We’re a motley bunch of nerds at nerd hyphen alert, evident not least in the various ways that we have each tottered through – and largely left – the world of scientific research.
Among our number, one has completed a PhD but decided to pursue academia no further, another has temporarily suspended (his second) PhD research pursuits to develop other related interests, whilst the most legitimate career scientist of us all is now a undergrad studying the vagaries of econometrics and the Northern Irish peace process. A motley crew indeed. It can lead one to suspect that life in the lab is not quite for everyone – even those that are inspired and motivated by science.
As for me, I did my PhD, worked for a year as a Post-doc and then too decided to get away from the bench – for a little while at least. I hung up my lab coat and embarked on a sabbatical period / jolly, dedicated to skiing and unraveling the Canadian psyche, funding both endeavours by pretending to know something about Marketing. Frankly, it was bloody brilliant (if you overlook the Marketing bit.) When my 8 months were over, it was tempting to stay longer but I honestly missed the lab. Plus after a prolonged Canadian exposure, I feared severely for the health of my sarcasm radar. It was time to embrace a future of polite, literal conversations and discussions about email click-through rates, or save myself. So, I got a post-doc in Australia.
As I embark on this new Antipodean scientific adventure, friends and family are keen to know what I’ll actually be doing. Enthusiastically, with my “public-communication of science” hat pushed firmly on my head, I have made serious efforts to answer such inquiries completely and satisfactorily. I’ve attempted to explain protein crystallography and the concept of a disulphide bond in dad-friendly language. I’ve given succinct simple introductions (replete with extensive hand gestures) to fragment based drug design. I’ve even tackled discussions of the mechanisms of multi-drug resistance in bacteria. I aimed big. I tried hard. I failed miserably.
After too many glazed faces met my heartfelt attempts to explain “what I was going to do in the lab”, I settled on “I’m going to develop new antibiotics.” It’s simple. It’s accessible. It’s even partly true. And well, it also sounds, y’know, kind of impressive. Glamorous even. They loved it. And boiled down to this one-line summary of a research objective, my new scientist day-job does sound kind of thrilling and glamorous. I even started to believe it myself.
But the memory of 5 years in the lab has not been entirely erased by dedicated après-ski sessions at the GLC. The reality of the jobbing scientist is not so sensational, nor so mysterious. The truth is that whilst overall you might be trying to cure cancer, today, tomorrow and the day after you are more likely going to be pipetting tiny volumes of colourless solutions into colourless plastic tubes. Sigh.
Possessive pen accumulation. It's a problem. Courtesy of estherase on flickr.
So, to all who asked the question “what will you be doing in the lab”, here is a more accurate day-to-day account.
- For every eureka-moment of personal scientific triumph, I will label approximately 5000 tiny plastic tubes in tiny black writing. (This is about as much fun as you might suspect.)
- I will spend 90% of my time washing, cleaning and tidying up. It’s tedious but the head rush of inhaling too much 70% ethanol spray can, occasionally, be quite pleasant.
- The other 10% of my time will be spent preparing solutions and trying to find the bastard that “borrowed” my timer.
- I will re-develop a keen, some might say encompassing, sense of possessiveness (see Number 3). On the “Outside”, I would not really consider myself the possessive, hoarder type but the environment of the lab brings out hidden gems in one’s personality. Stackable test-tube racks, multi-coloured permanent pens, the last clean 1 L bottle in the cupboard. They’re all MINE. Don’t even think about walking off with them.
- My primary motivation for coming to work each day, rather than an aspiration to push the frontiers of scientific thought, will be the pursuit of the perfect ice-box. Big enough to hold a sufficient quantity of 50 mL falcon tubes, not so big that it dwarfs a lonely eppendorf tube. It must be sufficiently insulated to keep ice frozen all morning. It must not leak. And it must have a lid. I can’t explain it, but the relationship between scientist and ice-box is more than perfunctory. It’s more than need fulfilment. Dammit. It’s personal.
- I will download and print out at least 10 papers a week. I will file them in neatly arranged folders. I will even read one of them occasionally.
These are the pre-requisites for progress in science; nice ice-boxes, a good selection of pens and a tidy work bench. Très glamorous, non? I wonder why it’s not more universally appealing …
[...] a lot of washing up – that’s how I summed up the daily grind of the lab bioscientist in my last post. Now that I’m back in a lab coat and safety glasses on a daily basis, let’s see how accurate my [...]