simply blood

“Don't think you are the smartest person in the room, to be a successful company you never should be.”—Mathew Sowa Regardless of where you are working, good science is driven by active curiosity and asking good questions. The differences come in how you approach answering those questions. Continuing our ongoing discussion about biotech careers, this blog will describe some key differences between academia and biotech along with some advice on how to utilize what you learn during your academic training to succeed in biotech. A huge thanks to Michelle Lin (Research Scientist at CRISPR Therapeutics, ~1 year in biotech), Mathew Sowa (Director at C4 Therapeutics, 5+ years in biotech), and Hariharan Jayaram (Associate Director at Editas Medicine, Inc., 6+ years in biotech) for sharing their experiences and advice! ------------ When asked about the biggest difference in day-to-day life in biotech vs. academia, all of our biotech colleagues agreed that team meetings now make up a mu...

Reproducibility is in crisis; or at least that is how 90% of more than 1500 researchers responded to a Nature survey conducted a few months ago (1). The statistics out of the survey are shocking. 70% of researchers have failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments. The Nature editorial and the following special articles about reproducibility have brought back an old concern - can we trust scientific publications? The same concern was discussed in a workshop two years ago, held jointly by the NIH, Nature Publishing Group, and Science (2) . Although the workshop triggered novel guidelines in grants and publications, the results from the Nature survey reveals that there is still “space for improvement.” Last year, Science , published an article about reproducibility in psychological sciences (3). The “Reproducibility Project” recruited hundreds of scientists to perform 100 replication studies, and the results were shocking - fewer than half were repeated successfully. This ra...