STORY WITH A MORAL
                  (required reading for graduate students)
Scene: It'a a fine sunny day in the forest, and a rabbit is sitting
outside his burrow, tippy-tapping on his typewriter. Along comes a fox, out
of walk.
        Fox: "What are you working on?"
        Rabbit:"My thesis."
        Fox:"Hmm. What is it about?"
        Rabbit:"Oh, I'm writing about how rabbit eat foxes."
        (incredulous pause)
        Fox:"That's ridiculous! Any fool know that rabbits don't eat foxes!"
        Rabbit:"Come with me and I'll show you!"
They both disappear into the rabbit's burrow. After a few minutes,
gnawing on a fox bone, the rabbit returns to his typewriter and resumes
typing. Soon a wolf comes along and stops to watch the hardworking rabbit.
        Wolf:" What's that you are writing?"
        Rabbit:" I'm doing a thesis on how rabbits eats wolves."
        (loud guffaws)
        Wolf:" you don't expect to get such rubbish published, do you?"
        Rabbit:" No problem. Do you want to see why?"
The rabbit and the wolf go into the burrow, and again the rabbit
returns by himself, after a few minutes, and goes back to typing.
        Finally a bear comes along and asks, "What are you doing?
        Rabbit:" I'm doing a thesis on how rabbits eats bears."
        Bear: "Well that's absurd!
        Rabbit:  "Come into my home and I'll show you!"
As they enter the burrow, the rabbit introduces the bear to the lion.
Moral:
        IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW SILLY YOUR THESIS TOPIC IS;
        WHAT MATTERS IS WHO YOU HAVE FOR A THESIS ADVISOR.



                            STORY WITH A MORAL
                    (required reading for students and supervisors)
Scene: It'a a fine sunny day in the forest, and a lion is sitting
outside his cave, lying lazily in the sun. Along comes a fox, out on a
walk.
        Fox: "Do you know the time? My watch is broken."
        Lion:"Oh, I can easily fix the watch for you."
        Fox:"Hmm. But it's a very complicated mechanism, and your great
             claws will only destroy it even more."
        Lion:"Oh no, give it to me, and it will be fixed."

        (incredulous pause)

        Fox:"That's ridiculous! Any fool knows that lazy lions with great
             claws cannot fix complicated watches."
        Lion:"Sure they do, give it to me and it will be fixed."
The lion disappears into his cave, and after a while he comes back
with the watch which is running perfectly. The fox is impressed, and the
lion continues to lie lazily in the sun, looking very pleased with
himself.
Soon a wolf comes along and stops to watch the lazy lion in the sun.
        Wolf: "Can I come and watch TV tonight with you? Mine is broken."
        Lion: "Oh, I can easily fix your TV for you."
        (loud guffaws)
        Wolf: "You don't expect me to believe such rubbish, do you? There
               is no way that a lazy lion with big claws can fix a 
               complicated TV."
        Lion:" No problem. Do you want to try it?"
The lion goes into his cave, and after a while comes back with a
perfectly fixed TV. The wolf goes away happily and amazed.
Scene: Inside the lion's cave. In one corner are half a dozen small
and intelligent looking rabbits who are busily doing very complicated work
with very detailed instruments. In the other corner lies a huge
lion looking very pleased with himself.
Moral:
        IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY AN ADVISOR IS FAMOUS,
        LOOK AT THE WORK OF HIS STUDENTS.



New Scientist, 06 June 1992, Vol.134 No.1824 Page 49

Forum: How to be a PhD student - Simon Wolff offers 
some warnings to would-be candidates

SIMON WOLFF

Well done! You got your first (or  upper second). You 
successfully eked out the long, hot summer months 
fantasising about your research career. You started your 
PhD studentship a few months ago. And about now reality 
is creeping in.

Lying on the beach you imagined yourself, no doubt, 
clutching test tubes in your tight little fist in the style of a 
B-movie; 'Don't worry Mayor, we'll have an antidote to 
the dread alien toxin toobyornot 2B by morning.' Or you 
saw yourself as a Frankenstein figure, at odds with the 
scientific community, but (inevitably) brilliant. Or you saw 
yourself as impossibly glamorous, with tousled hair, 
working in bow tie and tails or a little black number 
between cocktails and a late show. Or perhaps you saw 
yourself as a poor drab little thing, working all the hours 
the good Lord gives, with no reward, and no money.

Consider that latter possibility carefully. Because that, my 
child, whatever the fantasy, is the reality - as, I trust, you 
are now learning. You will also have learnt by  now that 
the British PhD system is a total nonsense. You are not 
there to be trained. Your supervisor does not want to see 
any intellectual development. You are there  to be slave 
labour. Your supervisor just needs you to generate results 
that she or he can pin to an abstract for that 'critical' 
conference in Hawaii.

It generally takes two months before the average research 
student, no matter how profound their personality 
disorder, realises there is no glamour and no future in 
doing a PhD. The pay, which looked modest, but better 
than the undergraduate grant, turns out to be completely 
lousy. The myth that the sheer honour of doing a PhD is 
sufficient reward is wearing thin. Chats with your elders 
and betters will have told you that you will have to pack 
more research into the next three years than you could 
manage in the following 20. You should also, by now, 
have realised that you are a despised subspecies of the 
laboratory world. Nothing you do will ever be good 
enough. Worse yet, you will have heard all the horror 
stories. If you have a nervous breakdown, they sack you; 
if your supervisor has a nervous breakdown, ditto. But 
there are ways in which you might just survive. Read on 
carefully.

First, the PhD student does not only  require the ability to 
turn 'suspension of disbelief' into an art form beyond the 
illusory skills of our most eminent Shakespearean actors; 
he or she must also retain the ability to remain as cynical 
and as hard-bitten as Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. 
This ability to deceive oneself and one's audience 
completely, while remaining in touch with harsh reality is, 
of course, the reason why most students become barking 
mad and continue the pain by applying  for postdoctoral 
positions at universities. Some extreme cases end up as 
lecturers.

Secondly, you must bear firmly in mind that you are on 
the thin end of a research team's thin budget. Your project 
has to be cheap, but must also look impressive. In short, 
your project has to be utterly meaningless but seem to be 
at the cutting edge of science. You have to kid yourself. 
You have to hypnotise yourself. You have to talk yourself 
into a state of religious fervour. You have to get yourself 
into that peculiar state of mind where you can go to an 
issue of Nature and read a paper entitled 'Glucose is an 
essential cofactor for function of the glucose porter in 
vitro' from top to bottom and think 'Wow' and then aim 
for similar lofty heights. Never, ever, for one second, must 
you allow yourself the luxury of thinking 'So what?'.

So when your grandmother asks you casually at tea how 
your studies are going, it is essential that you tell her in 
the minutest detail exactly how you are purifying that 
membrane protein involved in bacterial killing and how 
this is going to produce a cure for cancer any second now. 
If granny nods off you are home and dry. You have 
proved you believe that what you are doing is important. 
If, however, grandma asks you pertinent questions such 
as, 'Do you  have some interesting hobbies/friends?' or 
worse - 'Do they pay you for that?' - then you have failed 
and you might as well pack your bags and quietly leave 
the university. Of course, the really critical test comes 
when you can talk to your bank manager and his eyes 
become that unique blend of boredom and cash register.

Finally, you have managed to kid yourself into working all 
hours of the day and night doing something which, to 
anybody sane and in touch with reality, is useless, albeit 
cheap and reduces the dole queue by one. But, at the 
same time, you can only survive the vagaries and pitfalls 
of PhD life, and the appalling day-to-day hysterical 
politics within your research group/department by keeping 
a firm grip on reality. You have to convince yourself that 
'Well, there is more to life than the lab' while maintaining 
the huge lie. Frankly, you need a diverting hobby. Drugs 
are out. They are too expensive unless you are a 
particularly innovative organic chemist and sex can 
interfere with the old lab routine. So I recommend to my 
students that they take up odd-jobbing, such as painting, 
decorating, general housework and gardening, to divert 
their minds from work. This seems to have been of 
immense benefit to most of them although some, I admit, 
never quite manage to get my frying pan quite clean.

Simon P. Wolff is a lecturer in toxicology