Latest posts

In which we keep below decks – for now

Posted on 31 May 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

Everyone I know in academia is hanging by a thread.

The profession has always been fraught, but in the past few years I’ve sensed an edge of desperation in many of my colleagues, especially those who heavily teach. We have been facing rising student numbers every September, each new term a stress-test of what is theoretically possible. And yet each year, it makes me proud that we give more of ourselves to maintain the excellence we always somehow manage to deliver. Colleagues who both teach and run research teams, and/or have clinical or hefty administrative roles, are even more encumbered.

In theory there might be a tipping point beyond which we simply break, but thus far, most manage to remain resilient.

Or at least I hope so. Thinking about it, it might be difficult, sometimes, to recognise when a colleague is in danger. I think and hope that most of us have a support network to buffer all this, but in my experience, there is a tendency in academia to put on a brave face. Few would like to admit publicly that they are anything but successful, efficient, confident and fearless. Some are happy to confess their difficulties one-on-one over coffee or a quick corridor chat, and I find myself spending a lot of time ministering, because I am a good listener and I genuinely want to help. The truth is, however, that sometimes I struggle to find a listening ear for my own troubles, someone who is going through similar things and can truly relate, unlike a non-academic friend or family member whose support is dearly appreciated, but not always enough.

Or I do identify that specialised sympathetic ear, but end up hesitating: everyone is just so busy; do I really want to make someone else’s load heavier by dumping my issues on them? Isn’t it better for them if I just steer clear?

I have been going back and forth over this dilemma for the past year, as I navigate the choppy waters of my own anxieties. My biggest worries involve lab finances, securing team continuity with sufficient grants, and supporting departing team members to successfully land their next position. But on any given week, there are dozens of other bitty items and snippets of bad news: collectively, they form sizeable waves that threaten to upend my craft.

Like any good scientist, I’ve been experimenting with how best to deal with it. In the past, I seldom shared anything, mostly because my network was paper-thin, the place where I was embedded not being conducive to those sorts of relationships (enough said). And I got pretty good at being self-sufficient: it was lonely at times, but largely effective. But the problem is, those muscles need exercising, so if you start to rely on others, you forgot how to be that tough lone wolf. I visualise these two opposing parameter spaces as ships: one small, claustrophobic and solitary, but perfectly safe; and the other more sprawling, effective and comfortable, but with unreliable decks that might shatter at any time, because they rely on input from, and trust in, others – others who are barely holding their own ships on course. There must be some balance to be struck between these two extremes, but thus far I have not quite managed it.

At the moment, I’m hunkered down in my confined space, hoping that the current storm will blow itself out with minimal damage to my vessel.

Afterwards, maybe I’ll decide to come up on deck and ignite a distress flare.

Posted in academia, Research, staring into the abyss, Teaching, The profession of science | Leave a comment

Work Experience

Posted on 31 May 2026 by Athene Donald

Alan Milburn’s interim diagnostic report, Young People and Work, looking into the causes of the substantial increase in NEETs (18-24 year olds Not in Education, Employment or Training), makes sober reading. The causes are many, across multiple Government departments and national and local organisations, and Milburn identifies the overarching problem as a lack of system’s thinking: lots of individuals and bodies attempting to do good stuff, but insufficiently joined up with other good folk elsewhere. As he puts it

‘There is no system in Britain that takes young people from education into work as adults. There are institutions, programmes and many good intentions. But there is no actual system’.

We will have to wait a few more months to see the final report and recommendations, but the shape of what he wants to see develop is probably well articulated in those few lines.

Much has been written about what he has uncovered during his investigations and interviews. It should be a wake-up call, as many commentators have noted, if the number of NEETS – and therefore the cost both to the individual and society – is not simply to go on rising. This is not a case of a snowflake generation, or an aftermath of the pandemic, the problems sit well beyond such factors impacting at the individual level, due to the systemic vacuum.

One of the complaints often made is that young people are not ‘work-ready’. It makes me wonder how former generations ever learned those skills implied. Work experience wasn’t a ‘thing’ when I was at school, and certainly it was never suggested I had a Saturday job or a paper round, although presumably such would have been available. However, applying for jobs was undoubtedly much more straightforward, with far less formality through forms, psychological testing and/or assessment centres. When I look back to the first job I had, it was such an unremarkable affair I have no record of either applying or being offered it in my teenage diary.

My memory is that I saw an advertisement in a strange publication called The Lady (which still exists) for essentially a temporary, live-in kitchen skivvy over the summer. I can only imagine I sent in a letter and got the job, although none of this made it into my diary (although earlier in the year I did note that my family thought it unlikely I’d manage to get myself a job, so it must have been discussed). At just 16, though, I did note I ‘went and got myself an insurance card’ – who told me how to do it, I’ve no idea, (I’m not sure my mother would ever have had one by this point, as she didn’t have a job), but the local DHSS equivalent was housed in a sort of Portakabin not too far away and I must just have strolled in.

So, I got myself a job working at the Field Studies Centre at Flatford Mill (it’s still there) in Suffolk, John Constable’s old home, a fascinating building surrounded by locations that he painted and that I was able to explore. I was thrown in at the deep end, having arrived late one afternoon. The next day my diary tells me ‘Got up at 6.55 to start work at 7’ – that seems very casual, not how I might have imagined I’d deal with my first day on the job, but my bedroom was straight above the kitchen, so travel was not an issue. ‘First peeled potatoes in an electric machine.’ This was simply a tub that whizzed around with a rough surface to take the top layer off. Stop concentrating and leave them too long there and there wasn’t much potato left; that certainly occurred sometimes on my watch. I continue:

‘7.45 have breakfast and then rush through washing up students’ breakfast. Then sweep refectory [sic], polish tables, wash tea towels, sweep and wash pantry, wash up oddments etc. All very hard work right through till 1.’

I don’t record any views on all of this, but it must have been a real shock to the system. I hadn’t been particularly domestic at home, and I’m sure I’d never used a washboard, which was all I was given to wash the tea towels. And so it goes on. The last remark about that first day was ‘I expect I will enjoy myself’, although I suspect this was as much because I was looking forward to being independent, away from home for the first time, and getting out into the rather lovely surrounding countryside. Now, were such a job still to exist, no doubt there would be large numbers of applicants, people in their gap year, or indeed a NEET, almost all able to demonstrate some prior ability around domesticity. The problem of living away from home, so often a limiting factor for young people today seeking work, wasn’t an issue for me, since board and lodging were included, even if it was fairly basic.

Although the afternoons of the job were free for me, as the students were out doing their fieldwork, I did have to come back on duty late afternoon around the students’ supper, and sometimes I also had to do end-of-day ‘tea duty’. Here is another example of how unfit I was for this role. Tea duty consisted of putting on a large boiler to heat up water for the tea, and I clearly got this wrong on multiple occasions: not enough water, forgetting to turn it on, even forgetting to plug it in. I note wryly

‘if I’d been going to be here more than a month, they’d probably sack me’.

That last sentence probably highlights the problem for many people in their first job. Being overwhelmed leads to forgetfulness, leading to apparent incompetence. I didn’t get sacked – which would have left them short-staffed in the kitchen – and I hope I got more reliable by the end of the month I was there. The other thing I learned – still a key lesson and part of being ‘work ready’ – was that you were expected to turn up, regardless of circumstances. I was prone to regular migraines at this point, and they were incredibly painful and wretched (in the days before I found effective medication, which at least now ameliorates them), requiring an extended period in a darkened room. But I remember being chased out of my room to come and do my evening shift; shirking my duty was not acceptable, another lesson those who are now deemed ‘not work-ready’ may not get a second chance to learn.

Thinking back to this first foray into the workforce, I do think how lucky I was, how much easier it was for me than those too often termed ‘snowflakes’. I applied for one job, I got it, without anything more than a letter in response to an advertisement, with no real assessment of my abilities (a good slew of O Levels hardly counted, since they would have been utterly irrelevant for sweeping the floor), or even needing to produce a reference. Just as well, as a letter from my Physics teacher would hardly have helped either. Having got the job, despite being somewhat flakey, no one tried to get rid of me after a couple of weeks.

How different for those starting out today. Read the statistics in the Milburn Review, or tales from the NEETs of today, who struggle to get past the first stage in any job application, who can’t afford to travel to an interview, or there is no public transport to allow them to take on shift work….it is tough for those who have little support, financial or moral. I look forward to reading the second part of the report when suggestions for how to turn the situation around for the young are put forward. As a country, we cannot afford (morally or financially) to let so many people down.

 

Posted in careers, domesticity, education, Flatford Mill, Milburn Review, NEETs, snowflake | Leave a comment

What I Read In May

Posted on 31 May 2026 by Henry Gee

Featuring the struggle to reach the top of coming up to, notwithstanding inasmuch as which I just about manage to summarise the books I have read listened to consumed before the relevant month is out. The first two and the last were audiobooks, my regular accompaniment while walking dogs. The third was, you know, an actual book, a birthday gift from fellow bibliophile Offspring#2, and read while on vacation in Wales (where we visited Hay-on-Wye, because, you know). In other news, I now have an account on TikTok, so help me, where I plan, if time permits, which it usually doesn’t, to review some of the titles I read in video format.

Stella Rimington: Dead Line the latest in the seemingly innumerable adventures of MI5 agent Liz Carlyle as she and her crew foil an attempt to disrupt a Middle-East peace conference held in Scotland.

Stella Rimington – Present Danger Liz Carlyle is posted to Belfast, to keep her from forming an office romance with her recently bereaved boss. There she uncovers a plot to smuggle arms to a Republican splinter group.

Lucy Mangan – Bookish The news says that there has been a steep decline in the number of people who read books. Whether or not this is really true is perhaps a subject for another day, but in Bookish columnist and critic Lucy Mangan celebrates her love of reading, and how books have helped her through life’s crises. It’s a sequel to Bookworm, in which she reflects on her reading childhood, and picks up at the point where our teenage protagonist has to read stuff for her GCSE exams. (You don’t have to have read Bookworm to enjoy Bookish – I haven’t read it either). Mangan’s thoughts and reflections only occasionally intersect with my own – and why would they? Different people like different things, and it’s interesting to learn what others enjoy. She is, as always, a great writer (though extended parenthetical comments (some of which are nested (like this one)) that go on far longer than they should really have done for comfort might have benefited from a firmer editorial hand, or a footnote). On that subject, some of her footnotes are great: here’s one.

It remains my firm belief that if you have a teenage daughter obsessed with Wuthering Heights you should send her to her room now and not let her down until she’s thirty. Save you a lot of bother overall.

She also reflects on some perhaps unexpected reading choices, such as the comfort, while as new mother, afforded by Lee Child’s novels featuring Jack Reacher, a man built like the proverbial outhouse who settles scores with fists ‘the size of supermarket chickens’.

Do you know how many times a day the mother of young children longs to beat the shit out of someone?

Wonderful stuff.

Andy Weir – Project Hail Mary If you’ve read The Martian by the same author, you’ll know what to expect. Well, almost. The set-up is similar – an astronaut is marooned, a long way from home and with no hope of rescue, but being a natural optimist and not prone to woe-is-me despondency, seeks survival and solace in being able to ‘science the shit’ out of the situation. To start with the protagonist wakes from a coma with no memory at all – not even his own name – but his memory returns in flashback as the story progresses, so we finally understand why he is there and what he is doing. Along the way he receives help from a most unexpected quarter. This is a good old-fashioned science fiction book, based more or less firmly on science, of the kind that people wrote in the Golden Age of SF before  writers incorporated much in the way of social or political commentary. In which case you’ll either love it or loathe it. As for me, I found it refreshing.

Posted in Andy Weir, bookish, bookworm, dead line, jack reacher, lee child, Liz Carlyle, Lucy Mangan, present danger, project Hail Mary, Stella Rimington, the martian, Writing & Reading | Leave a comment

In which no scientist is an island – but that’s what we signed up for

Posted on 16 May 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

I’ve washed up on the shores of another weekend, almost limp after two weeks of protracted stress. Throughout this, my unsettled, cortisol-fuelled moods have mirrored the erratic nature of the recent weather: violent cloudbursts, hailstorms, rainbows, periods of brilliant sunshine dazzling off the wet London pavements. I see the world, often, through an edge of hunger, as sometimes I fail to find the time to eat properly. Things are supposed to be easing off academically this time of year, yet I find myself just as crushed under a too-long list of urgent deadlines as ever.

In this fortnight period, two grants were funded and one was submitted. I recently tallied up the lab’s manuscripts in various stages and counted a whopping seventeen: one in press, four in various stages of review, four about ready to submit, three in preparation and five in progress where I appear as a co-author: no wonder I’m feeing the pressure. I’ve given an invited talk at the spring conference of the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, am herding some changes to my course through the approvals process, and continue to field lots of queries from prospective undergrad students who still haven’t made their decisions. Coursework marking is starting to peak.

Amidst all this, my team members are generating large amounts of data and seek me out for ideas, advice, and my blessing – some days are so intense that I return home with an aching, over-exercised brain that can no longer perform, and which can sadly cannot sleep through the night. I feel simultaneously at the top of my game and yet hopelessly behind. Sometimes, it is only the words of encouragement from my most trusted colleagues that get me through the day – even as I worry that relying on that support is somehow a dangerous weakness.

It has got me to thinking about how lonely it is to be a lab head. We are not really prepared, let alone trained, for the intense responsibility of looking after a bevy of young, hopeful and talented individuals who are relying on us to keep the money flowing and the papers on track amidst the never-ending chores of teaching and admin. It is an intricate juggling act that requires tough decisions – intellectual, financial, strategic – and there is usually never just one obvious solution. Yet we are expected to navigate these dangerous waters with very little support. Things get easier with experience, but even today, I am sometimes confronted by one of my team asking me, What should I do?, and the honest answer is, I have absolutely no idea.

I was talking this over with a friend recently, and we came to the conclusion that the problem with modern science is that, generally speaking, most of us are so busy chasing the next grant that it is a concentrated struggle to deal with the experimental programmes to which one has already committed. I liken it to spending hours crafting the perfect meal, but never having a chance to sit down and enjoy eating it. For this reason, I am very careful to budget in a large amount of regular time to meet with my crew one-on-one, to make sure things keep on track. But it is not easy, and the time pressure I’m under from my collective academic portfolio means that a lot of work spills over into evenings and weekends – and indeed to other odd times. (Just yesterday morning, I found myself having to sit down on a bench on the District and Circle Underground line platform at Victoria, my laptop wired up to my phone signal, bone tired amidst the blur of rush-hour commuters rushing past left and right, to dash off some last-minute grant edits to a collaborator.)

The solo PI existence isn’t optimal, even though everything in academia is wired to facilitate and reward that restrictive model. The informal solution is to find like-minded collaborators who can complement your skills and take on some of the intellectual burden – and for whom you can do the same in turn. I am very fortunate to have hands-on collaborators who help both to ease my load and also offer free therapy, but ultimately, we are all of us alone in this wonderful, frustrating and utterly bizarre profession.

So if you feel as if you might be making things up as you go along, do not despair. Seek out your allies, keep them close, and never, ever give up.

Because after the hailstorm, there will almost always be a rainbow.

Posted in academia, Research, Scientific papers, Scientific thinking, Teaching, The profession of science, work-life balance | Leave a comment

Handel’s Messiah

Posted on 14 May 2026 by Frank Norman

I’m having a big clearout at home and have been discarding most of my collection of old concert programmes. These are a mix of concerts that I’ve sung in and concerts that I’ve attended, going back to about 1973. It’s a bit of a wrench to throw things away that represent old memories, particularly of my choral singing career, but I’ve decided that I am not defined by old bits of paper. I am keeping just a handful of them.

One I am keeping is one of the oldest – an old concert programme from 1974. It was a folded A4 sheet, printed in that blue ink that used to be commonplace in the 1970s. It was for a concert of Handel’s Messiah and I’m pretty sure that I sang in it.  It was memorable as both the first concert I had sung in that was not a school thing, and also the first time I had heard a countertenor singing live. The programme is dated ‘Saturday 2nd March’, but with no year specified. That day was a Saturday in 1968, 1974 and 1985 and 1974 is the only year that makes sense to me.

The previous year my school choir (Salesian School, Chertsey) had performed the Messiah, under our new head of music Father Thomas Carroll. This school performance was the first time I’d sung such a large piece of music, with soloists and orchestra. The soloists were competent but not fantastic. I remember the soprano was one of the nuns who taught at the linked girls school and she had a rather shrill tone. The tenor was a teacher from another school – he was called Trevor I recall – and I experienced a sense of jeopardy whenever he went for the top notes. Anyway, me and my mates in the choir had learnt the music pretty well and it was very rewarding to sing – the first of many times I’ve sung the piece.

Then in March 1974 Father Carroll arranged for a few of us tenors and basses to join in another performance, in south London. This was being put on by a young man, Peter, who was a past student of Fr Carroll at the Salesian School at Battersea, where Fr Carroll had taught music before he came to us at Chertsey. Peter needed some extra male singers to boost the choir – there’s never enough tenors and basses – and he turned to his old teacher to provide some young voices. It was a bit of an adventure for us. Fr Carroll drove us in the school minibus all the way to Streatham.

In my memory the concert took place in the Catholic cathedral at Southwark, but I think I must have imagined that. The fact I possess this programme suggests it must be from the performance that we sang in. I don’t think I would have attended a concert in Streatham, south London to listen to Messiah in 1974.  I didn’t make that kind of excursion far from home back in 1974.  I’ve looked at my old 1974 diary for corroboration but there was nothing marked in for that date.

I don’t remember much about the performance. I had a general sense that it was a big deal (well, it was for me but probably not really on the scale of things). The church we sang in was far more atmospheric and acoustically satisfying than the school hall that we had previously performed in. The orchestral players were good – probably semi-professional players – and the soloists were far better than at our school performances.  The sound of the countertenor soloist in particular entranced me – so pure and bewitching. His aria ‘But who shall abide the day of his coming’ stands out in my memory.

I was pleased to re-find the actual programme for this concert and to remember that occasion. When I looked at it I was somewhat astonished to read the names of two of the soloists: Rod Williams and Ms Rozario. Both are superstars of the UK and international classical music scene today. I couldn’t believe that as a schoolboy I had sung Messiah with these two in a church in Streatham.

I looked more carefully, and was surprised to see that Ms Rozario was listed as a contralto. She is known as a soprano, able to sing very high top notes, and famed for her work with John Tavener’s music. Rod Williams is known not just for his fine baritone voice but he also conducts and composes.

I then looked at these two singers’ Wikipedia pages. Patricia Rozario was born in 1960, so she would have been 14 years old at the time of this concert. It seemed unusual and unlikely that she would take on a solo role at that age. Roderick Williams was born in 1965 so he would have been just 9 years old. That seemed impossible.

Programme for performance of Handel’s Messiah, 1974

I felt perplexed, as though I was experiencing some time warp phenomenon. Then I looked at the programme more closely. The contralto soloist was named as Rita Rozario – not the now-famous Patricia Rozario. The bass soloist was named as Rodney Williams – not Roderick Williams. I don’t know where Rita and Rodney are now, nor whether they were ever mistaken for Patricia and Roderick in the past 50 years.

If I had been more switched on I might also have noticed that the concert was conducted by Peter Hook, co-founder of the popular beat combo Joy Division. I’m not familiar with their music. He was born in 1956, so he could almost have been conducting Messiah in 1974, but I note that he was born in Salford and attended Salford Grammar School, not the Battersea Salesian School. So it was probably a different Peter Hook.

Just imagine that fantasy concert though – Patricia Rozario, Roderick Williams, Peter Hook and Frank Norman all on one stage singing Handel’s Messiah!

Posted in Music | Leave a comment

What I Read In March And April

Posted on 11 May 2026 by Henry Gee

Oh, gosh, I wrote somewhere that a sure sign of unwillingness to write is an untended blog. I really ought to have qualified this. I’m just about to almost fast approaching coming to the top of another book deal – more about that anon – which will indeed involve a lot of writing, but first it requires a great deal of reading. Being the kind of person (that is, a trained scientist) who when making a statement about anything without a reference will feel as if venturing out of doors in a state of deshabille, I will always go back to the sauce tzores source, take notes, and follow up further references, which accumulate faster than I can read them. This has generated a large pile of light reading amid which I currently find myself.

IMG_0929

Some light reading, recently. This box contains almost 200 references on a subject people know almost nothing about. Exhausting but not exhaustive.

This means that I don’t have much time to write this blog, in particular to update my list of books read in the preceding month, which is becoming every two months. So here is what I read (or, mostly, listened to) during the past couple of months. Apologies for the brevity.

John Elledge: A History of the World in 47 Borders – The human habit of drawing lines on maps seems no more strange than when one is flying  above the ground in an airliner, or even in a spacecraft, revealing that these borders don’t really exist. For all that they are so insubstantial, they do cause a great deal of trouble. This entertaining read reveals the secret plans of Britain and France to carve up the Ottoman Empire (and we all know how well that went) to revealing why Bolivia has a navy, even though it’s landlocked. And other stuff.

John Le Carre: Smiley’s People – the conclusion of the trilogy that began with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and continued with The Honourable Schoolboy in which self-effacing spook George Smiley finally gets … well, that would spoil it. The writing is gorgeous, stately, measured. The character studies precise and detailed. You can practically smell the raincoats and cigarette ends and see the haloes of smog round the lamp posts.

Stella Rimington: At Risk When I discovered that my longtime friend Professor A. L. of London shares my new-found love of spy thrillers he recommended the works of former real-life spy chief Stella Rimington as easy reads that go down without touching the sides. Or, in my case, easy listens while walking the dogs. At Risk is the first of several novels featuring MI5 agent Liz Carlyle.  Lots of twists and high drama, well plotted and straightforwardly delivered. I objected to one thing – the author’s habit of dividing sentences to show that the character is doing two things at once. As Dr Gee took another swig of his coffee, he noticed a spelling mi$take. But that’s really just a matter of taste.

qntm: There Is No Antimemetics Division This was a recommendation from Natasha Pulley, one of my favourite authors of modern fantasy, so was not to be missed. And it’s a doozy. Weird, sui generis, inventive to a degree, I’ve come across nothing remotely like it, the closest (and for weirdness rather than setting) is The Vorrh by Brian Catling (which made my Book Of The Year some years back). The premise is simple – we all know about memes – that is, ideas that propagate themselves, perhaps to a greater degree than their inherent worth deserves. But what if there are antimemes? Ideas, concepts or even objects that hide their own existence, and even compromise the memories of those who come across them? Compelling, thought-provoking, terrifying – this will be a contender for my best book of 2026. Thanks, Ms Pulley, for that recommendation.

Stella Rimington: Secret Asset Here our heroine Liz Carlyle is worried about her agent working to foil an Islamist plot, but is taken off the case to expose a mole in MI5.

Adrian Tchaikovsky Children of Strife This is the fourth in the increasingly inaccurately named Children trilogy (Children of Time, Children of Ruin, Children of Memory). Tchaikovsky bows to no-one in his ability to get inside the minds of aliens, and Children of Earth deservedly won awards. But the problem with sequelae of books with long, complex plots and vast casts of characters is that it’s increasingly hard to move the plot along without losing people, unless you can constantly revisit past lives and past contexts. Children of Strife suffers rather badly from this. The story is great, but moves with the speed of an arthritic sloth. And it’s not helped by the fact that many of the characters are really, really unsympathetic.

Stella Rimington: Illegal Action Liz Carlyle goes undercover to protect Russian emigre, art connoisseur and Putin critic Nikita Brunovsky, who MI5 think is at risk of assassination by a Russian secret agent. But is he?

Leave a comment

Jealousy, Bullying, Harassment and Other Bad Behaviour

Posted on 10 May 2026 by Athene Donald

Recently I sat down to dinner with two old friends, one male,one female. Our conversation turned to harassment and what emerged was pretty grim. The man referred to an incident when an older and powerful woman had groped him during an important conversation (presumably under the table), which I guess was not a story I was expecting. The woman, like me, could share many incidences of petty indignities and inappropriate behaviour occurring at different career stages. We had all survived, but were no doubt coloured by our experiences.

But harassment, and its close relation bullying, comes in many flavours. It doesn’t have to be sexual in nature, but it almost invariably involves some sort of power imbalance, real or perceived. That is why it is so particularly common directed against early career researchers, but power can take many shapes. Who controls budgets, teaching loads or signing off of grants, for instance, each of which will give a measure of power regardless of seniority. Does it count as bullying when a senior professor, I’ll call them Professor Z, refuses to teach, because it’s more important to get grants, and so leaves the work to junior faculty (Dr Y) – who of course can’t then find the time to apply for grants themselves? This is such a common problem in my experience (although not, I’m glad to say, in my own department where such behaviour was not tolerated). If that does count as bullying, who is the perpetrator? The junior faculty member is put in an impossible position since who do they complain to? Should it be the head of the teaching committee (or equivalent), the head of department or Professor Z? Each will pass the buck undoubtedly, and the complainant will gain a black mark against their name simply for complaining. Yet the reality is that the power imbalance is being used in ways that hinder the career progression of Dr Y.

That is a clear case of egotism/selfishness driving bad behaviour. There are many other motivators ranging from anxiety to jealousy, causing bullying across the faculty chain, and so often no one does anything. On one occasion, when I was on a panel appointing a new lecturer, one professor (Professor A) essentially accused me of not knowing what I was talking about, although I was the most expert member in the room on the particular sub-discipline in question, and certainly more knowledgeable than Professor A was in the area. I was so taken aback I said nothing. Nor did anyone else. At my subsequent appraisal I raised the matter, surprised both that no one had defended me nor had any follow-up apology been made. I was told the professor in question was waiting for me to apologise. For what? Again, I was too startled to defend myself. It left me feeling isolated and uncertain. The cause of the outburst was undoubtedly because I wasn’t being supportive of Professor A’s preferred candidate, and so he chose this particular weapon to neutralise my position. It’s easy to deconstruct the remark with hindsight. I’d like to think in later years I’d have been better able to defend myself.

Jealousy can play out in lots of ways, such as an attempt to knock an opponent out of the action, and can be implemented at a structural level, even – as I’m observing from afar – directed against senior and successful folk by other senior but less successful academics. A head of department can facilitate such action, by blocking funding or space to go to the successful professor (let’s call them Professor L) to allow their work to flourish. Why would they want to do this? Jealousy again, or possibly an unwise decision to back the wrong horse.   Professor L can sit there puzzled why their loyal behaviour – perhaps fulfilled by dutifully and brilliantly delivering their teaching load – and excellent grant successes are being penalised. Again, just as for a younger colleague, making a complaint can only cause the behaviour to worsen.

What head of department wants to be reminded of their misjudgements? They can feel guilty and lash out as a result. I was once greeted by one head of department, who undoubtedly had just caved in to a more senior professor to my detriment, with the completely gob-smacking but effective remark of ‘how long do you want to rant at me this time, Athene?’. Yet again, I had no response; he had successfully neutralised my would-be complaint, while making it clear I could let off steam and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. Do they teach senior management useful phrases like this to derail complainants? Was that harassment or bullying? It was certainly using a power imbalance to put me in my place and, the source in this case, was undoubtedly and rather visibly that the head of department had felt his own weakness in the face of another senior professor’s no doubt tantrum.

That was but a passing annoyance, with fairly limited damage to me. But a long-running campaign against Professor L can be much more damaging, and yet can occur slowly but steadily over years. When PhD students are distributed, does Professor L get their fair share over the years? When a university sift for a big grant call is carried out, does Professor L’s undoubtedly strong case make the cut? When they are elected to their national academy, does the department celebrate or does it say – as happened to a friend of mine – that it ‘wasn’t their turn’ and therefore they wouldn’t celebrate the success? To take an extreme example, when Christiane Nűsslein-Volhard was awarded the Nobel Prize, the Director of her institute told her ‘Can you please organise the champagne yourself. I’ve no time to take that.’ As she put it ‘some colleagues couldn’t bear I got the prize.’

Our universities are as full of insecure people as anywhere else, indeed it’s probably a worse environment because competition sits at the heart of what we do, the drive to be first, to get that grant, to receive that accolade and so on. So, being flawed human beings, people will use whatever weapons they have to hand, driven by jealousy and anxiety.

Posted in competition, insecurity, power imbalance, Science Culture | Leave a comment

The Desolation of Success

Posted on 3 May 2026 by Athene Donald

Does this phrase strike a chord with you? Apparently, it first appeared in Peter Matthiessen’s book, The Snow Leopard, but I came across it quoted in Lindy Elkins-Tanton’s moving memoir Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman. As she puts it, and here she is discussing the feelings of those who get elected to the National Academy of Sciences:

Success and its presumed partner, happiness, are ever-receding.

In other words, however much those who aspire to election feel unhappy each year that passes them by without the desired recognition, yet when it arrives it merely confirms that success doesn’t bring unlimited happiness.  She also recognizes it as a feeling associated with, for instance, the award of tenure (in the US system), that feeling of a loss of meaning when the outcome is actually achieved.

Why struggle onward with new scientific discoveries, when only a few people in the world really care? What do I have to work toward now?

I wonder how common that reaction to tenure – or any other measure of success – really is. I know, when I was promoted to Reader (that obscure and now defunct title in the University of Cambridge that, in my day, was the stepping stone between what was still the career grade of Lecturer and full Professor), my reaction was ‘is that it?’ A reflection of the fact that, having worked flat out to establish myself and try to convince myself that I did indeed deserve to be on the Physics faculty, I suddenly wondered if that level of commitment had really been worth it. In time I adjusted, and did not have the same reaction when, a few years later, I got further promoted to Professor. I was simply overjoyed. Nevertheless, that phrase, the desolation of success, did resonate with me when I read it in the Elkins-Tanton book.

It is just another way of referring to the old idea, that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. A long-wished-for destination may turn out to be, if not dust and ashes, at the very least less than had been hoped for when it finally turns up. It is as true in academia as anywhere else in life. And, academia being the competitive world that it is, it is also so much easier to remember the things that didn’t work out, compared with those that did. To smart from that rejection letter from the editor of Nature twenty years after the event, or to recall a position that had briefly seemed like your dream opportunity, but which went – naturally unfairly in your opinion – to your lab mate. Schadenfreude points out that in fact the project you didn’t get a chance to take on went nowhere and you were well out of it, but it’s the rejection that stings, however long ago this all took place.

Nevertheless, in terms of the opposite of the desolation of success, maybe one should also consider that there are upsides to failure. After all, would one paper in Nature from 20 years ago really transform a lifetime of research, however wounding the rejection felt at the time. Much of the impact, at least internally, will be how one copes with it. Does it spur one on to better things, to work harder or perhaps change field – or even career to somewhere better suiting your strengths? Or does it prompt an extended period of self-loathing and depression? We are all different in how we cope with such setbacks, and context really matters, so that how we cope with one rejection may bear no relation to our reaction to a different one.

As I indicated above, I certainly felt an element of the ‘desolation of success’ when I’d achieved more than I’d ever dreamt of by mid-career. But earlier, I had responded very positively to a kick in the teeth when failing to get the position I thought was in the bag. I’d been somewhat coasting while waiting (for months) for a formal decision and was stunned by my failure. However, I was so annoyed I thought ‘I’d show them’ and reapplied myself with great vigour, transforming myself from being somewhat idle in the lab to an absolutely determined researcher. Those around me must have been startled since I was too embarrassed to explain my reinvention, the cause of which would have been invisible to them. The upshot of all this was that, far from heading back to the USA as a faculty member, I stayed in the UK, working my way up through the system, starting with a Royal Society University Research Fellowship awarded from its first cohort. Staying in the UK is definitely not something I regret, but it’s curious to think what a key turning point that moment was. Rejection can be good for you – but only sometimes.

I guess the ‘moral’ of this post is to say, success – in whatever field – may not necessarily bring joy, nor failure mean disaster. If failure turns you aside into a more healthy direction (perhaps instead of following the dreams of others for you, but finally pursuing your own) it may be the best thing that ever happened. Or it may not. But do not assume anyone who is a ‘success’ is necessarily happy. They may instead be constantly chasing the next trophy and never feeling satisfied, as there is always another target to aim at.

Posted in careers, failure, Lindy Elkinst-Tanton, nature, Science Culture | Comments Off on The Desolation of Success

In which the road forks and the future splinters

Posted on 2 May 2026 by Jennifer Rohn

A lab with bright light coming through the window

The end of a long road

It’s that time of year when prospective undergraduates are considering their various offers to study at university. As the Admissions Tutor for a large BSc programme, I’ve been spending a lot of time fielding hundreds of queries by email. And as a novelist, I am particularly sensitive to the backstory behind all these raw dramas – each a young person, often wanting to become a scientist and struggling with this pivotal decision in the face of a world that seems too big to truly know the right answer. In their minds, this choice is one of the key inflection points of their lives.

I keep my responses helpful and professional, but what I really want them to know is that no decision is right or wrong – that their life will unfurl and bloom no matter what they decide. There is no control twin to take the other path, against which outcomes can be compared. It can all swerve off-script but then eventually, come out right.

This is what I don’t tell them:

Once upon a time in a land far across the sea, a little girl dreamed of becoming a scientist.

The dream came from literally nowhere: no family member had ever expressed an interest in science, and she knew no role models personally that might have ignited this spark. She watched documentaries on public television, and devoured books about science from the library, including a fictional series about a boy who solved scientific mysteries with a supportive (though disappointingly submissive) female sidekick and a nutty old professor. One of her first memories was a flickering black-and-white square with faraway voices talking about small steps and giant leaps.

She collected fireflies in jars, swooped butterflies into her net and looked at planets and moons through her father’s telescope. She studied hard and did well at school, suffering the small cruelties doled out to students who enjoyed learning. She gained a liberal arts degree at a prestigious undergraduate institution in the Midwest, majoring in Biology but broadening her viewpoint with a wide variety of other courses, from archeology, geology and literature to Ancient Greek, linguistics and ethnomusicology. She waved placards at demonstrations, played tenor pans in the school’s steel drum band and – living in the shadow of a massive government loan – was able to afford food and toiletries only by working multiple odd jobs on and off campus: drawing advertising posters for the college catering company; doing admin at a local art museum; scrubbing the excrement from mouse cages in the science building. Each afternoon she parked her rusty bicycle outside the massive concrete cube of the main library and spent more than eight hours a day studying.

In her final summer of university she spent a few months in Bethesda, doing research at the National Cancer Institute. The viral papilloma genes she studied made no sense to anyone, a vast black box of mystery. Today it all seems obvious, but then, she felt like no one would ever understand – and that was exciting, but it also made her a little wistful. She cultured cervical cancer cells, treated them with cytokines and chemotherapeutics, and did flow cytometry with a middle-aged tech who liked to slurp icy soft drinks from a straw as she operated the machine. During one bomb threat evacuation, she looked up from the lawn and through a window high above, saw firemen trying unsuccessfully to pull a resisting white-coated researcher from his experiments.

The summer was long, and hot in more than one way; during one lab mishap, she spilled radioactive iodine-125 (half-life, 59.49 days) onto her favorite boots and some grim-faced white-coated men came to take them away. (“When can I have them back?” she asked. “In about 150 years,” came the terse reply.) She doesn’t remember how she got home in stockinged feet, but does recall that the postdoc in charge of her got a bad telling off from the department head. This wasn’t the same post-doc who sneeringly told her that girls made terrible scientists, so why was she even bothering, and convinced the department head allow him to use her as a slave, photocopying hundreds of articles from heavy journal compendiums in the dim NIH library stacks.

There was never any question that she would earn her PhD and become a jobbing scientist. The path was as well-lit as a motorway, pointing in only one direction. She got into her first-choice graduate program in the Pacific Northwest and finished six years later with half a dozen papers and several postdoctoral job offers – one made on the spot at a poster session at a high-profile East Coast conference. The future seemed bright.

The postdoc in London started out well, but somewhere along the way it all began to unravel. The lab head decided to move his lab to America eighteen months in, and she didn’t want to go back. She moved to the Netherlands for love and joined an exciting start-up company. Four years later the venture went bankrupt and the dream seemed over. Unemployed, the novels started pouring out of her as if she was possessed, but she couldn’t find any lab willing to gamble on someone on the dole. Eventually she accepted that the road had ended, and went into scientific publishing back in London, the only place that still felt like home. Many years later she found her way back to academia, and after a few false starts, found the line of research that finally clicked.

Fast-forward to now, and she is well-established, enjoying the culmination of all her dreams. Maybe she has never been happier, caught in the confluence of having the right team, sufficient funding, the perfect experimental system, the ride-or-die friends and collaborators, the international standing, the few years’ distance from a toxic situation that nearly broke her and – after two decades at the university – the proleptic appointment that has finally given her career security.

So many infection points, so many agonising decisions – but in the end it all came out right.

If only somehow had told her, early on, that it would. That no decision is the wrong one, that an infinite number of paths lead to happiness.

She probably wouldn’t have believed it.

Posted in academia, careers, Nostalgia, Research, The profession of science, Women in science | Comments Off on In which the road forks and the future splinters