The race

I don't know if folks have noticed, but when I talk about the work I do in the lab, I tend to be rather vague.  I do this primarily because this blog is not meant to be a chronicle of scientific progress, but rather a glimpse at life as a PhD student.  That said, I also hold back details as research scientists tend to play their cards close to their chests.

Let me preface the rest of today's post with the full disclaimer that nothing I do is Earth shattering or bound to make me a rich man.  Optimistically, I hope to get a couple publications out of my current work, but that's a pretty generic goal of any researcher.  So why be protective?  Well imagine spending months or years of your time and grant money on a project only to have someone publish similar results as you're writing your paper.  The number of groups in my area of study is pretty small, add in the required expertise and equipment to reproduce our work and you'd find only a handful of labs around the world would even be capable of reproducing our work.  However, when there's a significant amount of money and time invested in your work, you tend to err on the side of caution.  Hence I stay tight lipped about the details.

So why explain this?  At least, why explain this tonight of all days?  Well last night I picked up an email from my supervisor.  In short he pointed out that another group speaking at the workshop in Germany may be working towards similar goals as we are and that perhaps we should focus on getting a publication out.  The email was brief, as my supervisor is currently in the process of flying from NZ to Europe and the message was sent briefly at some airport en route.  Additionally, I read the email sometime between 12 and 1am and was maybe too tired to be doing work.  Well, this got me concerned, as I mentioned earlier, I have quite a bit invested in my work and to hear someone else might be about to publish the same work is pretty intense.

Jumping to the end of today, I've emailed my supervisor a number of times as I try to understand our situation and plan our next steps.  I received one response to the effect of "don't worry."  We have concluded that the situation isn't as dire as it may have first appeared and regardless all we can do is to continue to focus on producing quality work.  Fair enough, sounds like a plan to me.

So today was a bit of a roller coaster ride.  And even last night (at ~1am) I was thinking of heading into the lab to keep work moving forward.  Luckily there's no need for (extreme) late nights and we will hope to have a couple publications submitted to journals in the next few months, but this process got me thinking...  while I was ready to speed ahead so as to not be "scooped" by this other research group, if we published "first" wouldn't that be doing to them what I was so afraid of?  What if there are PhD students on this project half a world away hoping I don't submit a manuscript before them?  I know this is the way academia works, but at this point, I struggle to accept this reality.  For now, I'll chalk up the lessons learned from today and move forward.