I went to college for nine years to obtain a bachelors, masters and Ph.D. I am very proud of those accomplishments and completely embrace the moniker geek. I love doing cutting edge research and teaching the next generation of ‘geeks.’ The problem is that with that education I did not learn how to market or promote myself or my research. Self promotion is becoming more and more important in science because the federal system of peer review by its nature means that new and outside the box thinking cannot be supported. If you are the first with an idea, your peers will not be familiar with that concept and new things are shunned as being too risky. Innovation now seems to be more of a contest to see who is the first person to try to use a diabetes medicine to treat heart attack. That means research is not to discover things but to test the discoveries of others. Creativity and innovation as well as simple scientific curiosity are being lost.

The culture of discovery is rapidly vanishing. That is just sad.