Joseph F. Clark, Ph.D.

A colleague and I were going to dinner one evening. He was Japanese, but not familiar with the city of Morioka Japan, so he asked at the hotel reception desk for a restaurant recommendation. He was told of a little family run business on the corner of the very next block. After crossing 2 streets and up one flight of stairs we were there.

My biological clock is all out of whack because of the jet lag from a 13 hour time zone change between Cincinnati and Japan, I was hungry and it was dinner time. However when we arrived, no one was in the restaurant. My colleague, Sakai-sensei, did not like the looks of an empty restaurant and tried to usher me back out the door. He was a native of Tokyo and an empty restaurant is a bad place to eat.

I was too slow on the trip out the door and the matron of the place cornered us and showed us to our seats. Sakai-sensei apologized to me saying maybe the woman the hotel desk was related to the restaurant owners.

The restaurant had about 6 floor level tables on tatami mats. Each table could seat 4 to 6 on the floor pillows. There was seating on box stools at the “bar” for four. So by my reckoning the whole place could accommodate 34 people. That estimate is kind of a stretch because the bar was cluttered with debris that looked to be 20 year old crates and barrels.

The whole restaurant reminded me of a flea market more than an eatery. The little old lady was less than 5’ tall with thick glasses poised half way down her nose and a black lanyard hanging from those around her neck. The tables and floor pillows were about the only hint that it was a restaurant pretty much nothing else matched a restaurant décor.

Sakai-sensei and I sat at the bar on two box-crates. There was no leg room for me at the bar because of the debris. From my perch on the crate I could see clearly the tiny kitchen complete with drawings and faded kid photos on the refrigerator. There was an ancient gas stove, I think cast iron and enamel, with two burners and a broiler. Behind the stove there had once been tile and now was grease saturated bare wood cross hatched with the grout used to hold tile in place.

Sakai-sensei continues to apologize and I assure him I like adventure and that sometimes places like this can be a treasure. I’m not too good at Japanese so he orders some yasai-salad, sashimi, broiled mackerel; a house specialty, rice and beer.

We were served a traditional pickle appetizer consisting of cucumber and radish by being informed that it was homemade like everything else. It was excellent, fresh tender yet still with a pleasant crunch in the vegetables. We asked for seconds. Instead of a small single serving bowl she brought a huge plate heaping with succulent pickles and radishes

Shortly after ordering a second couple come in. Actually they are from the same scientific conference we are part of – still wearing their badges. I take my conference identification off as soon as possible. I may be a geek, but I tend to not advertise it when traveling. We nodded to each other with wide eyed question marks on our faces. It becomes obvious that the hostess is the waitress is the chef. We only saw one employee and that includes my view of the kitchen.

A third and fourth group arrives bringing the house total to about 11 people. The mama-san scurried around taking orders at tables, over the bar as well as cooking and delivering food. I watched in awe as she prepared the mackerel, lit the gas stove and arranged the sashimi on a serving boat with seaweed and vegetables.

The sashimi was well prepared, very fresh, abundant and just lovely. The hot mackerel filet traveled about 10 feet in less than 20 seconds; from the broiler to our plates. It was lightly encrusted with a salty rub and a tender – juicy texture. The filets were served on a bed of mixed greens glazed with a salty marinade.

The meal was awesome. Some of the courses were slow in coming but the spectacle of this woman rushing around doing every job plus seeming pleasant and interested in our satisfaction made it a multi media evening. She was the entertainment as well as everything else in the restaurant.

Mama-san offered us desert but we were stuffed. As we paid our bill, she took our money, did I say she was the cashier; we gave her a tip, not required in Japan and she sincerely tried to refuse it. We insisted on giving her the tip, but what I wanted to do was hug her and applaud. Instead I shook her hand, bowed politely and kept saying “oishy” which means tasty. I hope she was pleased because I was.

I did not get the name of the restaurnat or a business card, but this is what it looked like from the Hotel.

I spent a week in Japan for the Japanese Physiological Society Meeting recently. It was in Morioka Japan and I highly recommend the city as an off the beaten trail type of place to go. The area is known for its great noodles, its iron works and the convergence of three rivers from the surrounding mountains. On the mountains, even though it was May, you could see the snow capped peaks. Apparently the emperor has a dacha in the mountains as a place to escape. The city is easy to reach from Tokyo by bullet train; called the shinkansen.

I attended the society meeting and participated in several discussions of the latest science and technology. That is fun and is the attraction to science conferences. I was approached by at least two senior people asking me if there were jobs right for people of their experience in America. The job market in America for scientists is not great I told them. Two colleagues also were heavily marketing their graduate students to me for hiring as postdocs. Right now I employ two postdocs: one Japanese, I am sure she has said nice things about my lab to the people recommending another postdoc, and another postdoc who is Argentinean. My colleagues were telling me that positions for scientist in Japan were very few and it was hard to keep good people. I completely understand and sympathize. I’ve blogged the same musings before: Geeks are an endangered species and Lost Generation. Those blogs discuss the difficulty in educating American students in the science and the fact that my two postdocs are not US citizens is evidence therein.

What appears to be happening in Japan is that the high school education is focusing less on science and technology and more on banking and business. Therefore the best and brightest are not entering the sciences. Sound familiar? I’ve been saying that for years and the Japanese concur.

From what I was able to gather the biggest universities and most established faculty get the big grants because the philosophy is to do BIG science. Big science is where a great amount of resources are thrust to address an important question. A classic example of big science is the human genome project. That obviously was successful and the results are being used by a great number of scientists around the world. But that is a platform for others to make discoveries. What is happening is there are fewer scientists with funding or students to do research to mine the human genome data. This is true for the USA and Japan.

The Japanese government I am told have also done something interesting. The goal of their interesting policy was to encourage students and young faculty to go into and stay in science. So a policy of preferential funding to students and junior faculty was started. Well, there were not enough students going into science to fill the student positions. Plus the experienced faculty who were not doing big science lost their funding. This produced a huge brain, power, and experience vacuum of competent faculty who knew how to manage and mentor students in the labor intensive training environment that students need. Now there are fewer experienced faculty and fewer students. Those students in the system have lost their role models.

This is why the experienced faculty who are my age are losing their funding and trying to convince me to hire them and their students. They are abandoning a sinking ship. While that is just sad, I do not blame them. As I have said in a previous blog the smart scientists have options and will leave when times are tough. It is not a survival of the fittest.

I was on a flight headed to Tokyo. The flight is 11 hrs long and the plane is completely packed. I was booked in an aisle seat and next to me is a little girl of about 8. Her mother is three seats in front of me in a window seat. I prefer an aisle seat because of the extra elbow room I can use while typing. A ton of writing can be done on an 11 hr flight. I, of course, moved seats for this woman which allowed her to sit next to her daughter. After getting settled in my new window seath, that flight was cancelled and I was put on another flight. I again requested an aisle seat and was lucky enough to get another seat on the aisle. I’m in my seat before takeoff and a member of the cabin crew asks if I would switch aisle seats with a woman who had an injured right leg and it would be helpful if she could extend her leg in the aisle. So I switched seats a left aisle for a right aisle to accommodate a woman with an injured leg.

Well it turns out the new seat I was in had no person in the seat to my right. So I HAD AN AISLE with no one next to me. The flight was quite full with very few empty seats and I got one after switching. The woman I switched with had a person next to her. Would you believe that the woman with the bad leg asks me to switch again so she could have the empty seat and extend her leg under the empty seat on the right. I said no.

I have to admit I feel a little bad about refusing to change seats for a third time, but I can live with the rationalization that she went with the sure thing of a seat with leg room she needed and I obliged her to do that. It was good enough but why should I help her to a better seat at my detriment. We switched relatively equal for me to be better for her. So why should I move down in comfort and elbow room so she can be more comfortable?

Here I am on the flight, elbows spread out and typing away. I’m working on a lot of stuff for the trip, this is a work trip, and taking time out to blog on the little musical chairs I’ve had to endure. Yeah, I do feel bad, but not enough to affect my sleep tonight.

I recently received a survey from the US postal service. How interesting to get this because I have had missed deliveries and confusing tracking incidents with the USPS recently so I thought I would write them a letter. I ended up not sending them the letter, but included some of the more constructive parts in the mailed survey. Being with the times the USPS did have an option for doing the survey on line. What is below was an early, somewhat inflamed version of the letter that I had wanted to send the USPS with the survey. Sorry if it is confusing because the draft letter changed to a complaint – never sent. Addendum to the USPS – never sent and a neutral version sent to the USPS. What is below is the too inflammatory version not sent to the USPS.

To Whom It May Concern:

In this survey you are missing some important points. I feel strongly enough about this to make them here.

Lets cut to the chase: I do not trust the USPS any longer. There I said it so you know my position. Let me back it up.

Your survey is a nice attempt to engage customers and provide service, but I think there is so much room for improvement that the time and money used for the survey should be spent doing something.

If I purchase something by “mail” order and have a shipping option, I choose anything but USPS. This is because I am not comfortable or confident things will be delivered. I have had numerous occasions where I received, third and final notices that something was waiting at the post office, when I did not receive notice one. By the way, why do I have to come to the post office? When I paid the shipper to provide home delivery? I even had (since deleted) video evidence that the USPS incorrectly notified the sender of delivery attempt to my door and a notice left. My home security system showed no attempt to deliver to the door – I was home too – and no notice left at my mail box. If you want to ask why I did not notify USPS of this event the answer is simple: I do not believe you care about service. I believe I am not alone and it means that consumer confidence has eroded.

When using tracking updates on www.usps.com they are often wrong or very late. This makes the tracking system useless and is partially reflected in the exchange above where the sender was informed that notice was left, but no attempt was made. So what happened either the tracking system was wrong and the attempt claim is an honest mistake, or something else involving not trying to deliver to my home. Remember with multiple examples of “third and final” notice tags finally getting to my door, I just have no faith in the USPS system – sorry.

What your survey will show is simple. Today’s society is a fast paced and instant gratification society and the USPS has stayed in the 19th century (FYI; it is the 21st century). Society no longer trusts the USPS to do the job it was supposed to do. My most precious packages or letters no longer go by mail using USPS.

I understand there is talk of doing away with Saturday service to cut costs. That is one of the worst business decisions you could do. Maybe I’m wrong. It seems that someone wants to keep a government run USPS and cost cutting is to keep it running. However, as most businesses know, that is a short term move that prolongs what is going to happen inevitably. You need to be creative to stay operational. It is not clear to me that anyone wants the post office, but if you do here is a suggestion. No charge for mailing letters. If you do not charge for mailing the letters business will increase. If you are asking how you will maintain a revenue stream; advertising. Obviously some restrictions apply. Say with good old fashioned hand written letters, with the return address of the addressee on the letter. If a person drops off the letter he/she gets a receipt of the mailing with a paid advertisement. Letters picked up by the post office will have hardcopy ads dropped off. On the back of the letter, which must be clear of designs or writings, is printed an advertisement. You already stamp the post for scanners, why not for the recipient?

Some may argue that this will increase work load without increasing revenue. I actually think it will decrease volume of mail because those advertisers that send post cards and single page fliers will use this service and decrease other advertising means.

Okay, so that may be too complicated, require capital investment, market analysis, pricing etc etc. All that takes time, which you really do not have. I have another suggestion; be more efficient. Have people who want to do a good job. Locally we have an expression for most of the USPS people that we come in contact with: “the walking retired.” The employees themselves will tell you there is no incentive to do a good job and the best they can do is status quo and fly below the radar. That is not me talking, it is coming from your employees and a system that the USPS has codified. Maybe with happy and engaged employees my first and second notices would suddenly arrive and maybe things that should be delivered to my door might make it there.

Change comes from within and before you spend time and money looking at your customer base, while a laudable attempt, you need to look at your employees first.

I’m just playing with you. My blog will be 35,000 words in this post.

Hey guess what? My blog hit another milestone. It turned 35,000 words long. I did not know I had that much to say, but there you go passing 35,000 words of miscellaneous blather. I really have tried to provide a balance of ranting and raving. I know I have ranted more than raved, but the ranting is good for the soul.

Here are some statistics about my blog:

There are 102 blogs with an average word length of 340 words each. I publish 1.4 blogs a week typically on Sundays and Thursdays.

The blogs fall into 7 categories: science, education, medicine, research, my ambulance education, government and humor. The categories are not mutually exclusive in fact almost all the blogs have more than one category. The most common category is my ambulance education. Have you read the book, my ambulance education? If not I recommend it as a good read. There are also 245 tags covered in those blogs.

I average 0.25 comments per blog, which means most of the blogs are not commented on. Truthfully, I get about 3 comments per blog, but those are spam comments because my filter is not as sophisticated as I guess it should be. I think I have responded to every comment made on the site, that was not spam.

Recently the blog and my website has been getting about 1000 hits a day. Wow. I’m not sure how many of those are automated, but someone visits other than me.

Three sites feed in to my blog and several very kind colleagues have my url in their site.

As I have said before I’m working on getting my next book published. If it is not picked up, or close to being picked up, I will start publishing it on line here in September; just in time for back to school. We shall see what happens and I’ll keep you informed of what how things are shaping up.

So in conclusion, happy 35,000th word. By the way, the 35,000th word is this: THANKS.

Remember that short blog a little while ago? I needed a short one for the numbers to work here.

For anyone who wants to know what it is like to write a memoir it is easy to give a brief philosophy that partially addresses that question. That is if you do not get yourself emotionally involved and in tears, you are not honest enough with what you are writing.

What brings people to read about tragedy is because it is like watching or looking at a car accident and not being able to look away. It is emotional and we want to see it. We are drawn to our emotions by our emotions.

The link between writing a memoir and bringing back those emotions is a lot like that car accident we want to gawk at. If you have not brought back your personal car accident back to life in the writing it won’t be emotive enough for anyone else to want to gawk at.

I know this is kind of a short blog, I’m going to follow up on this theme in the near future, but wanted to re-introduce the theme and keep you informed of the progress.

Ever watch those sitcoms and other TV shows that celebrate their 100th episode? No, okay so I do not watch stuff like that either. But if you did, you would know that I was hinting that this is my 100th blog. Yes a little over 1 year and the blog is 100 blogs old. I set out hoping to blog once or twice a week and I’ve been pretty consistent with that. So please allow me to pat myself on the back.

As a retrospective I looked at the blog and found some interesting things. The blog gets about 200 hits a day and about one in every four blogs gets commented on. Actually less than that because some posts have multiple comments, and some comments directly to me are not be made public, but it is an average representation of the posts. That number excludes spam and other annoying responses. There are 226 tags on a host of topics concerning science, education, medicine, research, writing, publishing and a food blog or two.

The blog’s posts are filed under 6 major categories with the majority being under, My Ambulance Education, Education, as well as Science and Research. The word count for the blog is about 34,000 words. Did I have that much to say? There was one guest blog, which was really a hybrid of someone else’s rant (their word) and my musings.

On a philosophical and even pastoral level, I often recommend to students and people I mentor to let “fun” factor into their career decisions. When I decided to write a blog I thought it might be a burden but wanted to give it a try and hoped it would be fun. Well it is fun and I’ll continue.

Maybe having fun when making career choices should be the topic of a future blog.

What makes a good teacher versus a good scientist: Can one be both?

An overwhelming majority of my work involves doing research. I do some “teaching” or more correctly mentoring of graduate and medical students. Unfortunately however, for the past ten years I have done almost no didactic teaching. Formerly, teaching was a regular part of my job and I taught much of intermediary metabolism as part of the biochemistry course. I actually like to give lectures to students and teach but that is pretty much not available to me.  

I’m a researcher; that is what I do. But does that mean I cannot be an educator, more importantly a good educator? Yep, under most circumstances, that is pretty much what it means. I’ll need to keep doing research, writing grants and publishing papers until the grant cash drops and teaching revenue becomes a more fiscally responsible choice for the administration.

I’m not sure that I am a good teacher, but I think that I am pretty good because I like to teach and let my students know that. What I am now trying to do to get back into didactic instruction is engage the concept of remote learning. A new course will be launched by the University of Cincinnati in September 2010 and I will be organizing and teaching one of the five courses. While this will lack  the classroom experience, I will be back in the classroom, well in-front of a virtual classroom of students. So, I’m quite excited by this prospect. I will be posting more specific details about the course and how to register soon.

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 my 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 is not new, but we are rewarding the mundane.

To get federal grant funding you pretty much need to do the whole grant first and ask for the money second.

The discovery culture is rapidly and sadly vanishing.

Picture the whole of human knowledge as a sphere. We refer to pushing back the envelope to expand that sphere of knowledge. Breakthroughs expand the sphere. The research that is being done now is filling gaps, which is analogous to sanding or polishing the envelope.

So a clinical trial designed to study safety shows that a treatment produces significantly more death and survivable complications is presented to a group of people with several hundred patients. In the group with no treatment there was a 25% complication rate and with the group getting treatment there was a 75% complication rate. However, the mortality between the two groups was higher in the treatment group, more people died, but those numbers were not statistically significantly different. Because the complications were more frequent, but considered “manageable,” and the mortality did not reach statistical significance more people are going to be treated.  A lot more people with a much larger clinical trial.

It begs the question, how many people need to die to prove that unsafe is statistically significant. Or the other way to ask it; is your death significant?

Why am I concerned about this you ask? Well because the same technology was used in Europe several years ago in a larger clinical trial and killed significantly more people than in the control group. The lucky ones got the placebo and the dead ones got the experimental treatment. This technology is not new, but it is new. Let me explain. What happened is some technoweenies and patent attorneys made some tiny changes in the technology, packaged it again in new wrapping paper and tried again. While I am fully in favor of testing technology to improve the human condition there needs to be a moral justification for pursuing such technology.

The people pushing this work are physicians who know how to do medical research on patients. They have also spent a lot of their political and professional clout to get this technology going. I sympathize with any researcher who has worked for years to develop a research program. It takes many years, tens of years, to see research to fruition, but if it is not working; walk away. It is hurting society because some physicians and scientists who because of their power and prestige in the research community can keep killing their patients in the name of science. Sorry for your luck if you put all your eggs in one basket, or to mix metaphors, bet all your money on one horse, but if that horse loses, you need to accept defeat. Now others are paying for your dead horse. Your patients are dying because of your hubris.

That is just said.

Yes, since I am soap-boxing, I’ll admit that I have had projects that do not work and I can tell you I worked long and hard on two projects that I needed to let die. I was lucky, or dare I say smart, in that my research portfolio is diversified so that I walked away from one technology into another. Many smart people seem to be not so smart and invest everything they have intellectually into one research avenue and if that dead-ends, their career dead-ends. Tough, stop killing people in the name of science, because that makes the rest of us, who are only trying to help people, look bad. Quite frankly what I see happening in some research programs makes me sick.

Here is an idea. If you think your research is so good and needs to go forward, prove it to everyone by doing pre-clinical studies. Do what is morally right and don’t skip a step. That is what many projects are required to do under most circumstances. But because you are an expert in one field, and can push your favorite thing forward, you stay in your comfort zone to save you time and completely miss a step.

You want your legacy to be a successful device and successful company; personal wealth and fame from your one discovery. But you risk is a legacy of tombstones all with the epitaph, “the placebo group were the lucky ones.”