Some years ago, the Science Council created a list of ten different kinds of scientists, to showcase the fact that not every scientist does the same kind of work. Ranging from technician scientist to entrepreneur scientist via the more obvious researchers denoted explorer and investigator scientists, it covered many different aspects of the work scientists do. This list was created some years ago, although I suspect the case studies are being regularly updated. However, as someone said to me when we were discussing it recently, it can feel a little outdated. In particular, we were considering explorer scientist which was described as:
The Explorer Scientist is someone who, like the crew of the Enterprise, is on a journey of discovery “to boldly go where no one has gone before”. They rarely focus on a specific outcome or impact, rather they want to know the next piece of the jigsaw of scientific understanding and knowledge.
They are likely to be found in a university or research centre, or in Research & Development (R&D) at an organisation, and are likely to be working alone.
It was that last phrase we took exception to. Few scientists now work alone. Team work and collaboration, possibly across continents, is much more the flavour of the work these days, and implying we still live in the age of the ‘lone genius’ who is putting the jigsaw together on their own, strikes me as misleading and potentially off-putting to a teenager considering a career in science.
That idea of fitting in the next piece of a jigsaw reminds me of a description in Nobel Prize winner Venki’s book Gene Machine, where he refers to his then postdoc Brian Wimberley (at that point working in Venki’s old lab in the US, after Venki himself had moved to the LMB in Cambridge). Trying to place proteins within the so-called 30S subunit (part of a bacterial ribosome) had been ‘so exciting that Brian said it had been like eating crisps. Once he did the first one he couldn’t stop.’ Definitely like putting a jigsaw together; definitely not working on his own. There were many steps required to get to the point where the jigsaw could be completed, done by an array of different (kinds of) scientists on both sides of the Atlantic.
Venki was of course the team leader, and that – as fellow Occam’s Typewriter blogger Jenny Rohn said recently – can be a lonely role. There, one may be on one’s own, trying to make decisions about how the group should be run and funded. When a student turns up feeling lost or stymied by their research, how do you give them confidence, either at a personal or professional level? Indeed, how do you learn what is the right thing to do in such a situation? When group dynamics go astray, who does one turn to to get them on a sounder footing? Group dynamics can go wrong for many different reasons. Where there is a bully, it is the leader’s job to step in and try to effect behaviour change: to rein in the bully. Sadly, such people are often of the variety who ‘suck up and kick down’, so without a victim stepping forward such behaviour may be hard to spot by the head of the group.
That is a hard enough nut to crack. One of the hardest challenges I remember facing was when one of the senior postdocs in the team decided to undermine me because he felt the wider department was not appreciative of his work and therefore it must be my fault. It took me a long time to discover this was going on, because, of course, no one mentioned it to me. But it became apparent when a more junior postdoc was being pushed to turn against me, even though they were working on a completely different project from the person trying to sway them. Here, I was indebted to the group secretary for drawing this to my attention, who served a wonderful role as a pastoral carer for everyone (myself most definitely included). Sadly, with ‘efficiency savings’, such local support has been phased out of my department, and probably more generally too. Such a vital component of care is lost when everything is centralised and there is no local non-academic present to be a safe pair of ears for anyone in the group.
Preparing students and postdocs, not just for how to work in teams without attempting to hog the limelight, but also how to lead projects and write grants, should be part of their training. Although grant writing is probably a skill most useful if staying in academia, the ability to project manage is likely to be useful in any sphere in which science is at the heart. Yet, too often, it isn’t one that gets much attention. Being taught some relevant skills could be helpful, but it won’t solve the problem of being a lonely leader. The best advice I can give to current and future leaders is to remember to cultivate a circle of trusted allies. These may be academics from a different department/university – be they collaborators or not – with whom difficult group personalities can be discussed without obvious conflicts of interest, or the group secretary (assuming such a person still exists). It could simply be a neighbour who has experience of managing conflict in a very different sector.
This ‘loneliness of the leader’ occurs in any sphere, but is probably as acute in academia as in politics, because competition is inherently always present. Who do you trust with your inner fears? I was lucky to have a school friend who ended up in personnel and professional training (not in academia), who was excellent at taking my rambling concerns, extracting a few key facts from my narrative and then asking the awkward questions I didn’t want to ask myself. In one case this boiled down to ‘ok, you don’t get on with this influential person, but what do you want from him?’, and I realised the answer was quite simple. I wanted their respect. That does not, of course, answer how to go about getting it, but it was a useful insight.
This set of musings was set in train by annoyance with the idea that anyone can still propagate the view that scientists largely work on their own, but there is no doubt that loneliness can still be a key component in a senior scientist’s life.
