As someone who spent time with both biology and computer science PhDs, every bit of that article is true when applied to biology (much less so in computer scien

As someone who spent time with both biology and computer science PhDs, every bit of that article is true when applied to biology (much less so in computer science, and probably none of it applies to math). Actually it gets worse in biology than what the article describes. There are networks of "friends" established across the country which survive by sharing credit as much as possible. (Someone should write a paper on how such cliques get established -- it is almost like Darwinian evolution, except the other way around.) Members of those cliques often have impressive publication records, but when you start drilling down to what their individual contribution was to each paper, you start believing that you are watching some circus unfold in front of you. In an individual lab, members of such cliques can achieve significant power and influence (since friends know tricks to get paper closer to publication) even despite the fact that their individual ability to interpret experimental data is often very unimpressive to put it nicely.