The devil is in the details

Academics versus Industry

First, a note. I wrote both this post and the Hvidøre post last night, but am posting them now because I didn't have internet access then. I'll be back in a little while to let you know what fun stuff I've been up to so far today.

Wednesday was the day of the meeting that earned me the free trip to Copenhagen in the first place. As you may have figured out, I was not looking forward to the meeting. In the end, it worked out that my boss was presenting my data (because the company wanted the prestige of having him present). This meant that I was the lucky winner of having to meet with him over and over last week to teach him the talk. So Wednesday….

The meeting was at a conference center a ways north of Copenhagen proper, near the company’s home base. Those of us staying at the SAS Royal (the super swanky hotel downtown) were to meet in the lobby for a bus to the conference center (Comwell, in Holte) at 8:20 am. I set a wakeup call for 6am so that I would have plenty of time to get ready, pack, and take some pictures before I left. I ended up waking up at 4:30 am and being wide awake, so I instead answered emails for a while. Everything went okay…there were some minor snafus when I somehow cut my finger packing my suitcase and couldn’t stop the bleeding and when I realized that I was potentially underdressed again (really, I was fine.) and that I packed my black pants that required heels along with black shoes with kitten heels (resulting in my pants being too long) I got everything done in plenty of time and made it downstairs on time. We checked out and took all of our stuff on a bus to the conference center. (The company has their own hotel and conference center called Hvidøre that we were moving to for tonight, though the details of that will be covered later.) Once we arrived at the conference center, I learned the important lesson that ability to walk in serious heels (including stilettos) does not translate into the ability to balance in kitten heels. Especially when there are cobblestones involved. This observation baffles me, but it is most certainly true.

There were two parts of the meeting that I was anxious about. The major one was the talk: even though I was not talking, I was still responsible for all of the data that my boss talked about, and I was afraid that someone would rip it apart and that I would have to defend it. I was uncertain whether I would have felt more confident giving the talk myself (and thus knowing that I knew the background) or having him give the talk (and being able to distance myself from the whole thing.) The second thing that I was anxious about was the small talk: I didn’t want to talk about science all the time and I was uncertain whether I would get trashed over my data by random people during breaks. Neither of those two things were really anything to worry about.

Our talk was the second talk of the morning, after one other basic science talk from the company. I was assigned the seat next to the first speaker (who turned out to be EXTREMELY nice and someone who I enjoyed meeting very much.) My biggest issues in the morning had to do with the anxiety surrounding competition…I spent the whole first talk thinking about how it impacted my data. I got lots of interesting ideas, but I also felt a little humiliated because I was so afraid that my data would be laughed at or that my boss would be unhappy because I hadn’t talked to him about most of the papers that were referenced (which could lead to him thinking that I was deficient in reading the literature). Anxiety became paranoia as I watched the guy next to me flip through the handouts of the slides for our presentation and look at them critically and because of people who were whispering or smirking during the talk. It was particularly difficult to listen to my boss screw up his explanation of some of the basic science issues that he needed to explain, knowing full well that everyone in the room knew what he was talking about and knew that he was wrong.

But…there was the allure of his ability to spin. He tied the talk into the previous one really well and answered questions in a way to make us look particularly brilliant. In the end, everyone seemed really impressed with the talk (many people complimented me on both the amount of work I had done and the quality of it after the talk, both of which shocked me.) People referred back to his talk for the rest of the day (it really was all his spinning ability; he himself came up to me and told me that the meeting had made it clear that we needed to publish RIGHT NOW to avoid getting scooped).

I think the most useful part of my attending this meeting (other than the whole free trip to Europe thing) was the opportunity to see the difference between how we do science in an academic setting as compared to how science at both a biotech company and a big pharmaceutical company work. This will come in very useful down the road when making a decision about what to do with my life. Oddly, my boss and I had a conversation on the very same subject. This is odd because he usually gives the opinion that only the academic track at a Harvard is an acceptable career choice and can sometimes be negative about others. But instead, we talked about how great it was for me to get exposure to lots of situations to make an informed decision.

It is weird to work with a company. We work on an immunological molecule (as in something that your immune system/body makes normally) and it grated on my nerves when people called it “the drug”, because it’s not really a drug. I’ll leave out some of my more disparaging comments towards industry and I guess I’ll just say that it seemed like the bar for doing believable science was kind of low for them. A lot of the data and models that their idea to develop "the drug" were based on were faulty or not entirely proven, in my opinion. Anyway...it was a very differnt experience that other conferences I've been to, since the goal of this meeting was exlicitly how to cure cancer and screw how the molecule actually works, while all of the other things that I think about are more how does this science work and how might it impact a vaccine. On, and they give really boring talks. And are paranoid about secrecy and security. I was EXHAUSTED when we got go to the afternoon “breakout session” (I am still trying to figure out what a breakout session is.)

During a coffee break around 3:30 I found the boss in discussion with a big group of company people and I knew that he was causing trouble. I couldn’t figure out if he was causing non-specific trouble or if he was more specifically being a pain. After he left the group, he said to me: “ I think they’re going about it all wrong. I’m going to raise some philosophical issues, but I’ll be nice. You can tell me afterwards if it is okay or if I killed things.”

In the end, he did okay. In some ways he is a theatrical performer extrordinare because of the wool he pulled over people’s lives. He had everyone eating out of his hand as he trashed their plan. But then again, that’s just Manny being Manny. In the end, I was sick of the boss and pretty anti-biotech company, but it was nice to meet some of the people nonetheless.

posted by Immunegirl @ 10:10 AM