In which I confront the aging process

Posted on April 3, 2009 by Jennifer Rohn

Do scientists get less effective as they get older? The urban myth would have us believe that creativity is a thing of youth – physicists and mathematicians in particular are said to be past it by the time they reach my age (forty-something, since you ask). In reality, there isn’t much evidence for this stance. The whole issue was just summarized in a great blog post from Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, and Malcolm Gladwell recently explored the idea that genius may not be entirely the domain of the young.

Seeing is believing But what happens when you can’t?

As a mature post-doc, I find myself in the interesting position of being able to analyze first-hand the effects of age on the process of doing science, both mentally and physically. We’re a fairly small sample size, 40+-year-old researchers; most people my age who haven’t left science altogether have already become group leaders, so they’re no longer full-time at the bench. Clearly there are a lot of advantages to being older and wiser, but I’ve come up with four main drawbacks that might make molecular biology better suited to younger folks:

1. Old habits die hard. People tend to get more conservative as they age. You’ve all heard me speaking reverently of procedures and machinations that are no longer in vogue, such as platinum loops and, as I grow older, I take more pleasure in performing manipulations that I learned long ago. All of my labmates, for example, buy expensive pre-cast SDS-PAGE gels, but when my project moved into the biochemical realm, I rooted around in the abandoned detritus of Alan Hall’s decamped kingdom until I found a complete Mini-Protean III set, then lovingly polished it up, replaced a few missing parts and put it back into commission. This is not because I am adverse to new technology – indeed, I consider myself an early adapter (I was using an MP3 player in Amsterdam months before I spotted another one), and I’ve had no problems at all getting up to speed with all the new tech and software that confronted me when I returned to the lab after my four-year break. No, this is a deeper issue: it is something to do with familiarity, with trust, with loyalty, with ritual, with nostalgia. Am I wasting my time pouring my own gels? Possibly. Do I care? Not really. Am saving the lab a lot of money? You bet.

2. Paranoia, big destroya. I’ve always been a bit obsessive in the lab, but I fear it’s getting worse with the passing years. When I transfer my proteins to filters for Western blots, I feel a strange reluctance to throw away the spent gel afterwards, in case it turns out not to have worked. When I transfer supernatants to fresh tubes, I look worryingly at the old pellets before forcing myself to throw them away – unless I give into the temptation to stash them in a freezer box “just in case”. I can’t decide if this is age-induced paranoia or simply healthy caution.

3. Senior moments. Do not underestimate the importance of memory in being an effective scientist. When I was a Ph.D. student, I could proudly recite the restriction enzyme cleavage sites of most of the major cutters; only the other day, I forgot the name of the enzyme that makes blunt ends (the Klenow fragment) and had to look it up. All of those sectors in my brain seem to have been over-written by hard living; I think if it were not for Google, I’d be done for.

4. Dwindling vision. No, I’m not talking about my ability to come up with amazing theories. I’m talking about my deteriorating eyesight. Until you start losing your close vision, you don’t appreciate how important it is to be able to see in the lab. Looking for pellets in the bottom of a centrifuge tube is the worst – if it’s something clear like DNA or protein, and the tube is white or clear, I really struggle. Today when I poured a protein gel, I had a hard time seeing that thin line that forms when the bottom portion is polymerized. I can imagine the day when I’m going to have to start wearing my glasses instead of contact lenses, just so I can put them on top of my head and position my eyes a few centimeters from the thing I need to see. (As someone with appalling myopia, I can tell you that it becomes a great advantage when you age: you suddenly have microscopic vision up close, which I reckon could come in seriously handy in the lab.)

On balance, I think I’m not ready to hang up my Pipetteman just yet: I’m more efficient and confident in the lab than I ever was as a callow youth, and age has also brought the perspective that shelters me from the more negatives aspects of science. A few hours ago the confocal microscope crashed and I lost two hours’ worth of hard-won images; as a student, I probably would have cried, but today, I just laughed, booked another session for next week and joined the rest of the institute for Friday cocktails.

It’s only science, after all.