The Scoop

Ladies and gentlemen, I have been scooped.

Being "scooped" refers to another researcher simultaneously doing the same thing you're doing, usually without you knowing, then publishing the findings before you. In practical terms, this amounts to wasting months or years of your life. Two years, in my case.

In my particular case, there was no malevolence or trickery; it was simply a case of scientist inbreeding. Scientist inbreeding is a term I use for the following problem: because scientists specialize in single molecules in single pathways in single cells of single organisms, it is inevitable that the new scientists you train will have the same specialization and ideas as you. Now imagine those ideas are genes. Everyone's heard the "number one rule of genetics": spread the genes around! We don't have babies with our cousins because we're related, we might have the same versions of genes, we don't want babies with legs coming out of their heads. Right? Unfortunately, in science, once you are part of a family it is likely that you will stay in that family and make science babies, many of which will also stay in the family. One big, happy family of mentors, mentors that used to be mentees, and new mentees, all working on the same system. Ideally, our scientist inbreeding would result in lots of people attacking different facets of the same system, or taking advantage of the same system in different ways... but sometimes we are working on the exact same thing, without even realizing it, and then we have a baby with legs coming out of its head. Well, one of them does. The other one has a publication or two and the sense that they did not waste the past two years of their life.

So I am angry. I'm not angry at my boss, or the people that scooped me, I suppose I'm mostly angry at myself for not publishing sooner. I shouldn't have taken off so much time for Christmas last year, I should have been writing my Methods while I was collecting animals, I should have analyzed my data faster, I should have been thinking of new spins on my story instead of whatever I actually think about, I should have realized the urgency to get my story out there before someone else did. When I read the paper that this other group published, I see things I had not thought of and things I think they did wrong. But mostly, what I see is a story that was mine. I have spent two years developing this story and now it's told. Although it bothers me that my name isn't the one on the paper (of course!), what bothers me more is that I didn't get to do the story-telling. That story was mine!

I'm frantically regrouping. I know there are parts of the story that they didn't tell, that I can scrape up and piece together. I know I'm being (only slightly) melodramatic when I say I've wasted the past two years of my life because I can probably still get a publication out of this. And, of course, I only mean my "work life" when I say "life"; I have certainly not wasted years of my LIFE per se.

I'll post about the positives that have come out of being scooped next. Stay tuned...