This past Friday, though I didn’t realize it until well after midnight, marked my completion of a full year back in the lab. Time, as it always seems to do these days, has sped by more quickly than I would have thought possible, so much so that I have difficulty now remembering how it felt to be on the cusp of leaving the safety and security of an editorial universe for something much more tenuous.
My experience of returning to the lab has been an exercise in how not to take anything for granted. I can still acutely recall how it felt last year, in the bleak midwinter of 2007, when I had decided to go back to the bench but had only the faintest hope of achieving that goal. My scientific self then was still very much unallayed by four years in publishing, and it bled through in a thousand tiny examples. You could see it in the way I would measure water to the meniscus, and flour to the nearest tenth of a gram decimal place, when loading up the bread maker, and in how I experienced a twinge every time did so, remembering the life I had lost. Filtering my world through a scientific lens was not something that ever left me, even as my days were filled not with discovery, but tedious office politics, reams of manuscripts, freelance writing and all the other mundane trappings of a life more ordinary.
My enthusiasm may not have been blunted, but once I arrived back in the lab it became painfully obvious that the practical day-to-day skills of scientific research had grown rusty over the years, muscle memory notwithstanding. In fact, I would say it is only in the past few months that I have finally felt like my old self. I had to retrain myself to read papers like a scientist instead of an editor; to multitask experiments instead of doing them one at a time. Every time the twists and turns of my project led me to a different technique, I would hit the wall of yet another approach that I used to command without thinking but which I could now no longer remember how to approach. Having been unable to locate my old mildewing protocols and notebooks in the loft, I would be reduced to scouring the internet or pestering friends to remind me how to prepare a gradient gel or make a stable cell line. Surprisingly, it was the need to do mathematics that revealed the biggest gaps in my memory but, like anything else, if you don’t exercise your skills, they become flabby. And over the past year I have plowed through the calculations until they have again became second nature. A year on, I no longer walk into the common room and feel like an impostor.
It is a cool twilight in my garden, and my skin is still faintly tingling from the doses of solar radiation I took earlier. Blackbirds twitter, swifts cry overhead, a cloud-colored crescent moon hangs over the rooftops. I don’t know what will happen when my fellowship runs out in early 2012, but that doesn’t matter at the moment. For now, I am a scientist again, and I’m not ever going to take that for granted.
Wow. Really a year?
(lovely post, Jenny)
Really a year.
Took me this long to get to the stage when one somehow manages to pile on one too many experiments and no longer seem to be in control. Or perhaps when I was younger it was just easier to handle the stress.
I think a little out of control is good. Keeps you sharp.
Raw. Hungry.
I salute you, Jenny. I thought you were very brave then, and I haven’t changed my opinion. The fact that a year has flown by so quickly suggests that you’ve done the right thing.
Thanks, guys. Sometimes bravery is just bloody-mindedness from another angle.
Congrats on your anniversary – bravery and bloody-mindedness are synonyms in my book. Mind you, bloody-mindedness without talent is a dangerous non-combination…(not that it applies in your case of course!).
Elsewhere – disturbed to learn that blackbirds have taken up micro-blogging. Web 2.0 gone mad I say!
Blackbirds are always the first to get in on the action. (Personally, I think they are overcompensating for being typecast as only singing in the dead of night.)
All this talk of time flying reminds me of a lecture I saw earlier this year at the RS about why it is that the human brain perceives time differently as it ages – why everything goes faster. Naturally I can’t remember who it was – possibly Scott could.
I don’t know about blackbirds. Florida scrub jays, though, I think they really will take over the world. They are at least as intelligent as most people. Or, at least, the blank-faced, shell-suited kind that
infestedvisited Cromer this Saturday just gone.That’s a fantastic article, Henry. I like the thought of pilferers being more suspicious of other pilferers.
I think the whole subject of corvid intelligence is utterly fascinating. Here is a group of creatures, whose brains are organized quite differently from ours; which have acquired intelligence independently; and yet which have a sophisticated ‘theory of mind’ such that their motivations and behaviour are perfectly intelligible in human terms, without any temptation towards any anthropomorphism. And yet their brains arem tiny.
I use the example of corvid intelligence to explode ideas that there has to be some threshold ‘size’ for brains to be able to bootstrap themselves into what we’d recognize as intelligence. Such ideas are promulgated by anthropologists who seem to regard the human lineage as somehow distinct from the rest of nature, so that Homo floresiensis ‘cannot possibly’ have made tools, simply because it had a very small brain. Flo’s brain is disproportionately tiny in human terms, but it’s a big ol’ world out there, full of highly intelligent creatures. But Flo wasn’t human.
And, in any case, does one need to be sentient to make tools? Corvids are intelligent and make tools, but are they sentient? My guess is that they probably are, some of the time, perhaps more so than, say, chimpanzees, and certainly more than most human beings, most of the time.
You think corvids are more sentient than chimps?
Controversial.
I’d say that corvids are equally, or more sentient than chimps … and people.
Part of the problem is defining what one means by ‘sentient’. If it is to be self-aware, such that one has a theory of mind which allows one to picture oneself as a player on a mental stage with others, then corvids most definitely are at least as sentient as higher primates.
But sentience is not an all-or-nothing affair such that one is sentient all the time. In Figments of Reality, Cohen and Stewart play with the idea that one is only sentient when one really needs to be, and that we cruise along in automatic most of the time, a cognitive version of muscle memory, or spinal reflex.
I reckon that there’s a lot of truth in that view. To be self-aware all the time could lead to the kind of paralysis that struck Borges’ character Ireneo Funes in his story Funes the Memorious, of a youth crippled by total recall. Perhaps more realistically, an excess (or deficiency) of self-awareness can lead to all kinds of socialization problems. I reckon that educational psychologists would say that girls are more self-aware than boys, for example — which might also be conected with the observation that it is boys, rather than girls, who are more likely to be diagnosed with autism-spectrum disorders. (My slightly aspergic daughter, she of the unicycling girrafes, gets on much better with boys than girls because, she says, they are ‘easier to read’).
Small children are not sentient at all until they develop a theory of mind at around the age of three, when they become aware of concepts such as deceit (which corvids are very good at), and of thinking through the consequences of their actions (corvids are good at that, too). I have a feeling that most people pass >99% of their lives in a state which one would not regard as fully sentient. This is not a criticism — it’s a survival strategy.
Postscript – I don’t think one should confuse, conflate or correlate linguistic ability with sentience, simply because language is an attribute of humans. Corvids are sentient and, as far as we know, have no linguistic ability.
bq. Corvids are sentient and, as far as we know, have no linguistic ability.
which is a shame, really; because then we could ask them.
I don’t know what will happen when my fellowship runs out in early 2012, but that doesn’t matter at the moment. For now, I am a scientist again, and I’m not ever going to take that for granted.
I don’t know what happens in 2012 either… who does?! Really? (I know, it might be a little childish to rant like that but looking at the world of funding etc I don’t really think we know what will be happening with research in a few years time. Let’s hope it is something good though!)
I think it all sounds absolutely marvellous! And happy anniversary! (Can’t really belive that it has been a year though, that means… well… a year more for me too 😉 )
Hooray, and cheers, to the next Rohn et. al.
I don’t know what happens in 2012 either…
I do. I shall be 50.
Oy, I should live so long.
A Rohn et al., of sorts, is currently in preparation, Massimo. I am gratified that what I am working on seems to be bearing fruit, but living under the shadow of an imminent scoop. One of the things that my age has given me is a bit of perspective, though; the reality of this competing paper doesn’t rattle me like it once would have done. I think I know that its existence will deflect my paper into a lesser journal, but in the grand scheme of things, what I write afterwards will also have value.
Something to blog about, perhaps…
p.s. Henry, when and where is the party?
Jenny, I think we would be all edified by your blogging about the publication process… and your unique insight, having been both sides of the fence, would make it doubly valuable.
2012, eh? Do you think Nature might organize another conference? Say April 25th or thereabouts? I might have saved up enough money for another round the world flight by then.
Congratulations!
I’m going to do the opposite thing (well, not really, more the desynchronized thing) and am now doing my last experiments for a long time. I’ve given myself a year to figure out what I want to do and if I ever even want to go back tot eh bench, but the fact that it’s possible to go back after a while makes it a whole lot less scary for me to make that decision. So yay for you =)
Also, I have been on a cleaning spree lately and I found a folder with some things I printed out years ago that I found interesting. One of them was a 2003 NextWave article about research in The Netherlands, by a certain Jennifer Rohn =) I didn’t throw it out, it went to the pile for rereading-once-I-have-time.
p.s. Henry, when and where is the party?
Please note the qualifier, Oy, I Should Live So Long.
Thanks, Eva. I think it’s great that you can take that much time off. I myself had about nine months between leaving science and going into publishing, and it was a very intense time. There are a lot of things you just don’t have space to think about when you are embroiled in every-day life. Yes, you can go back any time you like: I am living proof.
Ah, those Science pieces…those were my first ever freelance articles. Seems like about a hundred years ago.
Richard…do you feel the need to be edified?
I think, Jenny, that I should take the opportunity while it exists.
Then it would be ungallant to refuse.
That gives me a nice idea, actually feels blog idea start to twitch.
About time. There is a Gap in NN.
Don’t worry: nobody Minds.