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Introduction

WriteWise had the honor and pleasure of interviewing Professor Peter Walter, Principal Investigator of the Walter Lab at the University of California, San Francisco, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and co-author of Molecular Biology of the Cell. Professor Walter has been awarded many distinctions, the most recent of which being the Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science in 2015.

Professor Walter is a cell biologist and biochemist most known for his work on the signal recognition particle and the unfolded protein response. The focus of the Walter Lab is to “understand how cells control the quality of their proteins and organelles during homeostasis and stress.” Professor Walter has published over 250 scientific articles in top-tier journals such as eLife, PLoS Biology, Cell, PNAS, Nature, Science, Journal of Cell Science, EMBO Journal, and the Journal of Cell Biology, among many others.

Professor Walter’s Tips For Studentes in a Nutshell

• Just like with scientific articles, when you are writing a grant proposal, it is very important to be brief, precise, and clear with what you want to say to the reader.
• When writing a project proposal, don’t repeat information. Put everything into its appropriate section.
• To write more clearly and succinctly, remember that your readers are smart.
• Do not rewrite your Abstract in a Cover Letter.
• eLife is changing the way peer review is performed, making the process efficient, fair, and focused on essential concerns.
• Professor Walter recommends the following paper as an example of good writing: Kimmig P, Diaz M, Zheng J, Williams C, Lang A, Aragón T, Li H, Walter P. The unfolded protein response in fission yeast modulates stability of select mRNAs to maintain protein homeostasis. eLife 1:e00048, 2012.

Writing tips

[WriteWise]

Do you have any general tips for writing a successful grant proposal?

[Professor Walter]

You write succinctly. You write simply, and you try to make it read well. Everybody who sitting around the [reviewing] table will have to read 15 or 20 grants. The first reason they find to say “oh no, I need to look something up” or “this doesn’t make any sense”, that grant may be doomed. So you need to make sure that everything is perfectly logical and accessible that everything is in place. You want to to make it easy on the reviewer.

[WriteWise]

You have been awarded with many grants including those from the NIH. Do you have a methodology or strategy to structure effectively the information that you are writing?

[Professor Walter]

It depends on the structure of the proposal that is asked by the agency. I think the best way to structure it is to keep everything in the appropriate category. Your Specific Aims specify WHAT you want to do, the Background & Significance section justifies WHY you want to do it, and the Experimental Procedures section describes HOW you want to do it. If you follow this structure, you never need to say anything twice. No reader wants to read the same thing over and over. Readers are smart, and you need to write respecting their intelligence.

Metrics: Impact factor

[WriteWise]

You have published many papers in the new journal eLife which has a very innovative concept such as not promoting the impact factor of the journal. What is your opinion about the impact factor as well as the general quantification and metrics of science that is so demanded right now by several funding agencies?

[Professor Walter]

I [have] served on grant review panels that have adopted an explicit policy to not consider impact- or H-factors of an applicant’s publication record. In my view, these measures are a completely meaningless metric. The impact factor is basically an attempt to quantify something that cannot be quantified on principle. It is a sign of laziness that people don’t want to read the papers or are too uninformed to read and assess them intelligently.

There are some brilliant papers in the Journal of Cell Biology that are much better—and much more impacting—than some published in Nature or Cell. The metric that flows into an impact factor does not reflect on the work itself; it reflects the journal in which it happens to be published. In part, Nature’s impact factor is so high because of the reviews that they publish and that are cited highly push it up. So it’s not that the papers in the journal are necessarily that much better. So I think that we should just get rid of this misleading metric.

I love publishing in eLife because the journal profoundly changed the review system. Basically what happens is that you send in your paper, smart practicing scientists who sit on the editorial board handle it, and make a first decision if the work will go out for review or not. That doesn’t take much time. If it goes out for review, then the reviewers write the comments, send them to the journal. Importantly, what happens next is that the reviewers get together in an internet discussion in which they evaluate each other’s comments. In that discussion reviewers are not anonymous to one another. Thus, nobody can hide behind the curtain and defend a weak argument; everything has to be justified. Next, a managing editor, him or herself a practicing scientist, distills a final decision letter from the comments of this discussion. This summary letter is very short, perhaps a page in most cases. It is usually a short list of concerns that the reviewers collectively identified. Additional experiments are limited to essential controls, which then are much more reasonable for the authors to address than the long list of unprioritized comments that you get back from many other journals.

What happens in some of the other journals is, unfortunately, that the editors sometimes have very poor judgment in which reviewers’ comments are substantial and which are not and should be ignored. De facto, you are often forced to do many things that are of very little value to making your paper any better. This very principle of having this dialog, of coming up with a short consolidated opinion by smart practicing scientists, is the important distinction between eLife and the others. And then, eLife free to the world! Everyone can read it, which is what all publishing should about…

[WriteWise]

The Discussion is one of the most difficult sections to write for students. How do you structure your Discussion?

[Professor Walter]

Well, what I often see in a first draft of a discussion is basically a summary of the results. That’s quite useless. You’ve just read the results, and the results are summarized in the abstract. Forcing the reader go through it for third time is not a useful. But in the results section you are forced by the linearity of your story line. You go from figure to figure, building your arguments step by step by step. In the discussion, that linearity no longer constrains you. You are free to integrate the individual pieces of your results and discuss them in a larger context.

For example, we found a small molecule that affects cognitive behavior in rodents, so in the discussion we can mention a few diseases for which this molecule might have promising therapeutic value in humans. Or, you have a biological process such as protein folding (one of our favored topics) that one yeast species regulates completely different from another yeast species. In the discussion, you can then focus on the amazing diversity in solutions that evolution explores (I pointed to this paper in Walter’s Tips as a good read). Discussions are the place where you can make these arguments, you can speculate, you can extend, you can make it interesting to a broader readership. You can pull in other people’s results, integrate them with yours, show where you’ve advanced things, show where others have different opinions. Discuss that.

Importantly, you do not necessarily have to resolve such differences. You can say that your interpretation is contrary to what xyz have proposed, and more work will need to be done to figure out how to figure this out.

Author: WriteWise Team

The WriteWise Team is a dedicated group of specialists in academic writing, with vast experience in teaching and the publication process. The goal of our team is to impart valuable knowledge on a range of topics that will help students, researchers, and universities achieve their goals.

Posted In: Interviews,Other Experts

Tagged As: All Researchers,University Directors