Maybe it all started with the departure of a well-liked clinical researcher from our lab, an OB/GYN with a sense of the absurd who never failed to make us laugh. Now when we walk by his empty bench, it’s a reminder of the absence in our close-knit team – an absence so strong that it’s almost a presence.

The itinerant nature of the scientific profession is one of its major downsides. The ‘churn’ in a standard lab ranges from a few months to half a dozen years on average, so it’s very common to show up in a new research position and attend a leaving party not long afterwards. People are always coming and going, and the group composition is forever shifting in dynamics as personalities add themselves to, or depart from, the mix.

As a sociological experiment, it’s interesting to observe, but there is also an undercurrent of sadness to the relentless flux that has always dogged me. Even when a scientist colleague doesn’t leave the country – and that happens a lot – it still is difficult to retain the friendships that once seemed so immediate, forged as they were in the crucible of a relentless rush of experimentation. In my past, there have been late nights in the lab, joking with colleagues, when I thought I could never recapture a social environment that special. But once you leave, it all slides away. For the first few months, you might meet up for drinks with former labmates, but it’s seldom the same, and soon the lab you left behind has churned itself out of existence – there are new people, new dynamics, new shared memories that you are no longer part of. To them, you are just initials on a useful Eppendorf tube, or an author on a paper that came before them. And your new lab becomes your new family, closing ranks to exclude your past.

Experiments, too, are fleeting. It never ceases to amaze me how manipulations that can take on such importance in your mind one day can, by the next, morph into insignificance when their outcome is not good. Freezers and fridges are full of failed experiments that you can’t quite bring yourself to chuck away – for at the time, you invested so much meaning in them, so much hope.

Even my physical surroundings are not constant. In a few months, my university is selling off the satellite campus that’s been my home for the past year and a half, to be turned into luxury flats. While I welcome the move south to the main campus, it will inevitably cause a lot of disruption. We are being “decanted” (such a dreadful managerial term) into temporary accommodation for eighteen months, into an abandoned building that is currently heaped with junk and – apparently – teeming with asbestos, meaning certain rooms are completely off-limits. When we had the walk-through a few months ago, we were dismayed to find that my future lab space had a huge, ancient radioactive spill on the lino cordoned off with fading yellow tape – with no Geiger counter to hand, and no indication of the isotope in question, we had no idea how hot it still was. It will all be decontaminated and given a lick of paint, so hopefully it will end up perfectly habitable. But then there will be another move, to our final resting place in a newly refurbished building a few blocks away – more disruption, more impermanence.

As I left the lab this evening, the cherry blossoms were fluttering down and accumulating against the curbs like drifts of pink snow.

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
- Lao Tzu

I know exactly what to expect, but somehow, that doesn’t make the atmosphere any less tense.

The Terror Within

As I pull open the door and slip inside, all at first seems well: the thrumming of the four massive freezers, ancient but still serviceable, produces its usual white noise, and a faint cool breeze from the open windows ripples my white coat, dispelling the breathy heat of the machinery. I’m just about to turn to my colleague and proclaim the all-clear when suddenly, an explosion of sound like an out-of-control helicopter blasts through the room. My colleague and I emit involuntary shrieks, duck and cover our faces as two grey, blurry objects rocket out from behind the freezers and make a bid for freedom through the open windows. In the shocked silence that ensues, a dozen feathers spiral lazily to the floor, already coated in the weekend’s layer of downy fluff and guano.

Only then do we laugh, and then go about our business retrieving samples.

Forget the spherical cow; dear reader, we have a massive pigeon problem here in the lab. It’s all down to the lack of air conditioning. Having four immense freezers attempting to keep a core inner temperature of minus eighty degrees Centigrade in a room barely larger than a closet, the ambient temperature quickly exceeds the machines’ capacity to do their jobs if there is not sufficient ventilation.

There were a few weeks over the long, bitter winter when we could actually shut the windows, but those days are long gone. As the warm spring sunshine pours through the Victorian panes of glass, the freezer room quickly overheats unless all five windows are wide open. And with spring also come the roosting pigeons, which seem to particularly like hanging out with a bunch of hot freezers. The fair weather also, of course, happens to correspond with the end of term, when there are no longer any undergraduates around to bribe into being gun dogs to flush out the pests.

Try as I might, I can’t come up with a solution that doesn’t involve a ridiculous amount of effort, such as buying lengths of chicken wire at a home improvement shop and nailing them up as barricades. We could learn to live with the shock factor, but we’re worried about hygiene: the freezer room abuts our main microbiology lab, where we are culturing uropathogens with fastidious care. And for some reason, the pigeons that hang around the Archway Gyratory seem particularly scruffy and insalubrious.

Post-pigeon carnage

All ideas, serious and otherwise, gratefully received.

But how does a younger scientist with a shorter track record, whose “excellence” might not yet be apparent, get his first grant? It must be a lot like getting your first break as a popular musician – except unlike a bloke with a guitar, scientists can’t film themselves on YouTube performing experiments in their bedroom to garner a reputation. Instead, they need grant money to produce the results that get turned into papers, which in turn prove their excellence – but without the grant, they’ll never get off the ground in the first place.

But then I got to thinking: wouldn’t it be totally cool if one could go viral being filmed doing an experiment in one’s bedroom? This is the closest I’ve got to it so far:

Our satellite campus doesn’t have an ultracentrifuge, so I recently had to gatecrash a friend’s lab in the Royal Veterinary College across town to do a plasmid prep. If you’ve ever perched in someone else’s digs, you know it’s always a little bit awkward – you don’t know where everything is, and inevitably you’re using up precious bench space that belongs to one of the resident students or postdocs. Ultimately, you end up feeling underfoot and in the way.

By the end of the prep, after doing the final spin and seeing that lovely white pellet of DNA at the bottom of my tubes, it was approaching 6 PM and the thought of sticking around for the final pellet-dry and resuspension steps seemed tedious. Worse, I wasn’t even sure I could get out of the building after hours without an escort or a pass.

So I took everything home and finished it off in my living room. (Don’t tell Health and Safety about that G&T on the side.) I was only really nervous when I was riding the Tube, wondering how I would explain the contents of my rucksack if I were stopped and searched by the London Transport Police.

“It’s just Green Fluorescent Protein,” I could imagine myself pleading as I was hustled away in cuffs. “GFP in a mammalian expression vector. To turn cells green. So you can see them.”

“Tell that to the judge, lady.”

But seriously. Could one actually film oneself doing an experiment real-time in one’s bedroom in any way that was meaningful, and would anyone be interested?

What do you think, Dear Readers?

Although research is a popular and oversubscribed profession because of the excitement and freedom of doing creative work, it is widely acknowledged to have many drawbacks compared to other professions. But in a 2011 survey conducted by Science is Vital on more than 700 UK researchers across all levels of experience, casualization was cited as the very top concern – ahead of pay and other common complaints.

As an individual, I’d have to agree that short-termism and its affiliated career uncertainty is my biggest problem with the scientific profession too. As an exercise for the talk I was giving, I thought it might be useful to make a flow chart of my professional career in terms of contract length (with relative salary indicated by the yellow stars). Although I know I’ve had a long and tortuous progression, something immediately sprang out at me when I put it all together in one diagram: in the private sector, I’ve been offered a permanent position within a few months of joining a company – every time. In academia, I’ve never been offered one.

But at least my immediate future is now secured. From April, I’ve been placed as a named investigator on someone else’s grant, so I can carry on with the same work I’ve been doing. (It’s a mark of how long I’ve been on an open-ended contract, renewed every few months at the last second, that a year can seem like an eternity). With some great papers coming out, and bolstered by an external grant I’ve recently won, I hope to use the coming period to secure one of the few independent fellowships that don’t have age restrictions – fingers crossed.

And inside too, as it happens.

Over the past month or two, London has been in the grip of some of the coldest weather I ever remember having experienced here. For most London workers, the chill is something you only notice on your commutes. But not so in the aged Victorian building that houses my lab, resplendent in the blonde-colored, ivy-sprawled, pointy-gabled brickwork of this provincial university satellite campus. Neither the lab nor my office has central heating of any kind, and the graceful, single-glazed windows suck out whatever animal heat scientists tend to give off.

All of which rather challenges the idea of doing an experiment at “room temperature”. (It is of little consolation that in the summer, as sun pours through those same beautiful windows, the temperatures will often exceed 40 – there isn’t any air-conditioning either, needless to say.) At the nadir of the big freeze, I measured the lab at 14 degrees Centigrade, and asked everyone to let their reactions run fifteen minutes longer than what the protocols called for, just in case. All the students soldiered onward in overcoats and wooley hats, bopping along to music and seemingly unconcerned. When our health and safety officer scolded them, I sent an email telling her to back off – if uropathogenic bacteria can’t penetrate a lab coat, they certainly won’t get through fur-lined polar fleece.

In my office, I’ve been working with my door shut with an electric space heater on full blast a few inches from my desk. It takes the edge off, but I find it scientifically curious how working in a cold room blunts the intellect. Unlike the music and chatter of the students drifting under the door, or the suspiciously pungent incense floating up from our ground-floor neighbors, the Asanté Academy of Chinese Medicine, the cold is something I cannot screen out. It prickles at the periphery of my senses, telling me that all is not well, that I should be shutting down all but essential functions. (Apparently writing a grant application is not one of them. Funny, that.)

But the cold is not all bad. For the first time in months we’ve been able to shut the windows in the room housing our mammoth, ancient minus-eighty freezers, which overheat at every other time of year. Which means that we don’t have to bribe the undergraduates to chase the pigeons out of the lab. And when the lovely man from BOC arrives with our liquid nitrogen refill, we don’t have to worry about our samples thawing out when we wheel our tank down to the pavement outside the main entrance.

My research assistant, Harry, keeping an eye out

And there are signs, too, that spring is coming at last:

I, for one, am ready.

This is why I find a certain area in my lab a little bit distressing:

This is the place where we do our Gram stains. Gram staining is an ancient but still perfectly serviceable microbiology technique whereby a slide of dried bacteria is subjected to a series of dyes and chemicals in order to reveal whether its cell wall is Gram positive (purple) or Gram negative (pink). The purple stain is associated with peptidoglycan, which is found on the surface of a large group of microorganisms. Even though it was invented by the Dane Hans Christian Gram back in 1884, it is still often used as a first step to classify an unknown organism.

I just wish the procedure weren’t so damned messy. There’s no getting around it, though: no matter how careful you are, your dedicated Gram sink is going to end up looking like this. I have a soft spot for this procedure nonetheless, since it was the first microbiology technique I learned as an undergraduate, back when we had to isolate E. coli from our own lower bowels to get full marks.

Those were the days.

If so, why not enter the British Society for Cell Biology’s writing prize? The shortlisted entries will be judged by me, and the winner will receive £300 in cash and will be published on the BCSB website as well as on LabLit.com. More detailed rules can be found on the prize page, and the deadline is 15 February.

If you’ve always wanted to try your hand, why not make 2013 the year you give science writing a go? The world needs good science communicators, particularly those who are active at the bench and can give topics their own unique, insider’s perspective. The more we scientists talk about science, the more allies we can gain in wider society. With science funding in constant jeopardy, this is one way you can do your bit to help engender trust and support for your profession.

Good luck, and spread the word!

The live program was being streamed into my headphones as I waited to go on air. After some cheerful cricket news, the guy before me came on: a fish geneticist who answered all the interviewer’s questions in a slow, roundabout and complex manner. It soon became very clear that, despite the interviewer’s best efforts to cut him short, there was going to be no time to talk about women in science that day.

Sure enough: “You’re going to hate me, but we’ve run out of time,” a voice said apologetically into my headphones at precisely 7.59.

“That’s OK,” I replied. “It’s not the first time I’ve been out-talked by a male scientist.”

Never fear, however: this disappointment was very nicely mitigated by subsequent happenings. Last night, after months of plotting and planning by myself and fellow University College London colleagues Uta Frith and Philippa Talmud, UCL Women had its glorious launch event.

A show of hands: they’re mine, actually!

UCL Women is a grassroots networking group for academic staff in the sciences, engineering and mathematics at UCL, open to staff at the post-doctoral level and above. (We had to restrict the numbers somehow, but if our starting pool proves manageable we may expand our criteria to other categories in future.) A significant expansion of a smaller group founded by Uta Frith called ‘Science and Shopping’, which I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of for a number of years now, UCL Women is informal and aims to provide access to information and advice that might otherwise be hard to come by. The main medium of interaction will be drop-in sessions where people can socialize, but we also plan to have a few formal events too. Research Fortnight had a nice piece on us earlier in the day, which includes some thoughts from Uta about what the group will be like.

We had no idea how much interest there would be when we first dreamt this up, but the hundred free slots to our launch sold out in a few days and 45 people on the waitlist couldn’t get in. So clearly the women at my university feel the need for something like this.

The meeting was chaired by Philippa Talmud (Professor of Cardiovascular Genetics), and the fabulous Vivienne Parry (Writer, Broadcaster, Vice-Chair of UCL Council) moderated a panel of speakers addressing the questions “How did I get here? What am I doing?”. I felt very outclassed on the panel, which also included Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience), Mary Collins (Dean of Life Sciences), Uta Frith (Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development), Jean McEwan (Dean of Medical Sciences), and Liora Malki-Epshtein (Lecturer, UCL Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering). Afterwards, Vivienne opened up the discussion within the wider audience, which was packed into the room along with one lone, brave male photographer (who held his head high, I’m happy to report).

What impressed me most was how many female professors were in the room. I am quite sure it was the most I’d ever seen together in my life – with only 15% in life sciences overall, they are certainly few and far between. And there was an amazing energy – a sense that passions were running high, that we were a force to be reckoned with – that there was nothing that we couldn’t achieve if we worked together in a positive and collegial way.

As one person tweeted:

At launch of @uclwomen: last time I was part of an entirely female audience this big, I was at school! Amazing.

— Claire Warwick (@clhw1) January 16, 2013

If you’re a female academic at UCL and would like to get involved, follow us on Twitter (@UCLWomen) or visit our website for regular updates. It’s all still in the chaotic planning stages, but it’s already shaping up to be something really special.

I’ve succeeded for the most part, having caught up on my sleep, eaten a lot of food, finished two so-so novels (The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides and Death Comes to Pemberley by PD James) and plowed halfway through a third (Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen). My limbs are languid and my brain is just a little bit mushy.

Despite all this recuperative loafing, I did have a firm goal to attempt at least one task over the long break: to jump-start my fiction writing.

Normally I never suffer from writer’s block with my novels, but when I do, it’s absolute. After penning my first two novels in an almost unbroken streak of furious activity (5000 words a day on average, taking about three months to write a first draft), I stalled halfway through my third for nearly four years. This hiatus was not actually writer’s block per se, though; it was more that with no publication in sight for the first two at that time, it seemed pointless to carry on churning out books into the void. But once I’d published Experimental Heart, it felt right to dust off Number 3 and finish it off. It proved rather difficult to overcome the inertia of four long years of activity, but as I described in a previous post, a writer’s holiday in Whitstable got things moving again. Currently I’m finalizing it for publication, though I am not sure yet exactly what the plan is there – which is another story for another time.

My current writer’s block is of a different quality entirely. Since I wrote those two and half novels so effortlessly, my life has become a lot more complicated — I’ve got LabLit.com to tend, rebellions to foment, various blogs to feed and rather a lot of speaking and writing engagements to discharge. As a consequence, I have less time to write overall. So it’s important then when I do manage to cobble together a few hours here and there, I make good use of the time. Unfortunately, Novel 4 — which is based on an interesting, real-life premise and seemed so promising in outline form — ground to a halt in the middle of chapter five sometime early last year. And try as I might, I have not been able to make headway since.

It is a very peculiar feeling as a writer, liking the idea of one’s novel, but not actually liking what’s emerging onto the page. Writing fiction, for me, has always been like falling in love, or being swept as a reader into a book you don’t ever want to end. The characters come to life and drag you under, and writing in this state is a joy, not a chore. Novel 4, alas, was just not doing it for me. I was not sure whether it was the novel itself, or whether it was the right novel at the wrong time. Eventually, Richard persuaded me to set it aside and try something else. And since he, and several other of the test readers of Novel 3, thought it ripe for a sequel, I decided to try just that. Within about an hour of plotting and thinking, the sequel was off like a rocket, taking on a life of its own after only a few pages.

So it wasn’t me; it was the book. I suspect it was too dark, too close to some real-life events in my past that still sit uncomfortably with me, and that’s not where I want my imagination to dwell heavily right now. Maybe one day in the future I’ll feel more enthusiastic about entering those waters, so I’ll keep the mothballed manuscript waiting. In the meantime, it’s back to a familiar universe where the characters are old friends, and there’s space to invent a few new ones too. And there’s unfinished business that needs to be sorted out, and someone up to no good who has disappeared off the map and needs to reappear, and — well, I don’t want to give anything away!

To celebrate, we hired a car and drove down, appropriately enough, to Whitstable, my place of literary mojo, and then eventually up to the Elmley Marshes on the Isle of Sheppey. Sheppey, a very strange and isolated part of Kent, plays a pivotal role in Novel 3 and its sequel, so it was good to immerse myself in its murky atmosphere as I prepare to dive back down.

I wish you all a very Happy New Year, and leave you with a few photos from Elmley to set the scene…

Richard scoping for birds

Extra-heavy rains have just made the marshes more hospitable to the many birds who shelter here

The old and new bridges onto the Isle – which play a pivotal role in the plot

Heading back home to my typewriter over the Old Bridge, eclipsing the New

In retrospect, I have mixed feelings about the work now – and I’m sure I’m not alone. Once you know a little more about what Rosalind Franklin was really like, and how certain plot points probably actually panned out, it’s difficult to look at Watson’s book in quite the same way again. Depending on whether you believe the ferocious defense by Franklin’s friend Anne Sayre or the more balanced biography by Brenda Maddox, you find out that Franklin was, at the very least, meanly lampooned as a person she was not, and at the worst, possibly stitched up and deprived for too many years of the scientific credit she deserved.

Nevertheless, the book remains an astonishing work of art: while it’s commonplace today to read fictionalized accounts of real scientists and historical discoveries – to make a novel out of a biography* – back in 1968 it was as far as I know, almost unique. No matter how I feel about Watson now, I recall being enchanted by his young narrator’s voice, rushing towards his destiny with humor, irreverence and a passion that leaps off the page.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Nobel Prize bestowed upon Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for the discovery of the structure of DNA, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and Simon & Schuster (Editors, Alexander Gann and Jan Witkowski) have collaborated to produce a gorgeous coffee-table edition packed full of annotations, photos, letters and documents, some never before published, as well as a “lost chapter” from the original manuscript and a fascinating dissection of the controversy surrounding its original publication.

I have not read The Double Helix since that heady first time in my teens, so I look forward to sinking into it over the holidays and seeing whether Watson’s youthful charisma can overcome the darker knowledge of subsequent information.

*If you’re interested in fictionalized scientific tales, you can visit the LabLit List and take a look at anything labelled as “historical”. Personal favorites include The Unfixed Stars (on Clyde Tombaugh, the Kansas farm boy who discovered Pluto), The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth (on Kepler and Galileo) and This Thing of Darkness (on Fitzroy and Darwin).