is a professor of genetics at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator. He juggles over a dozen graduate students and postdocs. Yet his lab has never published a paper in Science, Nature, Cell, The Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine. None appear in traditional high-impact genetics journals, either.

Instead, the lab’s papers appear only in open-access journals – those that are available to read online and free from financial “tolls” such as paywalls, subscriptions or other barriers restricting their audience – something the traditional journals can’t always boast.

These journals appear to be something researchers are warming to. In 2013 and 2014, academic publisher Taylor & Francis . Between the two surveys, respondents grew more confident that it brings wider visibility, and they were more receptive to post-publication peer review.

Opinions remained divided as to quality standards, however, and open access doesn’t mean “free.” Some open-access journals are subsidized or require authors to stump up the cost of publishing their work, for instance. But the broad choice of journals and the opportunity for crowd-sourced peer review does offer the chance for faster publication and a potentially unlimited readership.

An increasingly open model of scholarly publishing has thrived in the past decade. In 2008, .

Last year, the White House told other large federal agencies to , while , its seven-year, €80 billion research and innovation program.

As of 2011, open-access journals made up about 11 per cent of the total number of journals, and Eisen, who co-founded the early open-access journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) in 2001, thinks they could eventually replace traditional toll journals altogether.

Eisen is certainly sold on the new approach. Choosing an open-access journal, he says, is not as risky as people think. “I was told by people that there was no way I would get tenure at Berkeley unless I published papers in the big journals,” he says. But having been tenured in 2007 and made full professor last year, it certainly hasn’t held him back.

What do other scientists think of the option? And is Eisen’s a safe path to emulate?

Green or gold?

Open access comes in various flavors. With “gold,” open access authors pay an “article-processing fee” in exchange for open access on the publisher’s site. This is in contrast to traditional journals, which make money through reader subscriptions. Some of these journals, labeled “hybrids,” do offer an open-access option to authors willing to pay an extra fee.

Alternatively, with “green” open access, also known as self-archiving, a toll journal allows its published authors to post their own papers freely online, sometimes with an embargo period.

Open-access journals also often differ from toll journals in terms of their approach to peer review. PLoS ONE doesn’t judge whether research will affect its field, only whether it is technically sound, while the life sciences journal publishes articles that pass a quick soundness check, then allows for perpetual, crowdsourced peer review after publication. Hybrid journals, by contrast, retain traditional peer-review methods, offering the open-access option after they accept a paper.

Advocates say the open-access model replaces a distorted subscription model. They argue that university libraries pay steep subscription costs to publishers that enjoy huge profit margins, even as the university’s researchers provide those publishers with unpaid peer review services and journal content. They also point out the societal and scientific benefits of freely circulating knowledge, and some studies suggest open-access papers may lead to more citations for authors.

“The papers that we value during tenure and promotion are the traditional journals,” says physicist of Washington State University in Pullman. “The open-access journals, so far, are not as highly rated.”

But stigma may depend on the subject, department and the age of an assessor. Most open-access journals are in the biomedical sciences, and fields like genetics already enjoy high-impact open-access options, although journals in other fields may be too young, small or shady to boast much impact yet.

Eisen says academic success and a history of high-impact publication go hand-in-hand, but correlation doesn’t imply causation – and at any rate, an advisor’s letter carries more weight than publications.

“The reason why successful people have more high-profile papers is that they’re doing high-profile science,” he says. “To believe
 that their success was because they published in Nature and not because they did science that got them published in Nature, I think, is crazy.”

The price of success

A significant criticism of open-access publications is the scale of the author fees researchers must pay. Some journals charge thousands of dollars, and so far, only some funders and universities are willing to help foot the bill.

, an associate professor of mathematics at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, calls the current subscription system outrageous, but says he doesn’t think publication fees are an improvement.

“I don’t want my university deciding which of my articles is valuable enough for it to pay to publish, and I certainly don’t want to be paying for my own publishing,” he says.

Despite such problems, gold open-access is likely to prevail within 10 years, according to physicist of the American Physical Society. That’s in part because lawmakers are convinced taxpayers have a right to access research their taxes helped pay for, and partly because no genuinely alternative system has emerged.

Choose your journal

Another worrying issue is that the rise of open access presents an opportunity for . Whether it’s by plagiarizing articles, forcing authors to sign over copyright or failing to mention fees until after publication, they represent a minefield for researchers prepared to give open access a try.

, an open-access expert at Michigan State University in East Lansing, says the first way to vet a journal is to check if it appears in respected indices or bibliographic databases. Solomon says it’s not hard for a questionable journal to obtain an official-seeming international serial number or assign unique digital identifiers to digital documents, as established journals do. But, he adds, “these sleazeball journals are not going to get into MEDLINE [the database for the United States National Library of Medicine]”.

Next, see how many journals the publisher’s website contains. If there are multitudes, each with few or no papers, that’s a bad sign. So, for that matter, are scrappy websites or solicitation emails laced with errors.

The best way to judge quality, Solomon says, is simply to read some of the journal’s articles to see if they’re up to snuff. “It’s really not hard to spot these journals if you look at them with a little bit of caution,” he says. “Most of them stick out like sore thumbs.”

Once you master the publication landscape in your field, Eisen says there’s even a case for avoiding traditional journals outright. A CV with both toll and open-access publications might be read by a potential employer as a sign that you favor publishing in prestigious toll journals, which calls into question the quality of all of your open-access publications. A purely open-access CV, by contrast, must be evaluated by employers entirely on its merits.

“They look at your publication record in an entirely different way,” Eisen says. “It has helped immeasurably for me and other people in my lab to be able to say, ‘Look, just judge my science on the science.'”

The doctor looks at her patient’s test result and sighs – telling a patient he has metastatic melanoma is hard. Chemotherapy probably . Immunotherapies help in some cases, but make patients sick. Surgery and radiation are mostly used to relieve symptoms. Most patients with this widespread malignant skin cancer will live only six to ten months.

Or at least that was the scenario five years ago. Things have changed. Researchers have discovered that melanoma can be divided into several categories depending on the tumour’s genetic makeup. One type with a mutation in a gene called BRAF can be treated with a drug called , which can bring the development of some tumours to a dramatic halt and double some .

Innovations in the genetic sequencing of tumours are bringing about a revolution in personalised cancer therapy. To adapt, doctors and researchers are stepping outside their traditional roles. Today’s oncologists are informing the research of scientists, while geneticists and bioinformaticians are beginning to shape the treatment of individuals in real-time.

“I’m at the interface of three or four interesting worlds that have previously talked, but not interacted with as much overlap as they do now,” says Nikhil Wagle, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. “It’s extraordinary.”

Wagle may be a cancer doctor, but his role is not limited to patient care. A typical week involves sifting through sequencing data with computational biologists and discussing functional gene studies with lab-based researchers. The result is a better understanding of how cancers differ, he says. “The size of the groups that we are putting people into is getting smaller and smaller.”

The role of the cancer researcher is also evolving. Geneticists and bioinformaticians may increasingly be called upon to help make decisions about the best course of treatment for an individual. A handful of institutions have already started to make genetically-informed treatment choices for patients (see “Doctor, doctor”, below).

That scenario is still uncommon, though. Even at research centres with access to sequencing equipment and supercomputers to process the information, the medical system is lagging behind advances in genetics. For one thing, there are many unanswered questions. Will insurance companies foot genetic sequencing bills for all individuals with cancer, or only those with advanced disease and few treatment options? What if a person’s best treatment option involves an expensive drug that is not yet approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for that particular tumour? And then there’s the problem of how to turn genetic sequencing data into a treatment decision. Sequence a tumour and you’re likely to find thousands of mutations, many essentially unknown to science. As Wagle and his colleagues put it, the genomics superhighway has met the bike path of medical practice.

In the meantime, a number of new courses are being offered to prepare researchers for this more clinical role, and to tailor their research accordingly. The idea is that doctors can help scientists better understand the cancers they’re working with, and choose the best research questions.

Curtis Pickering, a molecular geneticist by training, was granted a (translational research in multi-disciplinary programme) fellowship at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. The programme, which exposes postdoctoral fellows to clinical medicine, offered Pickering the chance to shadow clinical doctors, and take a first-hand look at cancer care.

“Working with physicians to understand how patients are treated, and what a tissue sample goes through before it gets into our hands, actually is necessary for us to properly design our research,” says Pickering.

Robert Sikes, director of the at theUniversity of Delaware in Newark, thinks these programmes are vital for cancer researchers. “It keeps people focused on the disease rather than the molecule,” he says.

Joining the revolution

To be a part of the translational cancer revolution, it’s important to get where the action is. “You have to be around not just cancer researchers but oncologists and pathologists,” says Marc Ladanyi, a molecular pathologist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “For this kind of work, it’s becoming very disadvantageous to be in a university department that’s not connected to a cancer hospital.”

It’s also vital to get a handle on disciplines outside your own area of expertise. “This is team science at its finest,” says , co-director of the Genome Institute at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Beyond cancer genetics, a basic understanding of clinical care, pathology, and pharmacology will be useful. “When you get involved with a group, you learn by osmosis exactly how all this stuff works,” she says. “It really takes all of those areas of expertise to work together.”

Translational cancer research also involves a host of other players. When a genetic mutation pops up, pharmacologists can alert both researchers and clinicians of new or in-development drugs targeting that mutation that they might try. Materials scientists play an important role in developing tumour-cell scaffolds that enable human tumours to be studied in animal models, which can offer a platform for testing whether or not a drug will work. Genetics counsellors help patients navigate an increasingly complex set of treatment choices.

Some skills are especially valuable. According to Ladanyi, there are never enough bioinformaticians and computational biologists. , executive director of the new Center for Personalised Medicine at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, agrees that opportunities for the computer-savvy are plentiful. “If you have IT or bioinformatics skills, your chances of being employed in cancer science or cancer clinical care increase by a hundredfold,” he says.

Genomics-based cancer care is too big for any one discipline. “We’re still going to need the very pure basic scientists and we’re still going to need the person who sees patients all the time,” says , oncologist at the Yale Cancer Center in New Haven, Connecticut. “But in order to bridge that gap, we’re going to need a greater number of people who can live in both worlds.”

AFTER geologist Julie Pett-Ridge began a tenure-track job at Oregon State University in Corvallis, her ecologist husband Dana Warren received an offer from Colby College in Maine. But Colby had nothing for Pett-Ridge. “I could get my dream job – if Julie quit science completely,” says Warren.

The difficulties that face job-seeking couples in science are sometimes called the two-body problem. The term is borrowed from celestial mechanics: just as two stars may orbit each other on separate paths, two scientists can follow different career trajectories while in a relationship. Short-term positions and pressure to work at a variety of institutions can make it difficult for couples to stick together.

Though a challenge at all stages, the two-body problem can be especially hard on early-career PhDs, who often face major decisions about housing and children while trying to launch their science careers.

żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ”s are more likely to fall for their colleagues than other academics are. According to Stanford University’s Clayman Institute, almost two-thirds of partnered academics in science – a phenomenon known as disciplinary endogamy. Just over a third of business academics, on the other hand, form relationships with others in their field. The all-consuming nature of scientific training and the fact that shop talk is easier with another scientist may explain why so many of them pair up.

The two-body problem also affects female scientists disproportionately: while just over half of male scientists are partnered with other scientists, 83 per cent of female scientists find themselves in a scientific couple. It can also be harder for women to navigate the problem. Women in academic partnerships report less job mobility than their male counterparts, and are much more likely to be a “trailing spouse” – the one who follows his or her partner.

The trailing spouse can be forced to narrow his or her job search to one region, move away for a job, or put science on hold. For those hired at his or her spouse’s institution, things can be awkward. Thirty seven per cent of university faculty members think “second hires” are treated with less respect.

Given all this, it’s not surprising that the way couples navigate the two-body problem can make or break careers and relationships. But there are ways to tip the scales in favour of a happy outcome.

Two heads are better than one

For a start, couples can jointly apply for posts at the same institution, where they may have more leverage than they think. A university stands to gain or lose two strong hires, so has an incentive to help. “The universities that solve the partner-hiring questions for outstanding candidates are going to have a competitive advantage,” says , provost of Boston University (BU).

While the percentage of such couples at colleges and universities hasn’t changed since 1989, universities are hiring them at a greater rate. This is just as well, because the number of academic couples will only increase as women become more prominent in the sciences. The proportion of female engineering PhDs, for example, – and many of them will continue to pair off with fellow scientists.

Many institutions have formal dual-career policies in place. These tend to offer job-search guidance for the partner of an employee without making any guarantees of employment. “If there simply is no niche for a partner or the fit is just not right, they can’t do it, no matter what,” says Morrison.

At some institutions, postdoc offices post job openings for postdoctoral scholars. Universities and colleges can upload their job openings to a regional , which has a searchable database.

At the same time, deans, provosts and chairs within an institution exchange information about candidates’ spouses. In populous areas, administrators may reach out to other institutions, sending CVs to counterparts there.

Not all employees receive the same help, though. Whether formally or informally, universities tend to focus on helping the spouses of faculty members find jobs, says Kathleen Ehm, programme manager at the (NPA). Postdocs, on the other hand, remain part of the “invisible university”. “We find that most institutions don’t have these types of formal support structures available to their postdocs,” she says.

This could soon change. The NPA is set to release recommendations aimed at reducing the obstacles for female postdocs, including the two-body problem. Many research institutions, faced with retiring scholars and increased competition for diverse and high-quality faculty, appear to be improving their support for academic couples.

Speaking up

Early in the job-seeking process, questions about disclosure loom large. The risk of appearing discriminatory generally stops employers from asking job seekers whether their spouse also needs a job, yet merely bringing it up could bias a hiring committee against a candidate. So when, if at all, should a postdoc or PhD candidate mention it?

“My advice would be probably to just go through the first round and see if they’re interested in your application,” says , vice dean for scientific affairs and graduate studies at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, who interviews and hires scientists there. “Once there’s some interest, I think the sooner you engage the place you’re going with the truth about the situation, the better it will go.”

Morrison agrees that earlier is better. When a candidate discloses that he or she has a partner who is also looking for work, it allows the university to try to help its final-round candidates. But if a candidate doesn’t speak up until after a job offer, she says, “the institution can in some cases wind up feeling like the person didn’t negotiate entirely in good faith”.

Strategic openness worked for Amy Karlsson and Christopher Jewell. Both PhDs in chemical engineering, they often applied for the same position without saying they were married to another applicant. After interview invitations arrived, each would disclose and then ask about jobs for the other. “We didn’t want to get to the point where one of us would have an offer and it was too late for them to help with a position for the other person,” Karlsson says. The couple was fortunate to land two tenure-track jobs at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Staying flexible

Flexibility is also key, across both disciplines and job types. While applying for jobs in their field, Karlsson and Jewell also tried out for roles in biomedical and bioengineering.

The tactic worked for Marshall Hayes and Magali Moreau, who began postdocs in Cornell in 2005, primarily following Moreau’s scientific interests. After a three-year long-distance relationship, the couple was determined to stay together, so oceanographer Hayes switched fields and joined Cornell’s plant pathology department. Hayes says he values the cross-training: “I’m a generalist by nature.”

Hayes and Moreau were both promoted to research faculty a few years after their arrival, and Hayes says that, although they are not tenure-track faculty, they’re very happy with their work-life balance. “We’re not subject to the kinds of anxieties that the tenure track brings with it,” he points out.

Such research faculty jobs, also called soft-money positions, can be easier to secure than a tenure-track position. The university can provide space and letterhead for a researcher to write grants to generate a salary.

“If I found a partner of an employee or candidate who’s a really good scientist and clearly could support himself or herself on grants, that makes it a lot easier to develop a soft-money position,” says , dean of BU’s College of Arts and Sciences.

It is also worth searching outside academia. Researchers in government or industry can do good science without teaching and committee work. And industry scientists can often re-enter academia later.

Location, location, location

Another way to boost the chances of finding jobs for two is by looking in the right location. Aquatic ecologist Kristen Arend was jobless when she followed her partner to the Great Lakes after he landed a job at Lake Superior State University (LSSU) in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. But given her field, it wasn’t an outlandish leap of faith to move to the home of the world’s largest group of freshwater lakes. Arend was ultimately offered two positions: a post at LSSU and a US Geological Survey job 160 kilometres from the university.

For lab scientists, big cities offer a similar advantage. Candidates can blitz hospitals, startups and universities with applications.

Trying to make a relationship last while juggling such job applications is never an easy task, however, and each couple will find their own path through the maze. Warren, for his part, turned down Colby’s offer in favour of his soft-money researcher position at Oregon State University. “Our average happiness is much higher in Corvallis,” he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Let’s stick together”

Feeling isolated

Page counts. Proofreading. Discussion sections. As a postdoc, when your mind is immersed in the science, writing it up can seem like an annoying distraction. But whether the plan is to remain in academia or make the jump into industry, publishing papers is the only way to get there. Publications prove to potential employers that you are capable of carrying out original, cutting-edge work – and of working hard.

But publishing isn’t simply a case of doing all the research, writing it up and then sending it out to a few journals for review. To be successful, you need an overarching strategy that starts when your postdoc does. Here is a whistlestop tour of how to make your postdoc publishing career a success.

When should I start writing up my research?
Early – perhaps even before you go to the bench or the accelerator. It may sound premature, but writing up the rationale and methods behind your work will help you maximize efficiency, anticipate problems and focus on the big picture. “Good colleagues of mine can already envision what the paper’s going to look like before they’ve done the experiments,” says Keith Micoli, postdoctoral program director at the NYU School of Medicine. He suggests that new postdocs outline a manuscript after a few months of generating data, and then plan more experiments based on that. Use any downtime between experiments to start writing up the methods section and the introduction, and start building a reference section.

Justine Melo, a seventh-year molecular biology postdoc at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says she wishes she had adopted the write-as-you-go technique earlier. “It’s a real bummer to write the paper, identify the holes in the process, and then have to go back to the bench for who knows how long to plug them before you can submit,” she says. “Doing experiments while writing allows you to get the clarity of hindsight mid-process.” If you are overcome by inertia, Melo suggests forming a writing group with colleagues.

How early in my postdoc should I publish?
Again, early. “It’s really important to publish, not to put it off,” says Julia S. Austin, who teaches postdocs research writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Map out where you’re going and when you need to be publishing, and put yourself on that schedule.” You don’t want to let a year or two go by with no progress.

How much of my research should I publish at once?
Senior Nature editor Michael White advises a two-pronged approach: keep top journals in mind for possible home-run results while simultaneously parsing off parts of your research for smaller journals. The latter “turns the crank on your career by showing a consistent record of publication,” he says.

Melo chose a riskier strategy. She bet on two all-or-nothing projects that were ultimately unfruitful before succeeding with the third. However, after having a first-author paper in Cell last month (the only other author was her advisor), she feels optimistic going into the job market, even though her only previous postdoc publication was a fourth-author paper two years ago.

“I thought I’d get a better story if I waited and collected more data,” she says. “The risk of doing that is that someone could scoop you.”

How many research papers am I expected to publish?
That depends on what you are studying. “In some biomedical fields, having a paper per year might be a bad thing because it may mean that the postdoc isn’t working on a substantive project,” says John Alvaro, director of Yale University’s postdoc program. In astronomy, says Rodger Thompson, a professor at the University of Arizona, postdocs generally have many projects going on at once, so they can churn out between five and 10 papers a year. To make sure you keep up, ask your principal investigator how often they expect you to submit papers when you start a new position.

Do I need to be the first author for the paper to count?
Yes, if you are aiming for academic positions in competitive fields. “Postdocs really have to have some outstanding publications, usually at least one first-author paper in one of the top-tier journals, to even pass the first round” of interviews for a faculty job, says Stephen Miller, an immunologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, who has supervised dozens of postdocs. He encourages his mentees to add review articles and commentaries to their CVs. Those demonstrate a good work ethic and grasp of their field’s development – and, he says, “it also doesn’t hurt to have the extra first-author publications”.

Is my career over if I don’t publish in Cell, Science or Nature?
Papers in top journals open doors, but Miller says an alternative to having one first-author, top-tier paper is to do so several times in middle-tier journals. Given the eight per cent and seven per cent acceptance rates at Science and Nature, Alvaro says: “The odds are stacked against you. I don’t think you should feel your postdoc career was a failure if you did not get into one of those journals.”

In geoscience, says White, fewer papers are published in the higher-profile journals, so many scientists build fine careers from good subject-specific journals alone. MIT robotics researcher Matt Walter says his field measures postdocs by more than just their journal publications. “In robotics, publications at prestigious conferences are integral to getting our ideas out there and helping to establish credibility,” he says.

Will good science trump so-so prose?
“We definitely prefer good writing,” says White. Bear in mind that editors at general journals like Science and Nature may not be experts in the field covered by the paper, so sloppy writing will make it even harder to decipher.

However, White says he does sometimes send poorly written papers out for review. “It’s somewhat of a fine line between wasting the referee’s time and seeing if there’s actually a good idea in the paper,” he says.

Anxious writers do have options, though, such as taking research-writing classes or working with professional editors to help them develop their articles. Austin suggests carefully choosing a mentor who can offer guidance and is willing to proofread drafts in addition to your principal investigator, as some faculty will be better than others at guiding postdocs through the process.

Another way is to study those who have gone before. “Looking at other people’s work,” says Miller, “is really the way you learn how to do this stuff.”

What if I can’t get my research published?
Heed the reviewers, spiff up the prose and try your luck with lesser venues. It’s not unusual for people to start slowly at first. After all, it takes a while to settle into a new postdoc position, says Micoli. However, he adds that “the competition for faculty jobs is so intense that if you don’t have a solid CV by year four, you are unlikely to be able to overcome that deficit and time becomes your enemy”.

If you are not submitting or publishing as much as your peers as the years pass, consider rethinking your goals. As Alvaro points out: “There are some very rewarding jobs out there regardless of one’s publication record.”

This is what Devin Parry discovered when he finished a five-year molecular biology postdoc at Massachusetts General Hospital. He had one first-author paper in Current Biology to his name and the distinct feeling that he did not want to run his own lab. He is now enjoying life as a high school biology teacher in Seattle.

When he sees former colleagues, any nostalgia he may feel is forgotten when the conversation turns to funding. “The level of stress they have in their lives is very different from the level of stress in my life,” says Parry. “A lot of it depends on personality and what’s going to make you happy. Teaching high school is a great fit.”

When biologists look at cell signaling pathways, they see receptors, enzymes and transcription factors. When engineers look, they see a circuit diagram, says John Hazle of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He recalls the time an engineering graduate student took one look at a cell-cycle control diagram and said, “That looks like the circuit diagram I was working on last week.” She suggested untangling the pathways using differential equations, helping to clarify possible tumor proliferation mechanisms.

Such cross-disciplinary conversations are central to translational cancer research, an approach that teams physicians with experts in basic research fields to move lab findings to the clinic as quickly as possible – and vice versa. But it is no longer enough to simply sit with the “other side” during lunch. Driven by the need to accelerate the pace of discovery, as well as the high cost of clinical advances, scientists who study cancer are increasingly expected to cross traditional academic boundaries and become polyglots in the languages of the laboratory, the clinic and the latest technology.

And it’s not just biologists or people with a life-sciences bent who find themselves working in cancer research today. “We’ve always had dribblings of physics, engineering and mathematics students that kind of eke their way into biomedical science,” says Hazle, who is the chair of imaging physics at MD Anderson. But with the frontiers of cancer now reaching the molecular level, these outsiders are being welcomed into the fold.

Buzzword

Translational research may be trendy, but it’s not necessarily new. “It’s the future of research, but it’s also been its past,” says Robert Schneider, an associate director of the NYU Cancer Institute and its director of translational cancer research. Conversations between doctors and lab scientists used to be the norm a few decades ago, recalls Schneider, who trained alongside medical students while working on his doctorate. But once advances in science split genetics from cell biology and then molecular biology from cell biology, the training followed suit, he says, until “you could go through an entire PhD and not be able to identify the liver”.

Even at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, much clinical and basic research was still carried out in separate buildings when Mike Boyd left to set up the Mitchell Cancer Institute at the University of South Alabama a decade ago. “Even in a place like that, there is a large proportion of activity that goes on in isolated labs – world-class scientists working on their highly specialized research in their labs. They rarely ever encounter the other side,” he says.

That’s changing. The Mitchell Cancer Institute, for example, encourages transparency among researchers, clinicians and patients by having facilities with glass walls. MD Anderson provides salary support to scientists to free them from grant worries and allow more space for creative collaboration.

After transitioning from a basic-research career about a decade ago, Schneider, like many translational scientists, now meets regularly with oncology colleagues to plan clinical trials based on his and others’ lab findings. He says the NYU School of Medicine and its Cancer Institute instills translational thinking during lectures and journal clubs by covering everything about a disease, from molecular biology to treatment. The NIH, for its part, began funding translational research in the form of its Clinical and Translational Science Awards in 2006, with some 60 institutions now involved.

Starting early

Several universities offer dedicated courses that orient basic scientists to the bedside and clinicians to the bench. For example, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), offers health-sciences students summer and longer-term clinical and translational research fellowships. Along with other schools like Brown, Penn and NYU, UCSF also offers a master’s degree in translational research. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston hires a researcher every few years for hands-on translational training. And, in the wake of the staggering datasets generated by array and next-generation sequencing techniques, short workshops are popping up everywhere that cover must-know topics such as statistical genetics, gene mapping and bioinformatics.

For those with a background in physical sciences, the “Med into Grad” summer immersion course, which Hazle co-directs, is designed to give students from MD Anderson’s medical physics program and Rice University’s bioengineering program an introduction to medicine and biology that will help them apply their skills to biomedical research.

All this intermingling is happening in part because of the increasingly finegrained understanding of cancer. In 10 years, we will refer to tumors by their specific mutations, rather than their tissue of origin, predicts Schneider. Treating each patient will therefore require conversations between DNA sequencing experts, molecular diagnosticians, bioinformatics specialists and pharmacologists, among others. “It’s just too big for any single person,” he says.

Cancer is already becoming too big for academia, biotech or pharma alone. Shawn Sweeney, a senior program administrator at the American Association for Cancer Research, notes that the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to streamline drug discovery mean that large companies are increasingly partnering with universities. “This can be more efficient for everyone,” says Sweeney. Pharma provides “money to fill the gap in funding left by the federal government to get more early target discovery in university labs. Basic researchers benefit, as industry is providing alternative sources of funding. Industry benefits because it is filling the pipeline.”

Business savvy

Although business training for scientists isn’t standard in academia, some institutes have taken it on. At the Mitchell Cancer Institute, new recruits are taught about intellectual property and how to write business plans for the private sector, while MD Anderson’s Institute for Applied Cancer Science cites collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry as a specific goal on its website. The NYU Office of Industrial Liaison offers a “Life Science Startup Bootcamp” for grad students, faculty and researchers.

So move over, northern blot analysis – statistics, technology and business acumen are a modern cancer researcher’s weapons. Of course, the fundamentals still apply. Schneider says it’s key to have curiosity, stamina and the gregariousness that teamwork requires. Most importantly, “you have to be a superb basic research scientist,” he says. “To then be a translational researcher, you need to understand the disease, but also what’s feasible and achievable in the clinic.”

While translational research may be easy to talk about, says Boyd, it’s hard to achieve. But when it all comes together, “it’s almost magical. It’s an interesting and exciting environment, but very hard to manage,” he laughs.