Dr. Becca posted something hilarious about her Science Enemy, who actually BROUGHT A RULER to measure her error bars. That’s some serious crazy right there. Drugmonkey agreed with the crazy, but also mentioned that help felt these kind of rivalries help to move science forward.
Sci has her own Science Enemy, but more importantly her old LAB has a couple of Science Enemies. And I think I agree with DM that it really does help advance the science. Because of things these people have published, my lab got its feathers ruffled, went off, and said “FINE, well WE will do that experiment and we will SO SHOW YOU!”. And sure enough, we did, and out of that came more experiments, and more knowledge about the brain.
But there is another side to this issue, and that’s the side where your Science Enemy glares contemplatively at your poster, gets their army of post-docs on the problem, and…scoops you in a journal. In this case it was in a journal where we had submitted the same work and been REJECTED. Ouch. But science did advance. It just …wasn’t happy for everyone.
Sci would like to say that, even with the point I just mentioned, Science Enemies are good things to have. They keep you on your toes, make you evaluate your work that much more carefully, make you scan the literature that much harder for the key to your new hypothesis. And of course Science Enemies make for some great stories.
Our lab’s favorite was the one where the Huge, Tall Science Enemy Loomed over my shorter PI, waved his long arms expansively (whacking two of the other members of our lab in the process, we had formed up around our boss like his posse), and SHRIEKED loud enough to make everyone in that row at SfN turn around “I do not think you are STUPID, I JUST THINK YOU ARE WRONG!!!!!!”
Oh, it is ON.
