Dodgy Encounters with a Fragile Piece of Equipment

Doing a PhD is hard work, stressful and uncertain. Even with the most understanding of supervisors, the clearest goals and routes to get there, there will be hiccoughs and worse en route to getting the letters after your name. And, of course, for many, things will be tougher than ideal circumstances might imply, with lack of clarity over the objectives, equipment that does not work and peers who rub you up the wrong way (or worse).

My PhD is a long, long time ago. In speeches, for instance to the College’s graduate students, I point out that mistakes and disasters during the course of research are only to be expected and certainly need not be terminal. Just because things go wrong is no indicator the student is inevitably not cut out for research.  The particular mistake I made that I recall most vividly was repeatedly breaking a delicate piece of equipment (the tilting cartridge for a Siemens 102 transmission electron microscope, aka a TEM, if you’re really interested). It could be – and was – fixed by the skilled workshop technician who, strangely, was the father of the technician in my own group 20 years later. Perfecting such technical skills was obviously something that ran in the family, along with a great desire to help the novice researcher find their feet.

Talking about breaking this piece of kit, time after time, is something that feels worth spelling out to help those setting out on their careers that failure doesn’t mean they should walk away from their PhD. I’m not afraid to admit I was completely ham-fisted, something I had always suspected. It was not by accident that my final undergraduate year was dedicated to theoretical  and not experimental physics; I thought I knew my limitations, but then decided a theoretical PhD was even more beyond me than tangling with equipment.

This all comes back to me because I have been sorting through the letters I wrote to my mother during those turbulent months in the second term of my PhD, spelling out just how difficult I was finding things (retrieved from her house after her death). They contain a level of detail I had forgotten. I knew I had left Cambridge for a couple of weeks, retiring to my mother’s house and feeling most uncertain whether I should continue with research. I came to the decision ‘I was not a quitter’, quite explicitly, and made my way back to Cambridge to try again. But, what I had forgotten was it wasn’t all plain sailing from then on. I appear to have found it really hard even to set foot in the department: the first day I popped in for just a few minutes, that being all I could face. I obviously – and this is what I’d forgotten – had to screw my courage up to breaking point to get going again. It seems I slowly built up the confidence to spend a whole day in the department, and ultimately to start doing experiments again.

Whether or when, during the course of my PhD, I ever used that particular tilting stage again I cannot be sure. I do recollect that much of my work was done on a different make of TEM, and the central point of the project was to use a brand-new microscope, a scanning transmission electron microscope (or STEM), which arrived early on in my time, being only the second such instrument in the UK. I also know that the results that formed the meat of the thesis (from the STEM experiments) were almost certainly incorrectly interpreted, and that the part of my research that has stood the test of time (still cited just a couple of months ago) was a completely accidental finding. Serendipity is a wonderful thing.

The tilting cartridge for the Siemens instrument reappeared in my life in a much more positive way during my postdoc years in the States, although again being ham-fisted was relevant. By the time I had started my second postdoc, and moved from an unsatisfactory attempt studying metals to (amorphous) polymers, I was confident enough to tackle the Siemens again, with the same sort of delicate cartridge. However…I didn’t break it, but I managed to fail to zero the angle of tilt, thereby observing the craze (a precursor to a crack in a material like polystyrene) not at normal incidence. The tip of the craze was therefore splayed out in a way that hadn’t been observed before. Eureka – it supported a theory about what the craze tip would look like, as my wonderful supervisor Ed Kramer instantly spotted. Once I’d satisfactorily proved I could reproduce the results, obtain stereoscopic pairs of images (i.e. two images with a small and controlled angle of tilt between them that allowed a 3D reconstruction under an appropriate viewer), a paper was rapidly penned. This was within about 6-8 weeks of starting working with Ed. My life was transformed. Another piece of accidental mayhem, it couldn’t even be called serendipity on my part though perhaps it was on Ed’s, but this time with a happy ending.

The rest of my career, as they say, is history. It could so easily have ended after my first encounter with that fragile tilting cartridge; I might have gone off and become a teacher or worked in industry, who knows. In which case, there would be no blog, no strings of papers or letters after my name. So much is chance, and one should never forget it. I was lucky. Far too many people get discouraged, lost or break things (like me) and move away, perhaps completely away from science. Research is full of luck and serendipity. I have always tried to tell my students that. Shortly I will have the pleasure of meeting up with many of them, and collaborators more generally, at a conference to mark my retirement, albeit two years late due to the pandemic. I’m very much looking forward to seeing once more many of the people who have made so much difference to my professional life.

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