Many people by now have discovered A Singapore Taxi Driver’s Diary, a blog
oestensibly written by a Stanford PhD holder and former A*STAR researcher,
now retrenched and self-employed as a taxi-driver. The blogger’s name is
Cai Mingjie, and his blog currently begins with this poignant headline:

Probably the only taxi driver in this world with a PhD from Stanford and a
proven track record of scientific accomplishments, I have been forced out of
my research job at the height of my scientific career, and unable to find
another one, for reasons I can only describe as something “uniquely
Singapore”. As a result, I am driving taxi to make a living and writing
these real life stories just to make the dull job a little more interesting.
I hope that these stories are interesting to you too.

A lot of people have asked: What’s up with his story? Is he for real?

It’s not always easy for laypeople to understand the sometimes arcane
aspects of the scientific world. With that in mind, here’s some facts I
have collected, along with some comments that might help put them into
context:

1. The Institute for Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) existed before the
Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) did, which was only
founded in 2001: IMCB was founded in 1987. IMCB, along with several other
institutes, were co-opted into the A*STAR as an “autonomous research
institute” around the time A*STAR was founded.

In contrast, Dr. Cai supposedly started working there 16 years ago from now,
i.e. in 1993. This brings me to:

2. There is indeed a Cai Mingjie who has a documented existence in the
scientific literature, and he has published several times as documented by
databases of scientific publications such as the ISI Web of Science.

a) Two papers dated June 1989 and May 1990 are listed as authored by a Cai
MJ from Stanford University’s Department of Biochemistry and co-authored
two well-received papers by Prof. Ronald W. Davis, presumably his PhD
advisor. The earlier paper was cited at least 66 times, and the later paper
was published in the prestigious journal Cell and has been cited 249 times;
these papers are pretty influential.

b) Starting from 1995, 14 papers from a Cai MJ from IMCB are documented on
Web of Science.

Let’s tally the papers from 1993, the year the supposed Dr. Cai started
work at IMCB.

1993: 0
1994: 0
1995: 1
1996: 1
1997: 2
1998: 0
1999: 2
2000: 1
2001: 1
2002: 0
2003: 1
2004: 0
2005: 1
2006: 0
2007: 2
2008: 2
2009: 2

Yes, that was not a typo. His remaining colleagues are still publishing work
done together with Dr. Cai, who is the corresponding author of both 2009
papers and still lists IMCB as his affiliation on these papers.

This does not necessarily mean that he is still employed at IMCB, as it is
customary to declare the affiliation with the institution at which the work
was done, not necessarily where the author is now. Usually authors choose to
list past and present affiliations, although in this case the lack of a
second affiliation is hardly surpising.

3. A Dr. Cai Mingjie appears several times on IMCB’s website.

a) In this November 2007 press release, Dr. Cai is listed prominently as the
last author of the two featured scientific publications. The fact that he
is the last author in sequence is significant in many scientific disciplines
, as it is typically reserved for the Principal Investigator, who is usually
the most senior or most powerful researcher involved in the work reported.
The publication’s abstract lists his affiliation as IMCB Singapore. However
, note that Dr. Cai is promiscuously absent in the title photo. Note that
the Dr. Cai on the blog claims that he was informed of his being fired some
time in 2007.

b) An A/Prof Cai is listed in the program of the 1st A*STAR Postdoctoral
Symposium in 2004. It is not unusual for researchers at a research institute
to also hold professorial appointments at nearby universities.

Draw your conclusions as you wish, but to me, the facts seem pretty clear:
Dr. Cai does exist, and has a well-documented history as a biochemist from
the years 1989 to 2009. There is at best circumstantial evidence to suggest
that he had a falling out with IMCB sometime in 2007, but hardly anything
definitive at this point.

So why was Dr. Cai “forced out” of IMCB “for reasons [he] can only
describe as something “uniquely Singapore”"? And why is Dr. Cai having
trouble finding another R&D job, if not in Singapore, then abroad? His own
words strongly suggest some influence of internal politics. However, the
above facts also suggest other facets to his current predicament.

I have blogged before about A*STAR’s strong emphasis on metrics of
scientific output, which I have always maintained as missing the forest for
the trees. As highlighted prominently in the Johns Hopkins University
debacle of 2006, A*STAR focuses strongly (if not exclusively) on measurable
quantities such as the number of publications generated or number of patents
successfully filed, as all supposedly ways to measure and justify their
return on investment.

With that in mind, it becomes a damning fact that Dr. Cai only has 14
publications to his name since joining the IMCB 16 years ago. Going only by
that criterion of quantity, publishing less than one paper a year makes for
a truly unimpressive publication record. But just about every practicing
scientist knows that despite the current pressure to publish or perish,
science and research isn’t (entirely) about churning out more and more
papers, and the number of papers that can attributed to one’s name is not
necessarily a good measure of a scientist’s productivity. At the very least
, one should take a more qualitative assessment of the quality of the work
– one that I, as a non-biochemist, am not really qualified to make. I can’
t really tell if Dr. Cai sat on his bum for 16 years doing very little, or
if he was doing good work in an environment that insulated him well from the
more contemporary pressure to publish. However, I will point out that Cai
had had a good run as a graduate student, which at least suggests at the
very least, at some point in his scientific career, that he was capable of
doing good science. His papers prior to 2004 were also well-cited, so even
going just on these two counts, it seems unlikely that the “Dr. Cai was a
bum whose time was coming” theory is true.


So why is Dr. Cai having trouble finding another R&D job? The R&D market isn
’t so hot these days. The bad economy means not many firms are hiring
professional scientists. Academia isn’t much of a help – there’s a long
history of too many PhDs chasing too few jobs. It doesn’t help that many
people get a feeling for rampant ageism in the R&D job market too. Dr. Cai,
having received his PhD in 1990 or so, is probably in his mid-forties by now
, which in any industry is a particularly challenging time to find work.

Dr. Cai now writes engaging stories of his experiences as a taxi driver.
However, for someone like me, his experience spells a clear cautionary tale
for anyone interested in a R&D career, let alone anyone interested in an R&D
career in Singapore and A*STAR.

Update: Thanks to Fox who points out that Dr. Cai is in today’s edition of
the Straits Times., which not only confirms that Dr. Cai is for real, but
also has a few more details:

[Dr. Cai] joined IMCB two years later [in 1992-3] and worked as a principal
investigator in the field of cell genetics up till his departure.

A spokesman for A*Star, meanwhile, said renewal of all its researchers’
contracts is based on a number of factors, including the time taken to train
PhD students, their performance and their contributions to the research
institutes and the agency in general.

Dr Cai’s work, like that of all A*Star researchers, was assessed by an
external Scientific Advisory Board (SAB), which recommended his contract be
terminated.

This leds further credence to the “you don’t have enough papers, so you’
re fired” theory. Not that this necessarily excludes other possibilities,
like internal politics or IMCB deciding that having a yeast geneticist like
Dr Cai around was no longer in line with its long-term plans (after all, it
doesn’t offer tenure). But there you have it.

Update 2: After a long discussion with an A*STAR scholar-friend of mine (yes
, shock! horror! I do have friends in A*STAR!), I think it’s worth
clarifying that a lot of this post has to do with Dr. Cai’s publication
record. This is not because I think it was necessarily the deciding factor
in his leaving, but it is something I have data on, and hence something to
comment on. However, A*STAR’s track record on placing a lot of emphasis on
the quantity of publications (and variant metrics like quantity weighted by
impact factors) does not rule out the possibility of Dr. Cai getting fired
over his less-than-stellar publication record. Again there are many other
plausible factors at work here, which (at least for now) cannot be ruled out
, nor can they be used to evaluate many other plausible scenarios. Useless
bum who deserved what’s coming? Good scientist insulated for too long
against the relentless pressure of modern science to publish or perish? Well
-intentioned researcher who allowed years of lax oversight to get the better
of him? Who knows…