Pet peeve of the day: careerism.
My career has been a great pleasure. I loved being a U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) officer and I now love being an academic. The worlds have commonalities that drew me to them. They are filled with people that are dedicated to service and to making the world more beautiful. At their worst, there are too many careerists that never consider how their secrecy robs the public of knowledge.
I became a USPHS officer because I wanted to work with the poor and the underserved, but was too fearful of being poor to be a missionary or join the Peace Corps. I became an academic because I wanted to create new knowledge and share it to improve health care and quality of life.
Throughout my career, I have grown increasingly intolerant of those that take a taxpayer-paid salary or taxpayer-funded research grants and then refuse to openly share their work. Over and over I have seen people recreate the wheel because others didn’t know it existed or didn’t respect the person that created it and thus felt it necessary to recreate the work and again at taxpayer expense.
Today I heard an expert on nuclear preparedness communication hold forth on the need to, “make research accessible”. He went on to say that research cannot just be in the peer-reviewed literature. This would have had more integrity if he and most of his panelist had not prefaced their presentations by insisting that there be no photography or recording of their presentations as some of their work is copyrighted.
Hypocrisy: the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one’s own behavior does not conform; pretense.
Nuclear preparedness research on how to best communicate with the public is critical to preparedness, but for it to be truly effective it must be put into practice not just at the higher levels of government, but it must get down to the workers, to the mom at home with children, or to the average nurse. As the speakers stated the average teacher or clinician doesn’t read the peer-reviewed literature. How will research get down to the bedside if researchers don’t freely and openly share their work? How will we be prepared for a nuclear event if those doing the research and government officials will not share?
If you really care about improving healthcare, making us more prepared, or creating new knowledge consider the impact on lives when careerism rules public good. We can’t let advancing a career trump the public good.
End of rant.
