Imagine a World Without the Song of a Western Meadowlark

For those of you who have been in grad school, or who know someone in grad school, you are acutely aware of the extreme financial burden this represents. In fact, unlike professional students, grad students often live in relative poverty for the next ten years after they are awarded their degrees because they are struggling to pay off their debts on a postdoc's salary. Additionally, because postdocs and young professors lack job security until they are awarded tenure, these adult scientists have to resort to a variety of financial coping mechanisms often through their mid-30s and even their early-40s, beginning with relying on their parents to help support them, to engaging in a variety of other unusual behaviors in order to pay their debts along with their meagre living expenses. Further, even after many years in the field, academic research scientists rarely earn the big bucks that are associated with other careers.

It's no wonder that so many bright, talented people leave the sciences for more lucrative careers, such as law and medicine.

Even though there is probably no one thing that can preserve a career in science, many small things, and many small actions, can make a huge difference in preventing the loss of yet one more deserving scientist from the field. In this particular case, that one small action from you is the mere click of a mouse.

And that one scientist is one of my fellow SciBlings, Shelley Batts.

Shelley is in the running for a $10,000 college scholarship, which would go a long way towards paying for her grad school tuition. As of this moment, she's in second place in the voting .. a rather distant second place, too. Personally, I think that sucks because, in Shelley, we have a young adult woman who is devoting her life to neuroscience, to researching how to regenerate hair cells, which are the sensory receptors in the auditory and vestibular system of all vertebrates. This is valuable research because when our hair cells are destroyed, we are forever deprived of such amazing sounds as birdsong, buzzing bees and chirping crickets, symphonies and operas, the cry of a baby and the voice of a lover, leaving behind a silent world for us to decipher.

As a birder who identifies something like 80% of all my birds by recognizing their song and call notes alone, I would not want to wake up in such a silent world. I would not want to wake up in a world where I could never again hear the beautiful, evocative and etherial songs of, say, a Western meadowlark, a canyon wren or a Swainson's thrush -- all of which I grew up listening to. Heck, I also wouldn't want to wake up in a world where I would never again hear one of my favorite musical pieces, Carmina Burana.

So if you want to help ease one scientist's pursuit of her career, if you want to encourage a dedicated young woman in her quest to help people, if you want to contribute to the future of hearing research, then all you have to do is go here and vote for Shelley Batts.