaps the fact that I was
carrying out high quality research with very little knowledge and experience
under a mentor who had little time that left my work unpublished.
It is also possible that the work did get
published but by some other post doctoral fellow since I had to leave my notes
back there when I got a chance at a clinical fellowship at the Univeristy of
California, Irvine.
Mojica on the other hand did not have that
luxury of giving up pure science to pursue medicine.
He was now getting seriously jittery as he was
keenly aware of the importance of his paper though the world at large,
including the experts, had little comprehension of its impact.
He made one final valiant effort.
This time after all the previous futile
attempts when he sent the paper to Journal of Molecular Evolution, it was
finally not rejected.
But the editors and reviewers of the
journal took nearly 12 months before they eventually published the paper in the
February of 2005.
That happened to be just in the nick of
time before other labs too were about to come out with their work.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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