I’ve been pondering the impermanence of things lately.
Maybe it all started with the departure of a well-liked clinical researcher from our lab, an OB/GYN with a sense of the absurd who never failed to make us laugh. Now when we walk by his empty bench, it’s a reminder of the absence in our close-knit team – an absence so strong that it’s almost a presence.
The itinerant nature of the scientific profession is one of its major downsides. The ‘churn’ in a standard lab ranges from a few months to half a dozen years on average, so it’s very common to show up in a new research position and attend a leaving party not long afterwards. People are always coming and going, and the group composition is forever shifting in dynamics as personalities add themselves to, or depart from, the mix.
As a sociological experiment, it’s interesting to observe, but there is also an undercurrent of sadness to the relentless flux that has always dogged me. Even when a scientist colleague doesn’t leave the country – and that happens a lot – it still is difficult to retain the friendships that once seemed so immediate, forged as they were in the crucible of a relentless rush of experimentation. In my past, there have been late nights in the lab, joking with colleagues, when I thought I could never recapture a social environment that special. But once you leave, it all slides away. For the first few months, you might meet up for drinks with former labmates, but it’s seldom the same, and soon the lab you left behind has churned itself out of existence – there are new people, new dynamics, new shared memories that you are no longer part of. To them, you are just initials on a useful Eppendorf tube, or an author on a paper that came before them. And your new lab becomes your new family, closing ranks to exclude your past.
Experiments, too, are fleeting. It never ceases to amaze me how manipulations that can take on such importance in your mind one day can, by the next, morph into insignificance when their outcome is not good. Freezers and fridges are full of failed experiments that you can’t quite bring yourself to chuck away – for at the time, you invested so much meaning in them, so much hope.
Even my physical surroundings are not constant. In a few months, my university is selling off the satellite campus that’s been my home for the past year and a half, to be turned into luxury flats. While I welcome the move south to the main campus, it will inevitably cause a lot of disruption. We are being “decanted” (such a dreadful managerial term) into temporary accommodation for eighteen months, into an abandoned building that is currently heaped with junk and – apparently – teeming with asbestos, meaning certain rooms are completely off-limits. When we had the walk-through a few months ago, we were dismayed to find that my future lab space had a huge, ancient radioactive spill on the lino cordoned off with fading yellow tape – with no Geiger counter to hand, and no indication of the isotope in question, we had no idea how hot it still was. It will all be decontaminated and given a lick of paint, so hopefully it will end up perfectly habitable. But then there will be another move, to our final resting place in a newly refurbished building a few blocks away – more disruption, more impermanence.
As I left the lab this evening, the cherry blossoms were fluttering down and accumulating against the curbs like drifts of pink snow.
“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
– Lao Tzu
Is that a pie at the top of the petri dish stack?
I wish. No, we used this disposable food tray thingies in the lab for various things. Surprisingly handy.
I think this post can be related to not only lab but even school. Or in my case leaving family and changing countries. It is always a mixture of both, sadness and excitement at the same time. Leaving friends and places but looking forward to meeting new ones! Guess that is life…
Nice post 🙂
Thanks Ivette – yes, it’s a universal experience, but I think the scientific lifestyle is particularly prone to it.
Having just recently moved to another part of the country, to set up a new lab (a new family someday?) I can totally relate to this post. This was my 6th move in Science, 5 in the UK alone in the last 12 years. What you describe about trying to still be part of the old lab “family” particularly resonated – glad to know it’s not just me 😉
Thanks for writing it in such a nice way.
Thanks, Paula. Hey, we’re even – six in 12-ish years for me too! And ex-pats as well.
I hope your new home up North is perfect – and that you’ll get to put down some roots at last.
This post struck home for me in so many ways. And not only because I myself am in a state of transition–leaving my lab at the end of this month. My entire lab is in the midst of “the churn”, with two others leaving this summer, and two more grad students on track to graduate in the fall. On the other hand, three new people were added over the last few months to replace us all.
That sense of a “lab family” can be so tight–“forged in the crucible of a relentless rush of experimentation”, loved that phrase!–but in my experience it evaporates quickly outside the lab context. My family keeps me in the city where my current labmates work, and I may meet up with them from time to time, but within another year my good friends will all themselves be “churned” out of the lab and onto to bigger and better things elsewhere. The lab will have a whole new set of people, and an entirely different personality.
I know the Lao Tzu quote is supposed to be comforting and encouraging, but it strikes me as melancholy just now. (although also lovely, like this entire post).
This experience is very familiar. However, I now watch it with a certain degree of detachment having a permanent position as part of the “core staff”. As such my relationship to most students and postdocs isn’t quite so intense as it was when you are working day to day in a lab with them. Consequently as I sit in an internal seminar and look around at a sea of faces I don’t really recognise anymore, I just shake my head and wonder where they all came from! Same as when someone sends round a building wide e-mail asking if someone has some reagent or other, and I think “Do I know your name? Which one of those unfamiliar faces are you?” At that point I resign myself to not really knowing unless they intend to do any electron microscopy in the next few years! I’ve also got to the point now where the first year of 4 year PhD programme students that i gave the em induction to have viva’d and moved on, and the newer ones assume that I’ve been in the building forever. Amazing really that you can work somewhere for five years and be in the top few percent of the longest serving people in teh building! Only in academic science and football management!
Of course, like many things it is a bit of a double edged sword.. The rapid turnover means the removal of your “nemesis” that heavily used the bit of equipment you wanted/liked at the same time as you wanted to use it, or the really messy guy that never cleaned up tissue culture etc. Of course the chances are they will be replaced by a new messy nemesis, but you live in hope.