So yesterday my city's collective hive brain decided that it is now springtime and everyone took out their bikes and shorts and just made it happen, even though it is only 45 degrees F out. Very strange, this phenomenon.
Vanilla scented air fresheners in public bathrooms only make them more disgusting. Hey building maintenance folks, vanilla does not make the smell of poop better.
Recently I've been feeling like I've chosen the absolute worst field to work in. Don't go into biosensors folks! I'm too engineering to get funding from biologists because they hate change or trying new things and I'm too biology for the engineering folks who think my ideas are too obvious and that these problems must have been solved already or the problem isn't important enough because it's not cancer.
There are two categories of people that get funding in this field. There are nutjobs that can convince others that their ridiculous sensing scheme will somehow work and be useful. They sell the transformative and innovative part, when in reality it is not practical or useful. The other set are the bigwigs that are out of touch with the field and still think that adding carbon nanotubes to their sensors will revolutionize everything. This group tends to blind people with their years of experience and convince them that truly trivial problems aren't solved yet. Or that they can cure cancer if they make their sensors out of a different material. It often means you haven't done a thorough literature search or talked to anyone in the community. Common people, we don't need a more sensitive glucose sensor. Just because you say we do doesn't make it real. Sure you can build it, but after you spend $1 million dollars of NIH money you will find out that 1) the glucose level in your preferred fluid is not correlated at all with blood levels, or 2) it lags so far behind that it is useless for patients. Companies have known this for decades, but they don't publish their results, especially not failed experiments. So yes, you go ahead and try that. You'll find out the truth when you try to commercialize your newly patented worthless technology.
Anyone proposing a reasonable approach to a modestly difficult problem will not get funding. Sorry, it's not transformative. Sorry, you're not curing cancer. No funding for you. Since I'm not a bigwig yet, I will have to go down the path of the nutjobs soon and start proposing things like sensors for measuring gamma radiation emission from cells for early detection of the onset of cancer. Screw anyone that says that all of your signal will be lost in the background of the ridiculous complex surrounding environment. I'll reach that obvious conclusion in 5 years, after my R01 funding ends and I've spent two million dollars.
Vanilla scented air fresheners in public bathrooms only make them more disgusting. Hey building maintenance folks, vanilla does not make the smell of poop better.
Recently I've been feeling like I've chosen the absolute worst field to work in. Don't go into biosensors folks! I'm too engineering to get funding from biologists because they hate change or trying new things and I'm too biology for the engineering folks who think my ideas are too obvious and that these problems must have been solved already or the problem isn't important enough because it's not cancer.
There are two categories of people that get funding in this field. There are nutjobs that can convince others that their ridiculous sensing scheme will somehow work and be useful. They sell the transformative and innovative part, when in reality it is not practical or useful. The other set are the bigwigs that are out of touch with the field and still think that adding carbon nanotubes to their sensors will revolutionize everything. This group tends to blind people with their years of experience and convince them that truly trivial problems aren't solved yet. Or that they can cure cancer if they make their sensors out of a different material. It often means you haven't done a thorough literature search or talked to anyone in the community. Common people, we don't need a more sensitive glucose sensor. Just because you say we do doesn't make it real. Sure you can build it, but after you spend $1 million dollars of NIH money you will find out that 1) the glucose level in your preferred fluid is not correlated at all with blood levels, or 2) it lags so far behind that it is useless for patients. Companies have known this for decades, but they don't publish their results, especially not failed experiments. So yes, you go ahead and try that. You'll find out the truth when you try to commercialize your newly patented worthless technology.
Anyone proposing a reasonable approach to a modestly difficult problem will not get funding. Sorry, it's not transformative. Sorry, you're not curing cancer. No funding for you. Since I'm not a bigwig yet, I will have to go down the path of the nutjobs soon and start proposing things like sensors for measuring gamma radiation emission from cells for early detection of the onset of cancer. Screw anyone that says that all of your signal will be lost in the background of the ridiculous complex surrounding environment. I'll reach that obvious conclusion in 5 years, after my R01 funding ends and I've spent two million dollars.
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