Sir

Peter A. Lawrence, in his Commentary article “Rank injustice” (Nature 415, 835–836; 2002), describes ways in which senior scientists routinely abuse and exploit their juniors. My own experience is very different.

When I was a graduate student and postdoc, my mentors spent countless hours discussing science, experiments and data with me. When they gave seminars, my mentors advertised my work and acknowledged my contributions with every slide. As a result of all their guidance, I have been fortunate enough to have obtained my own lab, to have thrived in it, and to now have the great honour and pleasure of training young scientists myself. In short, good mentors spend time training their students, credit them fairly for their work, and guide them to independence; bad mentors do not.

Young scientists would be well advised to seek out good mentors. Our training system may not be perfect, but when I look around my department and university, I see that quality mentorship is unfailingly taken as seriously as is doing good science. For Lawrence to claim that mentors are routinely abusing young scientists is as irresponsible as it is cynical. More than obtaining fair “allocation of credit”, the reward of doing good science includes learning about nature, helping other people and solving mysteries.

How do I rate other scientists? I don't count their Nature papers but rather how many of their students do well in their own labs. Now that's success!