Advice to grad students: watch out

The wonderful Earth Pages News page, written by Steve Drury of Open University, starts out the new year with a cautionary note to graduate students. The new style of academic research, based on large teams and outside targeted funding, puts young scientists at a risk of losing their way when they should be finding their voices and owning their work. Rivals abound among peers and professors, even outside the home institution. Watch out who photographs your research poster! Meddlesome managers, for good motives or malign, can respectively smother or steal a grad student's work. "The most difficult obstacle to ownership can be, oddly, the genuinely honest, kindly and enthusiastic supervisor." Those interested in becoming great scientists should commit this article to memory—and send Dr Drury a note of thanks.