Dr. Cai Mingjie

The Straits Times ran an article two weeks back on a Dr. Cai Mingjie, a former Stanford-educated researcher with A*Star who is now working as a taxi-driver. Being a wannabe academic myself (or at least, I wanted to be one several years back), this topic naturally hits close to home. During the course of grad school, I gradually steered my career aspirations away from academia (and it's incredible how many of my lab-mates and friends in the US feel the same way I do), and this (horror) story has done nothing to raise the desirability of academia as a long-term career in Singapore. The true reasons for Dr. Cai's dismissal from A*Star might never be known, but it appears from the article that his work was deemed unsatisfactory by an external scientific board which then recommended that his contract not be renewed.

I've always found it a little galling the insistence by universities, research institutes, etc, that quality of research is measured by such metrics as number of papers published per year, importance of journals the papers are published in (through the impact factor), the number of citations your papers receive etc. Sure, these measures do indicate to a certain extent the productivity of one's scientific work, but anyone's who's ever done a research project will know that this is not all there is to it. Different projects in different fields inherently incur different time requirements, so a certain field might naturally yield more papers than others. In addition, as Toby Ziegler put so eloquently in the episode "Eppur Si Muove" of "The West Wing", there's no telling where undirected research might take us, X-rays and Penicillin being among the two best examples. Too strict an adherence to judging research performance based on quantifiable guidelines might constrain researchers to devoting time and funds only to short-term projects that might yield papers quickly, in order to "save their jobs", but might not be the researcher's true passion, and what's the point in that? And it might even be counter-productive...work done in haste and too narrow a scope might not be necessarily be of the real practical worth that the higher-ups hope the work to be in the long run.

Sure, researchers receive funding from various sources like corporations, from taxpayers etc, and should be answerable to these entities in some way, and metrics like number of papers published are an obvious, tangible way of assessing research performance. But a seemingly inflexible way of assessing performance solely (or mainly) on these metrics, either during the award of tenure or in renewing contracts, is just the kind of thing that will send shivers up the spines of budding researchers or grad students just embarking on their PhDs. Imagine spending (or going to spend) so much time and sweat on a degree just to get into a career that could well see you jobless in middle-age.

Dr. Cai Mingjie's story is a sobering cautionary tale for all of us who are foolhardy enough to want a career in academia in today's remorseless research climate (publish or perish, indeed). My best wishes to Dr. Cai.