Print This PostToday’s corner of knowledge comes to you courtesy of a previous supervisor of mine and a London School of Economics article. I’m going to be honest and state right up top that it’s a little thin on the knowledge front this week and a little heavy on the random cogitation. This week we’re going to talk about luck and how much of a role it might play in an academic career.
I went to have tea and scones with said previous supervisor in the interests of venting and discussing lunch recipes. I was frustrated with the fact that I landed a fellowship peak pandemic so have been ‘unproductive’ and am now short of funds for my continued existence. I spent some time being a bit of an ego maniac and listing my qualities. I’m a good in vivo researcher (we’re quite rare), I’m a pretty good surgeon (even rarer), I can do both molecular biology stuff and behaviour, I have a breadth of experience which is not all that common. I have decent leadership skills and, surprisingly, quite enjoy teaching junior members of the lab stuff. I write well and fast, I enjoy editing. And to top it all off someone slapped the title ‘associate professor’ all over my email signature. All of these things are pretty desirable in a scientist. I feel like someone should want to give me a job. But nobody does.
Partly this is personal choice. I bought a house with someone, we enjoy each other’s company and I don’t wish to drag him miles and miles away, wasting a small fortune in moving fees just for me to get a job doing something I absolutely love but potentially only for three years. Or six months. Or eighteen months. So I have to make it work where I am. But where I am is a rough, competitive place where the fittest survive and the rest of us drown. And in retrospect, I made some very poor choices which have not allowed me to float as well as I might have done.
On saying that during tea, I was told very firmly not to self-blame, it wasn’t going to help me or my mental well-being because so much of science was to do with luck. She said she wasn’t diminishing her achievements or my own, she was saying that some degree of the success we’ve had in our lives, and some of the failures, are simply down to luck rather than judgement. Being in the right place at the right time with the right people in the right environment to make a discovery or to be part of some great team that does some amazing work is not something you can co-ordinate. You can research all you like before you pick your PhD lab but if you land there during a pandemic it’s going to be tough. You can find a team that produces nothing but Nature papers but you won’t find out until you turn up that it’s because the guy in charge is a slave driver and expects you to work nineteen hour days, seven days a week. You can find a team that produces nothing but Nature papers but if you turn up the year where suddenly they’re trying a new technique and nothing works then you might not get a Nature paper. Not that Nature papers are supposed to matter, obviously.
Now…all of this sounds very much like a whinge about my personal circumstances and very few facts and figures so let’s try and correct that with some actual research.
Let’s start at point one, by defining luck. According to t’internet, luck is defined as “success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions” because of course one can have good luck and one can have bad luck. Which leads us to point two, which is to say, we try not to call it luck when we’re attempting to PubMed it. We call it ‘serendipity’ or chance. Serendipity tends not to have good or bad connotations but rather is just an event. There are a variety of articles on serendipity which vary from philosophical musings with extensive footnotes, to autiobiographical pieces from eminent researchers but quantitative research is challenging to find for a number of reasons.
The main one being how we define a serendipitous event. Makri and Blandford have studied luck in academic and creative fields and they outline a model that suggests that the label is always applied retrospectively. You cannot aim to be lucky, but you can have been lucky. You can land in an excellent lab, you can pick a niche area of research at just the right time, you can apply for funding on a topic that everyone on a board thinks is amazing. But the point is that you can do all these things and still not be successful, the point of labelling something as a serendipitous event is that it happened, and then you did something with it.
There are a ton of quotes from a ton of random famous people that emphasize this. Louis Pasteur said that “chance favours the prepared mind” and Eisenhower said that “luck is where preparation meets opportunity”. The LSE article I mentioned at the top interviewed a lot of academics and found luck to be a prominent feature in their answers. But they also highlighted that having a good environment, supportive mentors, great colleagues, and so forth, that they were able to take advantage of serendipitous discoveries more easily than if they had been elsewhere with different people. In an autobiographical piece about her >50 year research career, Barbara Rolls said that throughout her career she had been “lucky to have been in supportive environments surrounded by creative, insightful, and diligent colleagues.”
Part of the problem with all of this is the lack of agency. You can make what look like the right choices and the right moves but something outside your control can hinder your progress. Grant income is an excellent example of this. Grant success rates in the UK at the time of writing are between 10 and 20% for the major research councils. The number of academics has increased beyond the amount of funding available to them. They are time poor and so councils are struggling to recruit reviewers. Your application may land on the desk of a crotchety senior academic who believes that if you teach or do public engagement you’re not taking your science seriously enough (actual quote from a senior academic in a meeting I was once in). Or it may land on the desk of a young academic who thinks your work is too close to theirs and so finds a hundred small ways to put it down. Or it may land on the desk of someone who wants you to do well and helps in any way they can by saying nice things.
And there is nothing you can do to control that. You can suggest reviewers but at most grant review boards your work is then presented by someone on the board. This person might not have had the time to properly read through your work and think about the comments in the context of you and your CV. Maybe they had a rough night with their toddler and didn’t have the time, maybe they just recovered from a bout of gastroenteritis, maybe your project just landed with a ton that were just as good and someone had to make a tough decision.
In an article on luck by Davies and Pham, the authors discuss the issue with studying luck in the context of academic success, or lack thereof. The specific question they pose is “What does it mean to account for luck in a moral economy that rewards success (the breakthrough finding) and penalizes failure (the ‘unforeseen’ side effect) at the level of individuals or institutions?”. Or more simply, how can we even think about accounting for luck when the system is set up to reward success and successful people are good, not ‘lucky’. They also highlight that the majority of academic institutions put this onus on the individual. It is not the structural inequalities that are the problem, it is you.
If I were to recommend you go away and read one article it would be the one I found by Reinhart and Schendzielorz, the title of which is The Lottery in Babylon – On the Role of Chance in Scientific Success. Partly for the title, but partly because it’s very well written and occasionally extremely sarcastic. Here’s my favourite quote: “Should you believe that successful scientists have, for the most part, been lucky, you would best keep this to yourself. Explaining your own success by luck, however, is unproblematic. It will make you seem humble, or it will at least make your success more tolerable for your colleagues”. It goes on to discuss some of the issues and controversies around a lottery-based funding scheme importantly highlighting major institutional issues and biases which make a lot of what we do so difficult.
The point of all of this rambling is really for me to make you feel better about yourself. I suspect the majority of you listening or reading right now are not old enough to remember the Baz Luhrmann track, Sunscreen. If you haven’t heard it, I suggest you go and listen to it right now, it’s epic. I was going to round everything off highlighting the importance of never comparing yourself to others by quoting the great line “Do NOT read beauty magazines they will only make you feel ugly” but on reading through the lyrics I found a better one to help you on your journey. Remember, in academia there is so much chance involved, even if you work hard, even if you’re good. So…
“Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either – your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s.”
Dr Yvonne Couch
Author
Dr Yvonne Couch is an Alzheimer’s Research UK Fellow at the University of Oxford. Yvonne studies the role of extracellular vesicles and their role in changing the function of the vasculature after stroke, aiming to discover why the prevalence of dementia after stroke is three times higher than the average. It is her passion for problem solving and love of science that drives her, in advancing our knowledge of disease. Yvonne shares her opinions, talks about science and explores different careers topics in her monthly blogs – she does a great job of narrating too.
Adam Smith
Dementia Researcher
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