Recently I was preparing a talk about work scientists may do that is not simply research and it has provoked me to think about when I fell into doing policy work, or at least moving out of the lab itself. The first role I took on was not exactly policy: it was sitting on a grant giving board (with fixed membership) of what was then the AFRC (Agriculture and Food Research Council), a predecessor of BBSRC. I was still, to my mind at least, an early career researcher. I can have only been in the second year of my lectureship and I can date the occasion fairly precisely, because I know I was still breastfeeding my first child, which caused all kinds of logistical problems. I wasn’t on maternity leave, though, because I only got 16 weeks paid leave back then (which was generous for the time), and my wonderful mentor, Sam Edwards, took a dim view of me saying I didn’t want to attend my first committee meeting because of the challenges of keeping a small child happy, and essentially gave me a three-line whip.
It was definitely a baptism of fire. Leave aside the comments that greeted me when I walked into the room, as a young unknown female, about the papers (yes papers, literally, and a heavy weight of them), coming out late. Perhaps unsurprisingly for the 1980s, given that it could still happen today though one hopes with less frequency, it was assumed any woman present had to be part of the Secretariat. Once I’d worked out why I was being challenged about paper distribution by some grey-haired, grey-suited gentleman, I could push back. But the baptism of fire also got much closer to the science. I forget the precise title of the panel, possibly Food Quality, but I’d only been working in anything vaguely related to food for about a couple of years and felt a complete novice amongst this bunch of established researchers from food science and life science departments. What was I, a mere physicist (as well as the wrong sex) doing there?
It was, of course, precisely because I was a physicist that I was there, with the AFRC trying to reach out to the ‘harder’ sciences to broaden its research base and spread. I was inevitably faced with the prospect of not really fitting in; I was approaching problems from a different perspective which might put others out. Not being one of the crowd can be a plus, as well as a minus. Ultimately, I’m sure it was a plus for me, but it was an uncomfortable time when working on food didn’t fit well into my Physics department (as my colleagues often delighted in telling me) but being a physicist didn’t fit well into any community of food researchers. How different should one be?
When I was writing my book (Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science), I found Paul Nurse had quite a lot to say on this subject. “Always think is there another way of looking at this problem. …creativity is often at the edges, boundaries between disciplines, or subject areas. It’s putting things together that you often don’t put together….If you want to be creative, explore the edges.” as he said in an interview for the Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative in 2016. In a 2009 interview he said: ‘I took a risk at the beginning to work on something that wasn’t that interesting for most people’. He seems to have done this entirely deliberately, whereas falling into food research was more accidental for me, and driven by circumstance much more than design. The funding was there, obtained by my predecessor as lecturer who had then left the country, so I had to make a go of it, willy-nilly. It did, in the end, turn out well, but is going out on a limb something I would recommend to an early career researcher today?
I fear the answer to whether one should or should not do such a thing is only possible to give with hindsight. In other words, did it work out to one’s advantage? It may, as I found it, be an unpleasant experience to be an outsider wherever one is, even if there is something to be gained from it. One advantage I had at the time was that I had another research stream that was much more mainstream, continuing the work I had started during my second postdoc via industrial funding, so that was a safe line to follow, and it went well. I can also date this accurately to around this same time although when I was still on maternity leave, since the person I offered the position to I recall interviewing with a screaming baby on my shoulder. He coped well with that, as well as the rest of the interview. But here was someone else going out on a limb. He was someone who had done their PhD in superconductivity (low temperature, this was before high temperature superconductivity had been discovered) and wrote me a careful letter explaining why he wanted to make the switch to working on polymers – which he clearly thought would be much more useful than some esoteric compound that became superconducting at near absolute zero – and I found him very convincing. He made a great success of the project with me, and went on to have a productive career working on the mechanical properties of polymers in Swiss academia. He may have felt any postdoc was better than no postdoc, but he was willing consciously to make the move away from an area he knew to something else, and then he delivered on it. He was moving from what might be thought of as one mainstream area to another, rather than the bizarre world of food physics, but he still was taking a risk and it paid off for him.
As a young researcher it may feel very hard to weigh up these challenges. To stick with the straight and narrow or move into something unusual? Or, as Nurse put it, into some area others aren’t interested in. However, risk-taking is often a good way to get on, as is standing out from the crowd. I am conscious that, both by virtue of typically being the minority gender, as well as having an unusual name, I have derived the incidental benefit of being more memorable than some of my colleagues. It hasn’t been anything over which I had control, but one should use whatever accidental advantages one happens to possess, since other attributes may be simultaneously counting against you.
