Michael Coleman

Today in Science Without Anguish: 'It's not what you know, it's who you....trust'. When knowledge is really trust in disguise. And it's not absolute, it’s greyscale. Why knowing this helps us cope when our knowledge is challenged. sciencewithoutanguish.com/blog/its-not-w…

@Andrew_Akbashev Exactly! We’ve totally lost the plot of what good science is.

High-impact papers are crucial in academia. Like it or not. As a PhD student, you quickly learn that such papers are cool. They make advisors happy. Everyone admires you. During a postdoc, high-IF papers are not just cool. They are mandatory for a PI job. They give you awards and interviews. During the tenure track, they often become your ticket to a permanent position. Many young PIs are fighting to get their papers published in Nature/Science/Cell. It’s like getting a micro-Nobel prize. Many feel relaxed only when they publish in Nature (their tenure is finally safe!). But: Because such papers require a lot of time (often years), you live in constant uncertainty. You HOPE you will get it. You spend evenings at work, you look for stronger results, and you’re battling through a battalion of failed experiments. Then you submit it… Then: Stage 1. Editors reject 9/10 papers. Yours might be among them. Stage 2. The paper goes to reviewers but they are brutal. For some reason (and you know why!) they just don’t want to see your paper in Nature. Many papers get rejected in the first round. Stage 3. If reviewers can’t come up with reasons to kick you out immediately, they will request a lot of new experiments and changes to your work. Obviously, that will take months (if not years). Of course, some reviewers are great and genuinely help improve your work. But they are not as common as you might hope. Stage 4. After addressing all problems and submitting it again, you will likely see some reviewers still resisting. They can simply reject your paper because they didn’t like how you addressed their requests. Or they will find new flaws and will get you to do another round of revision. (If you’re lucky, they will accept the paper.) Stage 5. If reviewers are divided between “accept” and “reject”, the editors may send your paper to additional reviewers. That will start another cycle of hell with a likely negative outcome. Stage 6. If you are rejected, congratulations - you’ve just wasted months on nothing. But because you need that paper, you resubmit it to another high-IF journal, and it all starts with Stage 1. So, it’s like gambling. You gamble your career on this publication. During those 6–24 months of fighting with reviewers and editors, someone else may publish the same work. Then you’re screwed. Or your paper is likely not accepted in any high-IF journal. After loosing a year or more on trying to push it through, you will have to publish it in a low-IF journal. Is it a healthy game? No. You get exhausted. Anxiety skyrockets. But unfortunately that’s how academia works. I’ve been through this myself. Most of my colleagues have the same experience. We definitely despise it. And the worst part of it? We’ve started to see it as completely normal.

Grateful & excited: New paper alert by Simone Thomas with contributions from other @merkinpnnrcenter.bsky.social scholars —live on PubMed now. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41502156/ #MerkinCenter #MerkinScholars #PeripheralNeuropathy #NerveRegeneration #TeamScience #Neurology #JohnsHopkins

Delighted to say that our paper identifying a novel role for protrudin in endosomal fission has been published: Protrudin acts at ER-endosome contacts to promote KIF5-mediated endoso... sciencedirect.com/science/articl… @TheCIMR @juliakleniuk

@AlzResearchUK Congratulations Hilary!

We are delighted to share that our Chief Executive, Hilary Evans-Newton, has been recognised with a CBE in the 2025 King’s New Years Honours for services to charity and dementia research. Hilary has transformed Alzheimer’s Research UK into the leading funder of dementia research with the search for a cure at it’s heart. Read more: bit.ly/4sagcA5

If you grew up in the 1970s, you probably possess these rare traits.

This is dreadful. Do we have to cave into Trumpism? This is not the US! It’s very simple: research in a culture of fear just doesn’t work. sciencewithoutanguish.com/blog/the-high-…. Funding research without also addressing culture is a waste of money.

Question to non US scientists: What effect will the proposed social media checks by US border control have on your willingness to attend conferences in the US?

Today in Science Without Anguish: how we handle experiences that don’t fit our mental map. The many ways that cognitive dissonance plays out in academic research and the problems this causes us. sciencewithoutanguish.com/blog/to-change…

Science WITH Anguish? Grant rejection today. It never stops hurting no matter how successful or how many you dealt with before (this is no. 57). Thanks to my team for helping me handle it today. 😀 Tomorrow we go on. ECRs dealing with rejection: know that you are not alone!

Today in Science Without Anguish: Is blame bringing you down? How we shackle ourselves by blaming others, also degrading workplace culture and raising our stress levels. But can we avoid it without blaming ourselves instead?
 sciencewithoutanguish.com/blog/is-blame-…

@jenheemstra Exactly! Each time I reached one of these I felt a few weeks of relief/sense of achievement followed by a bewildering feeling of ‘what next?’. These points, in contrast, are timeless. It’s where I ended up but could have been there all along and the other things follow anyway.

When setting goals, we often focus on achieving milestones like a PhD, job, tenure, or promotion. Those are great goals but they’re not enough. We also need to think about: -Why we’re pursuing that goal -What specifically we need to do -The values we will follow as we work

Today in Science Without Anguish: how failing to notice when the wind is behind us makes us believe the world is against us when things don’t go our way. sciencewithoutanguish.com/blog/im-good-w…

@AdrianoAguzzi Even rides in flat and boring Cambridgeshire do the same for me! But I’m pretty jealous of that scenery!

In our latest review with @DoctorPAF, we explore the breadth of therapeutic potential for the neurodegenerative enzyme SARM1. We discuss: -Challenges for SARM1 inhibition for neuroprotection -Roles in non-neuronal cells -SARM1 activation for selective peripheral neuroablation

In this week’s Science Without Anguish: ‘Short cuts to lost potential’. How confusing the simplifications we make to understand the world with the real thing can lead us astray. sciencewithoutanguish.com/blog/the-short…

@AdrianoAguzzi Congrats on the outcome anyway! And for sharing that it was previously rejected. Young scientists need to know that everyone gets rejections and that what really makes the difference is persistence with what we truly believe in.

@AdrianoAguzzi Exactly the point just made in sciencewithoutanguish.com “We recognise the concept of biological or technical variability, accepting that multiple replicates are needed to get a true picture, yet we see a single grant or paper rejection as questioning our worth as a scientist.”

Science Without Anguish series 3 This week: the mistakes we make understanding our world that we would never make in our science sciencewithoutanguish.com/blog/heuristic… Coming up next week: how what grabs our attention most and first impressions skew our thinking.

@smead2 Fascinating! So could synapse loss reflect an attempt by host neurons to stop viruses spreading among them? And potentially to stop prion-like proteins spreading too?

Varicella-zoster virus reactivation and the risk of dementia | Nature Medicine. Super paper, now convinced. This also bodes reasonably well imo for GLP1 agonist trials, assuming the mechanism is through reducing brain inflammation. nature.com/articles/s4159…