RESEARCH COMMUNITY PROFILE
This profile was written for MCDB 397, also known as Writing in Biology. I was to interview a primary investigator in my research lab and write up my findings about the field. Because this class was for scientists more than writers, the requirements of the assignment were fairly tight and for me, pretty restrictive. As a way to fulfill the assignment but also remain true to myself as a writer, I wrote this piece more in the style of a profile. I did my best to balance having to answer specific questions with keeping the writing interesting, and I think I pulled it off. This writing showed me that I could be personally invested in science writing, something I had never done before.
Dr. Meredith Morgan had always thought that radiation was a field for “old, white-haired men.” That is, until she joined them.
Dr. Morgan’s work in the Department of Radiation Oncology focuses primarily on how to make pancreatic cancer cells more sensitive to radiation and chemotherapy. Certain parts of the cell cycle contain checkpoints: control mechanisms that determine cellular division. Dr. Morgan studies checkpoints, like Wee1 and Chk1, and she investigates how inhibiting these particular checkpoints can affect a cell’s sensitivity to cancer drug treatment. Like other scientists in her field, Dr. Morgan works in a laboratory setting that involves basic science rooted in a clinical problem. For this, she considers herself to be a translational researcher. The work done on her lab bench directly relates to cancer treatment, a clinical issue.
Researchers in radiation oncology typically use patient tissues brought right from the operating room. In Dr. Morgan’s case, pancreatic tumors from humans have been used to create patient-derived xenographs that are then implanted into mice. The use of such cross-species tissue implantation is common in animal studies in this field. Current research also studies biomarkers as a way to determine the effectiveness of various drugs. Biomarkers are classified as characteristics of cells that indicate a biological state. In Dr. Morgan’s field, cancer cells are examined for DNA damage and their particular stage in the cell cycle.
Biomarkers are one of the many useful methods for evaluating sensitization, a commonly researched area of radiation oncology. The ability to sensitize cancer cells to radiation and chemotherapy can greatly improve the outcome of the treatments. While sensitization is the focus of Dr. Morgan’s work, there are a couple other major questions that radiation oncologists are currently asking. How can normal tissues be protected? How can therapy be better personalized for each patient? How can toxicity levels in normal tissues be monitored during treatment? These questions are all immensely important to the improvement of cancer treatment, as they allow minimal damage to healthy tissues and maximal treatment to harm cancerous cells.
With so many different areas to study within radiation oncology, researchers must stay up on the current work being done in their field. This involves a lot of both reading and writing. Dr. Morgan estimates that about 50% of her time is spent writing, and much of that time is allotted to original research, grants, and review articles. The rest of her writing involves protocols for studies, material transfer agreement to obtain new drugs, and progress reports. When it comes to publishing original research in the field of radiation oncology, the common journals are Radiation Research and the “Red Journal” (International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, and Physics). While Radiation Research fits closely with Dr. Morgan’s field, it is not as high impact of a journal as she likes. She prefers to focus on journals with broader audiences, like Cancer Research, Clinical Cancer Research, and Cancer Discovery. Cancer Discovery is the highest impact, she feels, and it requires researchers to have a translational component to their work—clinical data or animal models incorporated into their studies. In her writing, Dr. Morgan hopes to target a much broader audience than just radiation oncology researchers. She appeals to translational cancer research scientists, and hopes that by publishing in her favorite journals, physicians, basic scientists, and clinical researchers alike will all read her work.
Writing articles is not an easy task, though, and it took a while for Dr. Morgan to establish a system for writing. Starting off, she admits that her writing was “horrible.” Without any formal training, she was thrust into the world of scientific writing as a postdoctoral fellow and forced to learn by doing. She credits her development of writing skills to her boss at the time, who asked her to write things he could have easily written himself. While most principal investigators tend to do their own writing, sometimes, as in Dr. Morgan’s experience, postdoctoral fellows are given opportunities to contribute. Her first few papers came back with numerous comments and edits, but as she persisted, she gained a strong understanding of the conventions of scientific writing. Although she initially thought the discussion was a place for rambling and that starting with the abstract made the most sense, she now begins with materials and methods, pieces together the introduction and results somewhat simultaneously, and continues on to the discussion. She also writes the abstract last. For Dr. Morgan, this was the biggest surprise as she developed her writing process. Because the abstract needs to be succinct, it is most logical to write it last, after everything else has been laid out. She has also developed stylistic elements, and she enjoys writing now that she has her own “formula” to follow. While writing grants and review articles tends to be less appealing, Dr. Morgan enjoys writing research articles.
Writing skills aside, researchers need others to edit their work. Typically, a senior or peer mentor will read an article and evaluate its scientific content. The researcher then takes the paper back and addresses the scientific issues. Dr. Morgan, thanks to her experience with writing by this point, usually exchanges a paper with her boss only one to two times in this stage. After the science has been solidified, fresh eyes are needed to review the article for mechanical concerns. For this, Dr. Morgan often turns to other members of her lab.
Collaboration is a key part of science in any field, and for much more than just editing. Researchers often combine various fields and studies, and this allows for plenty of collaborative writing. Even within a single lab, there is collaboration amongst the principal investigator, lab technicians, postdoctoral fellows, and undergraduate students. While the principal investigator typically writes the bulk of the articles, focusing on the introduction, discussion, and results, it is common for whoever worked most at the bench to write the methods and materials section. Dr. Morgan reveals that collaborative writing typically occurs in a segmented fashion, with different people writing different parts of a paper or grant. It is too difficult to sit down together and write, and it makes more sense for each person to write their area of expertise. In one of Dr. Morgan’s grant proposals, she worked primarily on explaining the theoretical part of the study and the animal models, while another researcher was responsible for detailing the actual design and synthesis of the drugs used.
Although collaboration leads to great things in the scientific community, it can also cause divisions. Authorship is an issue that arises when multiple researchers contribute to an article. First author typically goes to the scientist who contributed most to the paper, but sometimes editing alters the breakdown of whose work is most prominently featured, and this in turn affects who is listed as first author. Dr. Morgan recalls a time she was involved in a battle over authorship. She was to be first author for a Nature review article, but following review, the editorial board decided they wanted more scientific content from another author, and authorship changed. While it was hard to accept not being first author, Dr. Morgan was able to use her material in a different article. Her major lesson from this experience was to solidify authorship up front. She explains that having co-first authors is usually a good compromise, as all researchers want to be first author.
Advances in technology have greatly improved the ease with which such collaboration can occur. Email is the easiest way to communicate, and it allows for quick exchange of data and other information. While Dr. Morgan has always relied on a computer for her writing, she does not have what she considers fancy, high-tech machinery in her lab. She has, however, realized the increasing convenience of performing little, everyday tasks. She doesn’t have to pour her own gels anymore or count cells manually on a hemocytometer. More importantly, improvements in technology have allowed for radiation oncology research to take new directions. While Dr. Morgan recently implanted pancreatic cancer cells into mice on their flanks, not their pancreases, there is improved imaging that allows researchers to view tumors where they actually belong on the body, as opposed to implanting them in a particular place for convenience. There has also been progress in fluorescence, enabling researchers to more clearly see tumor sizes inside an organism. Clinically, there have also been vast advancements in biotechnology. Doctors are better able to target high doses of radiation to specific tissues, and many different kinds of radiation are now being studied. As reliance on technology expands, it seems that the field does, too.
While developing new areas of study is important to solving the scientific problems at hand, it makes securing funding increasingly more and more difficult. Most of the funding for radiation oncology studies comes from the National Cancer Institute within the National Institutes of Health. Funding for various cancers also comes from foundations like the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network or even the Department of Defense for common cancers that affect service men and women. Dr. Morgan describes trying to get funding as a “rollercoaster,” and reveals that she has written about 30 grants throughout her time as a researcher. The most common grant that researchers try to obtain is the R01 through the NIH Research Project Grant Program. Dr. Morgan shares a rare success story when it comes to applying for an R01: she was able to secure funding after her second submission of her very first proposal. As a researcher with no prior R01 funding, she was granted five bonus points on her score, which is always offered as a courtesy to new researchers.
Once a grant is submitted, it is usually returned with comments, and it often requires a researcher to run more experiments. This can take years sometimes, and Dr. Morgan explains that grant writing from start to finish is a slow process. The minimum time spent writing a grant is around three months, and it is often longer. The University of Michigan even offers R01 Boot Camp mentoring programs to help younger investigators obtain R01 funding. Although it is tempting—and sometimes necessary—to tailor a research project to what is likely to get funded, Dr. Morgan believes that good, solid science will usually be funded.
While she didn’t decide until her junior year of undergraduate studies that she wanted to pursue a career in science, Dr. Morgan has certainly immersed herself into the field of radiation oncology. From her large commitment to writing, to her success thus far with grant proposals, she has found her place. Dr. Morgan will be speaking this spring at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting in San Diego, a long way from the young researcher who barely took a breath during her very first talk at a meeting. She didn’t predict that she would end up in radiation oncology, but as a treatment that almost 50% of cancer patients opt to undergo, Dr. Morgan’s work is essential to the field—and she doesn’t need to be an old white-haired man to make an impact.
Dr. Morgan’s work in the Department of Radiation Oncology focuses primarily on how to make pancreatic cancer cells more sensitive to radiation and chemotherapy. Certain parts of the cell cycle contain checkpoints: control mechanisms that determine cellular division. Dr. Morgan studies checkpoints, like Wee1 and Chk1, and she investigates how inhibiting these particular checkpoints can affect a cell’s sensitivity to cancer drug treatment. Like other scientists in her field, Dr. Morgan works in a laboratory setting that involves basic science rooted in a clinical problem. For this, she considers herself to be a translational researcher. The work done on her lab bench directly relates to cancer treatment, a clinical issue.
Researchers in radiation oncology typically use patient tissues brought right from the operating room. In Dr. Morgan’s case, pancreatic tumors from humans have been used to create patient-derived xenographs that are then implanted into mice. The use of such cross-species tissue implantation is common in animal studies in this field. Current research also studies biomarkers as a way to determine the effectiveness of various drugs. Biomarkers are classified as characteristics of cells that indicate a biological state. In Dr. Morgan’s field, cancer cells are examined for DNA damage and their particular stage in the cell cycle.
Biomarkers are one of the many useful methods for evaluating sensitization, a commonly researched area of radiation oncology. The ability to sensitize cancer cells to radiation and chemotherapy can greatly improve the outcome of the treatments. While sensitization is the focus of Dr. Morgan’s work, there are a couple other major questions that radiation oncologists are currently asking. How can normal tissues be protected? How can therapy be better personalized for each patient? How can toxicity levels in normal tissues be monitored during treatment? These questions are all immensely important to the improvement of cancer treatment, as they allow minimal damage to healthy tissues and maximal treatment to harm cancerous cells.
With so many different areas to study within radiation oncology, researchers must stay up on the current work being done in their field. This involves a lot of both reading and writing. Dr. Morgan estimates that about 50% of her time is spent writing, and much of that time is allotted to original research, grants, and review articles. The rest of her writing involves protocols for studies, material transfer agreement to obtain new drugs, and progress reports. When it comes to publishing original research in the field of radiation oncology, the common journals are Radiation Research and the “Red Journal” (International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, and Physics). While Radiation Research fits closely with Dr. Morgan’s field, it is not as high impact of a journal as she likes. She prefers to focus on journals with broader audiences, like Cancer Research, Clinical Cancer Research, and Cancer Discovery. Cancer Discovery is the highest impact, she feels, and it requires researchers to have a translational component to their work—clinical data or animal models incorporated into their studies. In her writing, Dr. Morgan hopes to target a much broader audience than just radiation oncology researchers. She appeals to translational cancer research scientists, and hopes that by publishing in her favorite journals, physicians, basic scientists, and clinical researchers alike will all read her work.
Writing articles is not an easy task, though, and it took a while for Dr. Morgan to establish a system for writing. Starting off, she admits that her writing was “horrible.” Without any formal training, she was thrust into the world of scientific writing as a postdoctoral fellow and forced to learn by doing. She credits her development of writing skills to her boss at the time, who asked her to write things he could have easily written himself. While most principal investigators tend to do their own writing, sometimes, as in Dr. Morgan’s experience, postdoctoral fellows are given opportunities to contribute. Her first few papers came back with numerous comments and edits, but as she persisted, she gained a strong understanding of the conventions of scientific writing. Although she initially thought the discussion was a place for rambling and that starting with the abstract made the most sense, she now begins with materials and methods, pieces together the introduction and results somewhat simultaneously, and continues on to the discussion. She also writes the abstract last. For Dr. Morgan, this was the biggest surprise as she developed her writing process. Because the abstract needs to be succinct, it is most logical to write it last, after everything else has been laid out. She has also developed stylistic elements, and she enjoys writing now that she has her own “formula” to follow. While writing grants and review articles tends to be less appealing, Dr. Morgan enjoys writing research articles.
Writing skills aside, researchers need others to edit their work. Typically, a senior or peer mentor will read an article and evaluate its scientific content. The researcher then takes the paper back and addresses the scientific issues. Dr. Morgan, thanks to her experience with writing by this point, usually exchanges a paper with her boss only one to two times in this stage. After the science has been solidified, fresh eyes are needed to review the article for mechanical concerns. For this, Dr. Morgan often turns to other members of her lab.
Collaboration is a key part of science in any field, and for much more than just editing. Researchers often combine various fields and studies, and this allows for plenty of collaborative writing. Even within a single lab, there is collaboration amongst the principal investigator, lab technicians, postdoctoral fellows, and undergraduate students. While the principal investigator typically writes the bulk of the articles, focusing on the introduction, discussion, and results, it is common for whoever worked most at the bench to write the methods and materials section. Dr. Morgan reveals that collaborative writing typically occurs in a segmented fashion, with different people writing different parts of a paper or grant. It is too difficult to sit down together and write, and it makes more sense for each person to write their area of expertise. In one of Dr. Morgan’s grant proposals, she worked primarily on explaining the theoretical part of the study and the animal models, while another researcher was responsible for detailing the actual design and synthesis of the drugs used.
Although collaboration leads to great things in the scientific community, it can also cause divisions. Authorship is an issue that arises when multiple researchers contribute to an article. First author typically goes to the scientist who contributed most to the paper, but sometimes editing alters the breakdown of whose work is most prominently featured, and this in turn affects who is listed as first author. Dr. Morgan recalls a time she was involved in a battle over authorship. She was to be first author for a Nature review article, but following review, the editorial board decided they wanted more scientific content from another author, and authorship changed. While it was hard to accept not being first author, Dr. Morgan was able to use her material in a different article. Her major lesson from this experience was to solidify authorship up front. She explains that having co-first authors is usually a good compromise, as all researchers want to be first author.
Advances in technology have greatly improved the ease with which such collaboration can occur. Email is the easiest way to communicate, and it allows for quick exchange of data and other information. While Dr. Morgan has always relied on a computer for her writing, she does not have what she considers fancy, high-tech machinery in her lab. She has, however, realized the increasing convenience of performing little, everyday tasks. She doesn’t have to pour her own gels anymore or count cells manually on a hemocytometer. More importantly, improvements in technology have allowed for radiation oncology research to take new directions. While Dr. Morgan recently implanted pancreatic cancer cells into mice on their flanks, not their pancreases, there is improved imaging that allows researchers to view tumors where they actually belong on the body, as opposed to implanting them in a particular place for convenience. There has also been progress in fluorescence, enabling researchers to more clearly see tumor sizes inside an organism. Clinically, there have also been vast advancements in biotechnology. Doctors are better able to target high doses of radiation to specific tissues, and many different kinds of radiation are now being studied. As reliance on technology expands, it seems that the field does, too.
While developing new areas of study is important to solving the scientific problems at hand, it makes securing funding increasingly more and more difficult. Most of the funding for radiation oncology studies comes from the National Cancer Institute within the National Institutes of Health. Funding for various cancers also comes from foundations like the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network or even the Department of Defense for common cancers that affect service men and women. Dr. Morgan describes trying to get funding as a “rollercoaster,” and reveals that she has written about 30 grants throughout her time as a researcher. The most common grant that researchers try to obtain is the R01 through the NIH Research Project Grant Program. Dr. Morgan shares a rare success story when it comes to applying for an R01: she was able to secure funding after her second submission of her very first proposal. As a researcher with no prior R01 funding, she was granted five bonus points on her score, which is always offered as a courtesy to new researchers.
Once a grant is submitted, it is usually returned with comments, and it often requires a researcher to run more experiments. This can take years sometimes, and Dr. Morgan explains that grant writing from start to finish is a slow process. The minimum time spent writing a grant is around three months, and it is often longer. The University of Michigan even offers R01 Boot Camp mentoring programs to help younger investigators obtain R01 funding. Although it is tempting—and sometimes necessary—to tailor a research project to what is likely to get funded, Dr. Morgan believes that good, solid science will usually be funded.
While she didn’t decide until her junior year of undergraduate studies that she wanted to pursue a career in science, Dr. Morgan has certainly immersed herself into the field of radiation oncology. From her large commitment to writing, to her success thus far with grant proposals, she has found her place. Dr. Morgan will be speaking this spring at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting in San Diego, a long way from the young researcher who barely took a breath during her very first talk at a meeting. She didn’t predict that she would end up in radiation oncology, but as a treatment that almost 50% of cancer patients opt to undergo, Dr. Morgan’s work is essential to the field—and she doesn’t need to be an old white-haired man to make an impact.