The Frankenthesis

Abstract

When my father passed away, I climbed up the steep steps to his attic, dug out his old, dusty PhD thesis, and dragged it halfway across the country to put it in a prime spot on my office shelves at the University of Western Ontario. As the afternoon sun peeks through the blinds, it is easy to make out the gold‐colored words on the green leather binding: Frank Smith, PhD 1971, Chemistry, University of New South Wales. The title—Metal complexes of 2‐substituted pyridines and 1, 10‐phenanthrolines—is enough to intimidate even the most prodigious students that come to my office. And, being a biologist, most of the thesis is lost on me as well.All my peers in the department were building their own Frankentheses in the twilight hours of dimly lit laboratories, and most of us were advised to do so by our mentors.Still, sometimes I gently pull it down from the shelf and skim through the chapters, glance at the figures, and reread the acknowledgments. What strikes me whenever I do this is how different my father's dissertation is from my own—not because his is in chemistry and mine genetics, but because his has a single overarching question and hypothesis that runs throughout the chapters, whereas mine is a hodgepodge of ideas and arguments. I'm the academic product of the DNA sequencing generation and, as such, my thesis is a conglomerate of loosely strung together genome papers, all of which were published before I even arrived at a defense date. Of course, I tried to develop a coherent theme unifying the different chapters, but I did this as an afterthought, and it was obvious to the examiners that I had created—as one of them creatively phrased it—a Frankenthesis.I wasn't alone in practicing the dark arts of dissertation …