bq. My friend Richard and I are moving in perfect reciprocity at the moment, so we thought it would be entertaining to plot our opposing curves simultaneously. I left science publishing to return to the bench, and he’s leaving the bench for a job in the same publishing company where I had my first editorial job. As he winds down in the lab, I find myself ramping up. You can read his side of the story over there, and here is mine:
It all started on the day I formulated my first real hypothesis last December. Up until that point, I’d been working full-time on a large-scale RNAi screen, hoping that some interesting gene would slip through the filter like a fragment of fossilized bone in a sieve of endless sand. It is absorbing work up to a point, but only in the way that hoovering is: there is satisfaction in making each square meter tidy, replacing chaos with order, but your heart doesn’t exactly pound at the thought of finishing the living room and moving on to the kitchen.
But on that December afternoon, darkness falling around four o’clock and a fierce rain battering the windows of the lab, I saw something amazing in the pattern of green, blue and red in my cells. A few threads clicked into place: my first major hit was starting to look promising. Suddenly a dozen ideas for experiments were tumbling out of my brain, and something very strange began to happen: I felt myself trying to metamorphose into my former self.
What did I used to be like? My previous work ethic has been memorialized in the character of Andy in my first novel, who spends nearly every waking hour in the lab. When I was a PhD student I subjected myself to regular eighty-hour weeks and never once lost that sense of excitement and enthusiasm about being there. But those are the excesses of youth. Since returning to the bench eighteen months ago, a little wiser and a lot older, I have been very strict about my time, arriving just before ten on the weekdays and leaving by six, and never coming in on weekends. I arranged my manipulations so that they’d run over the weekends and if that didn’t work out, I’d postpone things until Monday. And I did all that without a shred of guilt, and with full support of my boss: I am very efficient when I am in, and do not waste my day with excessive tea or lunch breaks. It all worked really well, and it gave me the time I needed at home to write my novels, edit LabLit and do the freelance writing, broadcasting and engagement gigs that needed feeding on the side.
But ever since my hypothesis, I feel the tidal tug of obsession threatening to shatter my carefully balanced life. Because now, you see, I am doing actual experiments: I am perturbing signal transduction pathways to see how they respond; I am knocking down some genes and over-expressing others to see whether and how my pet protein is involved. I have made an antibody to this protein, and I am probably the first person in the world to see where it is localized in cells – despite the bioinformaticist’s prediction of nuclear localization and nucleic acid binding, I instead see it packing into discrete globules in the advancing, ruffling front of spreading cells – exactly where my hypothesis would predict it should be. Now the experiments that I perform answer questions, and lead to more questions, and – before I know it, six o’clock has arrived and I don’t actually want to leave. In fact, I’ve stayed until seven a few nights recently, and even then I’ve had to force myself to stop.
When I first returned to the bench I found it hard to do more than one experiment at a time; now, like Andy in the novel, I am piling them one atop another to see how high the tower can get before it topples. The inevitable failures, which before were just part of the hoovering (like having to pause to empty the filters), in this environment become more frustrating because they keep away the truth for one day longer. Yes, the essence of it is that now, I am starting to care.
Somewhere under all the excitement and anticipation is a sense of danger. As much as this feeling reminds me of my youth, and reinforces my decision to return to the lab, I know I will to fight to the death to prevent myself from being sucked under once again.
Good for you – keep fighting the good fight! I rarely worked weekends as a postdoc (my PhD was a different story) and I maintain that it is perfectly possible to do molecular biology on a 9-5 basis. Guess why none of my projects involved animals, primary cells, or time courses (other than 5 day cell growth curves, 1 time point per day).
Hell, yes. Thank god for HeLa cells. You can ignore them for weeks and they are still gloriously malignant.
Thank god for grad students. cough
I thought slavery was outlawed in Australia.
hoping that some interesting gene would slip through the filter like a fragment of fossilized bone in a sieve of endless sand
Please allow me to edit this to
hoping that some interesting gene would slip through the filter like a fragment of fossilized bone in a sieve of lots of other pieces that look like they might also be fragments of fossilized bone, but aren’t
And also
Hell yes, thank god for fossils. You can ignore them for days – years, even – and they are still just as dead as they were the first time.
Palaeontology: The Science That Keeps Regular Office Hours.
Henry, I put that line in for you! I was hoping you’d notice.
bq. Richard, what are your chances of getting it back into the UK unchallenged?
Well, I got it out: getting it in should be a doddle.
In which cavity?
These aren’t the comments you’re looking for, young
paduinDr GrantHenry, I put that line in for you! I was hoping you’d notice.
Thank you. I’m touched.
We know that, Henry.
Shaping up well to be commercial publishing persion you are, Master Richard. An instinct for keeping knowledge to yourself until you can sell it, essential is. May the F1000rce be with you.
Actually, I can sort of understand why Bora made the comment he did. Jenny is talking here parenthetically about not getting sucked into the abyss of stupidly long hours, but the main point is the draw of the excitement of science and getting back into the swing of it. The hours is, as I say, parenthetical. I didn’t talk at all about working hours: I was reflecting on what it’s like, emotionally, to leave that environment.
So — ‘sort of’ understand.
It should be noted that there was, at least for me, a lot of emotion in not being in the lab any more. I am not sure I ever lost that sense of sadness, even against a backdrop of truly enjoying my new profession. I hear the same sort of things from friends who’ve changed careers.
When I left the lab I did so without a backward glance!
“I’ve stayed until seven a few nights recently”
That was the normal time I was expected to stay at my lab. But since I never got there before 9, leaving at 7 was considered “early”. I was usually there from 10:30 tot 7:30 or something like that. It varied depending on types of experiments or meetings. For some experiments I had to be there from 8:30AM to 9:30PM (13 hours, not 1). I could have frozen the RNA at around 4 or 5 PM, but was always too paranoid about it degrading and did the reverse transcription to the much safer-to-store DNA on the same day.
I had some mixed feelings about this set of posts, and will eventually write my own in response to them (but not today). Your post did not make me want to get back to the lab at all, but Richard’s made me sad about leaving. It’s complicated…
Eva, that’s really interesting. You may have mixed feelings because I was emphasizing the negative and he was emphasizing the positive. The truth is, I like the way it feels to work hard and accumulate data in the lab. I just know that it comes at a cost. As things started really ramping up a fortnight ago, I started stuffing papers into my handbag to bring home — something I have thus far resisted.
But you know what? By the time I got onto the train, the urge to read them passed, and I happily opened up my Sony Reader instead. The spell fad once I’m out of the building, and rationality reasserts itself. So thus far, I think it won’t be too difficult to resist.
Damn, Bob beat me to it…
I remember clearly getting ready to leave the lab (it wsa only two months ago). Once the final decision had been made, the paperwork signed etc., there was a wonderful feeling of finality to everything. I was surprised at how little nostaligia I felt doing my cell culture for the last time, patching cells for the last time…although, actually that last…there’s a talke there I should tell one day soon…
No nostalgia whatsoever? I find that difficult to fathom…but I guess if you were really loathing what you were doing, it wouldn’t be any other way. I guess it’s probably a good sign that you made the right decision.
I was really surprised, and a little saddened, that I felt nothing about my last cell split, for example. I’d been culturing these little buggers every day for three and a half years, missed vacation opportunities etc., because I needed cells for experiments and couldn’t leave them in anyone else’s care. But…nothing…maybe a vague trembling of joy in my jujunum, but that was it…
Ah, but cell culture is such drudgery. I’d be more likely to miss something that required a little finesse.
You think so? I look forward to seeing my cells in the morning, making sure they’re happy, looking after them, putting them on coverslips — but then, they’re not HeLas. I wonder if that makes a difference.
On the other hand, maybe I like looking after them because I anticipate the cool experiments I get to do with them?
Yeah, but, Richard, you’ve compared cells to children
Other people tend to think of them at most as pets
I do miss my cells a bit, though. I had really cool ones – they made melanin, and if you left them too long, the medium would turn brown and you’d see threads of melanin on the cells (even without a microscope)
I think cell culture is more like gardening. Without the sunshine and fresh air.
I think cell culture is more like gardening. Without the sunshine and fresh air.
But don’t you like gardening, Jenny? I seem to remember some rather sweet chillis and tomatoes.
Oh, and slugs. Hmm. You may be onto something.
“By the time I got onto the train, the urge to read them passed, and I happily opened up my Sony Reader instead” – oh yes, that has happened INNUMERABLE times to me.
I literally just compared cell culture to taking care of pets to the colleague who took care of (my cells!) last week, without reading either Eva’s or this post. Jenny, you do have a gift for extracting the essential truths of our career experience.
(oops – but not with a Sony Reader, just any other book, magazine or my Palm would do).
(I did actually study palmistry when I was about eleven or so.)
Just talk amongst yourself, Heather. Say ‘hi’ to Heather for me.
I love gardening, but it’s mostly the being outdoors stuff that makes it for me. It doesn’t have to be sunny or even dry — just fresh.
Thanks, Heather — I’m glad my posts are making sense to someone.
Richard – done. Now I can head into the culture room where I’m sure to cross her path again.
{Thinks about doing cell culture outside}
Wait a minute. That is gardening.
When I was an editor, what I missed most about the lab was mashing up proteins and analyzing them. I am reliably informed that you are not actually allowed to call this ‘biochemistry’, although this is the name I was taught. Anyway, I love fiddling with lysates and running gels and analyzing modifications.
That’s biochemistry in my book.
Apparently it’s not biochemistry without the kinetics and maths.
@Jenny – Apparently it’s not biochemistry without the kinetics and maths.
Alas, not everybody appreciates the intimate links between biochemistry, kinetics and maths…
Your comment reminded me of a story about the Lineweaver-Burk plot, which was published in JACS in 1934, but only after a bit of a struggle. Lineweaver and Burk made no bones of the fact that all they had really done was invert the Michaelis-Menten equation so that it could be plotted as a straight line. The referees were universally negative about the paper (“This is just maths!”, wrote one) but were overruled by the far-seeing editor. Their manuscript became, by some considerable margin, the most cited paper ever in JACS.
And now we spend years trying to persuade students that in this modern age of computer aided fitting that linear transforms are not always their best friend…
Ha ha! Lineweaver and Burk are rolling over in their graves, Cameron.
There is, however, a lot of shall we say digital biochemistry that can be done completely maths-free. Is this protein phosphorylated at this site, yes or no? What causes it to be so? What proteins does it bind to and what happens when that binding is abrogated?
It’s us biologists. We always have to be squishy about things.
Ooh I’m late. But I have to disagree. It is very rare surely for protein phosphorylation to be truly digital? I mean every copy of the protein to be phosphorylated the same way? Isn’t there evidence of phosphorylation levels being effectively buffered by maintaining a distribution of phos states? Isn’t it the case that it changes the binding constants or binding kinetics – not that it stops binding or causes binding.
That’s the real problem – by pretending that things are on and off and simple haven’t we gone too far down the “you can do biology without maths” route already?
It’s a population which seems to be largely on or largely off, at least in the systems I’ve studied. It isn’t always necessary to understand the ways and hows of the individual fluctuations and how they are integrated to predict what will happen after upstream activation or downstream execution. I’m sure the level of detail you are describing will be necessary to successfully and completely simulate the signal transduction of, say, an animal cell in silico, as has been done in bacteria (by folks like Dennis Bray). I know people are working on this, and lack the hard-core biochemical data to make all the right predictions. But when it comes to biology, it’s amazing what we’ve learned about signal transduction using an essentially digital on/off mentality that has stood the test of time.