University professor P.I. Tenure and his bondservant B.S. Grad have managed to publish a work that will add a line to their CVs, but will fundamentally be lost in a shuffle of not particularly impactful science.
Their work was issued in mildly above average chemistry journal The Annals of Mundane Chemistry and provides the scientific publishing community with more grist for their ever-churning mill.
"Our findings will probably be ignored by both academic researchers and industrial chemists alike, but that doesn't change the fact that we've expanded the scope of this unknown and obscure reaction."
Tenure said researchers have been mostly avoiding his area of research due to a lack of respect from peers, citation and funding. In March of last year, constant begging allowed departmental funding to finally come free. This allowed Mr. Grad to purchase a few reagents and to squeeze a few reactions in between teaching courses to grade-grubbing undergraduates. The time and funding also allowed for the purchase of a copy of Microsoft Word, which was used to write up these languishing results.
"After years of this project and my ideas being ignored, it's nice to have a somewhat more-motivated-than-usual researcher produce results that are both solid and reproducible. That's pretty decent for this school."
When asked about the effects on the chemical industry as a whole, Professor Tenure was open about its impact.
"The Western chemical industry is undergoing enormous shifts from various top-down money-saving initiatives from their corporate management and competitive pressures from developing countries willing to devastate their environment for medium-term economic gain. It's unlikely that our article will have any effect on their personnel whatsoever. It's possible that someone will scroll by our work while quickly perusing their RSS feed -- that's an honor in itself."
Professor Tenure said the March 2010 experiments will probably never be performed by anyone outside of his laboratory, but that the paper will probably be cited in a review written ten years later by a overly ambitious writer.
"I've always wanted my work to be cited as footnote 573 of 1035," said Professor Freely. "I'd prefer to be footnote 410 -- I mean, really -- that guy's a hack! But we'll take it."
*Inspired by this press release. N.B. This satire is a comment on the release, NOT on the underlying science or the people involved.
You've got me laughing like a loon here. Love this!
ReplyDeleteThat press release is nearly as overstated as this recent one from OSU about a new organocatalyst they invented that would change the face of pharma research.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-catalyst-drug.html
Cynical but true. Then, of course, there is the old boys club with self congratulations and refereeing each others papers. I recall once looking at the publication lists of great 19th century scientists. I was amazed how few they wrote, yet those few were all significant. Today I doubt they would get tenure and likely would perish.
ReplyDeleteTo overshare, I was also inspired by this old political science post: http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/06/07/what_to_read_today_in_political_science
ReplyDeleteCJ: you are a riot! Man! Keep these humorous thing coming so that we can all be uplifted, during these depressive times.
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ReplyDelete