The Invisible Graveyard of Scientific Risk: Rethinking the Role of PhD Supervisors

  

https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-moral-imperative-of-scientific.html

In a previous post from February 2024, linked above, I argued that science needs more rebellious minds and mentioned seven ways to cultivate them. One of those suggestions was to “establish mentorship programs that pair young researchers with experienced rebel scientists.” Seen in that light, a recent Research Policy paper by Shibayama, Mattsson and Broström, researchers affiliated with the University of Tokyo, Lund University and the University of Gothenburg, is especially relevant. One of its research highlights states the point directly: “Risk-taking is a critical trait for scientists.” Based on survey and bibliometric data from PhD students and supervisors in the Swedish life sciences, the study argues that scientific risk-taking is not merely an individual disposition, but may be shaped during doctoral training and transmitted across academic generations. Its central finding that students’ risk-taking is significantly associated with that of their supervisors, especially when mentoring is more frequent, and that this association may persist long after students leave their PhD affiliation deserves serious attention from science-policy scholars worldwide.

Yet caution is needed. The study captures only the risks that survived into print. In an earlier post, I made a related point about academia’s uneasy relationship with failure, science needs failed attempts and risk-taking attitudes, beyond publishable safe outcomes, in order to advance, yet institutions tend to reward only the successes that can be counted. The letter posted online yesterday, which cites that post, applies that concern directly to Shibayama, Mattsson and Broström’s study. Before we credit supervisors with breeding bold scientists, we should first confront the system that buries failed risk, ignores abandoned projects and rewards playing it safe, even when science demands otherwise to advance meaningfully.

PS - This also connects with my July 2024 post on the Nobel laureate who visited Portugal and advised young scientists to be “arrogant enough.” Without some of that "arrogance", science becomes the polite manufacture of safe, countable mediocrity. https://pachecotorgal.com/2024/07/15/nobel-prize-winner-advises-young-scientists-to-adopt-confident-arrogance/

Meaning Begins Where Permanence Ends

Milky Way over La Palma, Canary Islands, the world’s first Starlight Reserve.

"And I'm broken apart, and all the littlest pieces of me are just recycled, and I'm billions of other places. And my atoms are in plants and bugs and animals, and I am like the stars that are in the sky. There one moment and then just scattered across the cosmos."

This phrase, from Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, spoken by Riley Flynn, gives poetic form to one of cosmology’s most brutal truths: we are temporary arrangements of matter, briefly gathered, inevitably scattered, and never entirely ours. In my previous post of June 3, 2025, I referred to an essay in which five respected senior scientists reflected on how modern cosmology shapes meaning, ethics, and human identity. Riley’s words enter the same territory, but with less academic distance and more raw, deeply unsettling existential force.

If we are not permanent selves, then existence cannot be about preservation. Nothing in the universe promises us permanence, purpose, or cosmic importance. Meaning, if it exists at all, is not written into the stars. It is made locally, inside this fragile, brief, trembling, conscious accident of matter, against the vast indifferent silence, where we feel, love, grieve, imagine, build, and create. That is not a failure of existence. It may be the only form meaning can take.

This also changes how we think about compassion. A skeptic may rightly object that shared material origins do not automatically create moral duties. But that misses the force of the insight. Once the self is seen as provisional, the boundary between my fate and yours becomes less absolute. Compassion stops looking like a noble decoration added to life and starts looking like a clearer, less frightened way of seeing it. Connection matters more than legacy because legacy is often only the ego asking to survive under another name.

Consciousness is matter briefly witnessing itself. No rock does this. No star does this. Yet here, for a moment, the universe opens its eyes, fears its own disappearance, and asks why it exists. Perhaps that is the closest thing we have to a point: not to solve the mystery, but to be the fragile, achingly brief, luminous place where the mystery becomes aware of itself.

There is, however, a darker counterweight to this consolation. In a post from July 2, 2022, I reflected on the uncomfortable idea that suffering may bind us to something higher than ourselves. The two thoughts sit in tension: does impermanence console us, or wound us? Perhaps it does both, and perhaps that is precisely why it matters. It exposes our vulnerability, breaks the illusion of self-sufficiency, and forces meaning to stop being something merely understood and become something tested by suffering, expressed through action, sustained by connection, and redeemed by shared human compassion. https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2022/07/porque-e-que-uma-vida-com-significado-e.html

The illusion of scientific talent identification through publication counts: a critical commentary on Haunschild and Bornmann

Abstract: This letter responds to the article by Haunschild and Bornmann, published in the Journal of Informetrics, which proposes a bibliometric framework for identifying promising early-career scientists based on three specific indicators: the number of publications in top-quartile journals (Q1), total publication output (O), and corresponding authorship (C). Using the combined OxQ1 indicator, the authors compile a dataset of 46,200 individuals classified as “potentially talented,” intended to support informed peer review and hiring decisions... 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157726000805?dgcid=author