In which I capture the present, but forget why

Posted on March 19, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

Ancient history (1997): does anyone map plasmids anymore?

I have always been a compulsive chronicler, ever since I was a small child starting off my first journal. I still write an entry nearly every day, taking a few months to fill in all the pages with my increasingly illegible scrawl, then adding the bound notebook carefully to the stack of hundreds of others fading in cupboards in my study – decades of events, sucked irrevocably into the past and largely forgotten.

This habit suited me well over the three decades that I worked at the lab bench, writing down every last experimental detail alongside taped photographs, x-ray films, plasmid maps, nucleotide sequence outputs. I captured not just the process, but analyses, conclusions, next steps – even a few unscientific expressions of joy or misery. These entries contain smudges of chemicals, coffee stains, and even what I suspect were tears. For all I know, some of the pages might even be faintly radioactive.

In more recent years, I have felt a strong compulsion to chronicle my home life beyond just what I write in my journals. It was actually Richard’s idea to start a family almanac when we moved to our ‘forever home’ back in 2015. Near the end of our fifth volume now, we both record weather observations, gardening activities, adventures in home-brewing and produce preservation, and any other domestic event that might be worth remembering: pandemic lowlights, comets and meteor showers, hen memorabilia (acquisition, laying habits and deaths), significant illnesses. After a few years we started to see patterns, certain events happening very close to the same time each year: the flight of ant queens, the first appearance of particular butterflies, the flowering of the first snowdrops, crocuses, ornamental cherries, daffodils, tulips, the onset of powdery mildew infection in our courgette patch.

Around the same time, we started a cookbook too – just an A4 notebook where we scribbled down our favourite food experiments or taped in printouts from online recipes or cuttings from magazines. These two volumes are encrusted in batters, grease, fruit stains and God knows what else. I like to think that a thousand years from now, scientists might be able to bring back some extinct forms of life with it.

In the past year, I’ve developed an urge to re-discover some of the more creative areas of my life that I haven’t fed in many years. I’ve started playing the piano again regularly, which I haven’t done since I all but abandoned the instrument at about Grade 8 proficiency when I went off to university. And following a bout of severe laryngitis that largely obliterated my singing voice in 2018, I recently decided to start taking weekly lessons to see if I could rehabilitate my vocal cords. A few months in and I am not only nearly back to where I used to be, but I am learning techniques that should make me sing even better, with a larger range.

Colored pencil sketches of flowers

Last weekend’s entry (Clockwise from top left: Magnolia, hyacinth, crocus, evening primrose, wild garlic)

But the most exciting development has been resuming regular sketching. I’ve always loved to draw, especially botanical subjects, but do it only rarely. Inspired in part by Emma Mitchell’s flower sketches on Twitter, and Katherine May’s excellent book “Wintering”, I decided to start a botanical journal, capturing emerging flowers and plants in our garden every Sunday, not only practicing my technique but also documenting the changing of the seasons. After I spent quite a bit of money on a 72-piece set of Lyra coloured pencils and a hardbound book of fine vellum from Strathmore, I was worried that I might abandon it after the first entry. But the project has taken on a life of its own, and it’s satisfying to watch the pages fill up week after week, blossoming like a garden in springtime.

Last weekend, however, I did have a little wobble, wondering why I am so compelled to get all of this stuff down on paper. In the past, when my life stretched out forever, I assumed that the chronicles would come in handy, a reference to consult whoever I wanted to remember a forgotten aspect of my journey on this planet. But now I’m not so sure. Why go to all the trouble? Who is it for? I can’t imagine anyone being interested, even my own family tree once I am gone; unlike a laboratory notebook, it’s not even useful: nobody will need to see how I did it, or reproduce the result. All these hours, days, years of active chronicling, sometimes at a considerable cost (for it takes time and energy that I sometimes feel I cannot spare): what is the point? The experience of doing it, living through it more intensely by recording it? But no – if it was only for the process, I wouldn’t save anything: I’d discharge my heart and soul onto the pages and then throw them away. It seems the saving is part of it, but I no longer know why.

It’s a sobering feeling: in the past, there was only the evangelical certainty that I must gather and accumulate this diverse evidence. Now the stacks of dusty journals seem to look at me and say, “Well?”

Posted in Academia, Art, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Music, Nostalgia, The ageing process, Work/life balance, Writing | 3 Comments

In which my lab is a garden

Posted on January 29, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

purple crocuses

It’s a grey afternoon, the light already fading. R. and I have just done a circuit of the back garden – ‘inspecting the troops’, we call it.

The entire space is dishevelled, as it always is this time of year: the brown skeletal remains of last year’s growth tangled in with the green perennials, most of which are in dire need of a prune. The lawn is more mud than grass, and everywhere the bulbs are pushing upwards. Hellebore already blooms in the train-wreck of our unweeded herb garden, along with the snowdrops, rosemary, winter jasmine and the first crocuses. There are even a few of last autumn’s roses unfurling, having powered through several weeks of hard frost to put on their last-gasp performance. Magnolia trees display furry pods that you can’t resist stroking, and the bird cherry in the back hedgerow – always the first to kick off – is studded with hundreds of tiny white buds. Wild onions – the bane of R.’s existence – seem to reproduce in real time, spewing out ten clumps for every one he yanks up. I’m sure our well-meaning predecessors (largely sensible in most of their other horticultural choices) had no idea what a cursed epidemic they were unleashing.

Our overwintering shallots, garlic and broad beans are doing well, but our greenhouse needs a good clear-out, to prepare for the dozens of seedlings that are already germinating indoors in heated propagators under industrial LED light panels. After last year’s aphid infestation, it probably needs a good fumigation too.

Earlier today after J’s rugby practice, we skulked into the local park and dug up a few lush cow parsley crowns, taproots squirming with fat earthworms, from the weedy verge, which I transplanted along the back garden wall. Our hedgerow has turned into a little woodland, and I think every woodland needs cow parsley on its sunny edges. If I try hard enough, I can almost smell the shimmering springtime haze of a field of cow parsley in bloom.

As if on cue, R. has just put a cocktail into my hand made from rum and pulverised blackberries picked last August and stored in the chest freezer since. A little bit of summer in an ice-cold glass.

Things are going well at work – which sometimes resembles an untidy garden of its own, old and new all entwined, everything coming and going. We published a paper in the first week of January, have another with minor revisions which should soon see the light of day, a second one close to submission, and several more taking shape. I’ve nearly finished the second of two major grant applications already submitted this year. Meanwhile, three grants are pending with outcomes expected soon. I’m advertising for a PhD student, just in time for one of my existing ones to take his viva. A postdoc has joined to start a project, while another has just moved to a new position abroad. All the various strands of what are euphemistically known as “output”, but are really human beings and their amazing achievements, bits of the cycle shooting here, blooming there, or blowing away like feathery seeds to take root somewhere else. And me in the middle, a smudge of mud on my forehead, reading glasses shoved onto the top of my head, wielding a spade and secateurs, half proud, half bemused as it all takes shape.

Posted in Academia, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Research, The profession of science, Work/life balance | Comments Off on In which my lab is a garden

In which I step over the edge

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Jennifer Rohn

Trees reflected in a pond

Another first of January, and I find myself in that fuzzy transition between old and new, between holiday and the resumption of real life. The Christmas tree and its associated trappings give me that look, seeming to realise they they belong to another era and are living on borrowed time. Their glimmer has an air of tragedy. You really want them gone — the decorations, the festive table settings, the fairy lights, the deformed candle-ends, the last few days of going through the motions. The coup de grâce. You want to rearrange the furniture back to normal, restore the boxes of ornaments and relics to the loft, hoover up all the needles on the carpet. But it’s not quite time: tomorrow, perhaps.

I’ve been ill for so long that this Christmas could never have been normal. Only in the last few days have I started to feel somewhat like myself. The best I can say is that I caught up on my sleep, read a few good books and gained back three of the twelve pounds I precipitously shed in the acute November throes. I’ve started to learn the accordion (again), and have resumed my fitness regimen, months behind where I used to be, but you have to start somewhere. I’ve enjoyed the walks we’ve taken, fresh mild air in the lungs, stands of old oak and holly and mud beneath my boots, crunching on spent chestnut casings and acorns and sodden leaf.

I’ve thought about the future: what would I want to see different this year? As usual, I already feel happier and more secure than I probably have any right to. If it ain’t broke… But nevertheless, I’d like to up my game. Some of this I can control: writing more, doom-scrolling less. But some of it is out of my hands, and none of it is urgent.

In the meantime, 2023: welcome. Let’s see how we get on.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

In which we fall

Posted on November 6, 2022 by Jennifer Rohn

autumn leaves

Fireworks crackle in the darkness: yesterday’s Bonfire Night stretching to fill the entire weekend. The torrential rains have given way to an almost full moon, glowing cold-silver in the eastern sky. November is always a positive month, with the cosiness of a warm home as nights close in, various celebrations to anticipate and the frenzy of Term 1 lecturing having somewhat peaked as we start our downhill crash towards Christmas.

I have not written in a long time because work has been ruthless and all-encompassing, filling up every hour, even when I rise too early and retire too late in a vain attempt to wrest back control. Burning at both ends, my middle feels exhausted and sometimes only partially present. I scribble in my journal when I get a spare moment – a few swaying stops on the Underground, or a decadent five-minute break over coffee – but there is time for little else. A couple of snatched chapters of a novel, cuddles with my son, the 30 minutes of cardio exercise I prioritise over sleep each morning, my daily Duolingo lessons, half-hearted attempts to tame the feral garden before winter sets in. This weekend I managed to cook a hearty stew, bake a pie, play a Chopin Nocturne for fifteen minutes at the piano and put some narcissus bulbs into containers for forcing, but I worked many hours on various academic chores and face a soberingly long list come tomorrow morning. The clamour for my time never ceases; I just grimly slice off heads as ten more sprout back to take their places.

But things are exciting in the lab: I’ve recently got a few new grants, with some others submitted; we also have a number of papers in press, in revision, pending or in the final throes of preparation. Many people are asking to collaborate with us, from great labs all over the world, and that opens up new intriguing possibilities for the research. It’s stimulating and it propels everything forward. On the other side of my portfolio, the small cohort of medical students I’m teaching this year on my course are honestly a joy, and I feel very privileged to be able to work with such bright young people. So life is good, even if sometimes it borders on unbearably stressful.

I just have to keep going.

Posted in Academia, Domestic bliss, Gardening, Joshua, Research, Staring into the abyss, Students, Teaching, The profession of science, Work/life balance | 2 Comments

In which I cherish useless facts

Posted on September 19, 2022 by Jennifer Rohn

I’ve just had my first letter to the editor published in the Times (of London, that is, not of New York). It wasn’t an urgent missive about science policy or politics or the state of the world or the Queen’s death – just a little musing about a pretty weed that was one of hundreds of Ohio native plants and trees I studied in a botany class as an undergraduate at Oberlin College.

People sometimes ask me what good my Liberal Arts education did – especially as a scientist. It’s a particularly interesting question in the UK, where science graduates start specializing as children in school; after this, most undergo a heavily restricted three-year BSc degree consisting solely of modules about that science. As a result, they are taught little about anything else. Even normal high schools and undergraduate degrees in the US allow students to take a broad range of topics, so to a typical Brit, my even more expansive liberal arts degree seems completely bonkers. How have they benefited me, my years of Ancient Greek and Spanish, my modules in Ethnomusicology, Linguistics, Cultural Anthropology and the dozens of other modules I was required to take outside of my Biology major? I even got credits on my transcript for playing in the steel drum band and the Javanese gamelan ensemble and being part of the Ultimate Frisbee team.

I’m not sure it made me a better scientist, but I’m sure it made me a better person. The botany class where I learned about “camper’s friend” was run co-run by Dr David Benzing, an expert in epiphytes, and George Jones, a 90-year-old alumnus who led us around the local woods and fields collecting specimens and telling us stories about which plants had medicinal or edible properties. You had to keep on your toes – he was quick as a flash and would start talking as soon as he reached the specimen of interest, whether or not the gaggle of students had caught up with him. The class began in the depths of winter, when it was so bitter cold that we had to use pencils to take notes because the ink in our ballpoint pens would freeze. Our first exam was a series of one hundred different winter tree twigs, laid out on the lab benches, which we had to identify by genus and species only by inspecting the color, texture and bud-scar pattern. Much of university life has faded, but I can still see those twigs laid out on the scuffed black epoxy resin, and various still-frames of happily collecting leaves and blooms as winter finally morphed into spring. On one occasion, an angry farmer charged over on his tractor, gun aimed squarely at us. Dr Benzing blanched, but the girls of the party looked up at him with big imploring eyes, flowers in our hair, and the man finally cracked a smile and lowered his weapon.

I have long since forgotten how to identify those one hundred Ohio trees, and am immersed in a different country with a different spectrum of flora. But as autumn deepens under golden sunshine and indigo-blue skies, I’m comforted by the familiar species of my youth: great mullein, yarrow, asters, the scatterings of horse chestnuts on the faded grass.

horse chestnut

Posted in Nostalgia | 3 Comments

In which climate apocalypse feels inevitable

Posted on July 18, 2022 by Jennifer Rohn
Cover for the Ministry For the Future

A dystopian future is already mostly here

Here in England, we are braced for an historic heat wave. The Met Office has issued its first ever ‘Red Warning of Extreme Heat‘ for much of the UK, with temperatures set to reach a new record of 40 degrees C today. It hasn’t rained here for many weeks, and the grass is baked brown and tinder-dry. On the Met Office map, a sinister blob of scarlet spreads over otherwise orange terrain, and if you zoom out to the rest of the continent, it’s the same in many other countries. Wildfires burn in Spain, Portugal and France, and a number of people have already died.

Some of my America friends seem bemused that the Brits are panicking about mere 104 degrees F temperatures, but you have to keep in mind that we aren’t equipped for this. Even in slightly less intense heat waves, people die here. The vast majority of homes, and many offices, do not have air conditioning or decent insulation. A number of people commute by trains, whose tracks start to warp in extreme heat.

It’s a big deal because it’s not normal – though of course, sadly, it’s part of our coming new normal. A new normal that feels inevitable now. I consider my last trip to the beach in a car burning fossil fuel, and think: how strange/reckless/crazy/amazing will this activity seem to someone twenty years from now, a hundred, five hundred? When I write in my journal about my lush green garden, where I can wander out and pluck an apricot from a tree, will this seem like some sort of paradise lost?

Climate change, and how on earth we are going to fix it, is the subject of Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel The Ministry for the Future – a story that starts with a deadly heatwave in India and goes downhill from there for its characters. It’s one of those books that has lingered long after I tucked it away on a shelf. A strange sort of novel, it focuses on a governmental policy team in the very near future – 2025 – trying to turn around the planet-sized oil tanker of climate change using a series of incentives and punishments both small and large, ranging from global to intensely local. Being in uncharted territory, the team just throws whatever they have at the problem and sees what sticks. Nothing is off the table, not even government-sanctioned black ops and guerrilla manoeuvres. Although it’s like trying to fight a forest fire with a squirt gun, momentum gathers in interesting ways as the drama plays out over many decades. The main storyline is intercut with hundreds of vignettes, first-hand accounts of what the dying planet is doing to individual people all over the world. The picture slowly builds, blinding-bright sunlight splintered through a glass shard of narrative.

By the end, all you can think is: we might just be able to pull this off. But how to convince everyone else that we need to? Persuading others to read this book might be a good first step – a droplet against an inferno, perhaps, but someplace to start.

Posted in Policy, Science fiction, Staring into the abyss | 2 Comments

In which ‘Lab Lit’ escapes its little box

Posted on June 7, 2022 by Jennifer Rohn

It’s been many moons since I published an article in Nature featuring my graph illustrating the apparent year-on-year increase in frequency of novels with scientists as central characters – or ‘lab lit‘. The trend had looked compelling, but coming from such sparse beginnings it was difficult to be sure, as the only way was up.

Increase in lab lit novels

The only way is up?

Twelve years on, is the trend holding up? You bet. Due to my hectic academic existence, I’m sadly more than a year behind in updating the database on LabLit.com, but I don’t need to run the numbers to tell you that this once-rare genre is rare no more. Years ago, my Royal Institution book group struggled to find titles to read each month; now we are spoilt for choice, with suitable novels coming out all the time. In due course I will update the graph, and I confidently expect it to show exponential growth.

Part of the trend has seen science transcend its ‘normal’ intellectual/arty/historical boundaries and invade territories that delight me. Case in point is the increasing frequency of the glorious mash-up of “chick lit” and “lab lit” – spawning deliciously awful back-cover blurbs such as, Jess Davis is a numbers genius, but when it comes to love she’s had to accept there is no magic formula (Christina Lauren, The Soulmate Equation).

two romance lab lit novels

Chick lit meets lab lit

And why not have a bit of romance in the lab? A lot of published lab lit has been, for want of a better description, terribly worthy and too esoteric to interest a wider swathe of people. But once your story has made you a Tik Tok sensation (as for Ali Hazelwood and The Love Hypothesis), you know your geeky cult classic fringe element is going mainstream.

And that’s all I’ve ever wanted.

Posted in LabLit, Writing | 3 Comments

In which I see the light

Posted on February 14, 2022 by Jennifer Rohn
Viburnum

Viburnum x bodnantense, a winter-flowering shrub

I’m happy, and I don’t know why.

Usually I dread this time of year, the period between demobbing the Christmas tree and the daffodil-studded benevolence of mid-March. It stretches on endlessly, the dreary coldness, the frosts interspersed with rain that pools on pavements and hardly ever coalesces into snow, and above all the afternoon darkness, which on overcast days might as well be twilight.

Last year, my diary reminds me that I was resorting to ordering from flower catalogues to take the edge off – huddled in a chair with candles lit on a mid-winter evening, daydreaming about dahlias whose future blooms felt almost mythical. During this period, probably in late January, I was walking Joshua to school when I registered a deep, hyacinth-like spring scent. Looking up, I discovered a shrub I had never noticed before, spilling over the garden fence of one of the grand Georgian listed houses, its woody branches lush with pink bunches.

What seasonal misfiring could have coaxed such delicate flowers out into a world encased in a hard frost? This singular oddness made it easy to identify online: Viburnum x bodnantense, which blooms from November until March on purpose, not as an accidental aberration of climate change. (Apparently bees and other pollinators can over-winter in gardens, at least in this climate.) Of course I had to order one for my own garden in the hopes that it might cheer me up during midwinters to come, but that just added something more to the long list of things I was waiting for.

Well, that ‘mental health viburnum’ has been flowering for weeks out back this year, but for some reason, I don’t need it. I have been happy, more or less non-stop, since I hoovered up the brittle fir needles from the carpet on New Year’s Day.

It’s so out-of-character to have dodged the winter blues that I’ve been trying to work out why.  The weather is probably part of it – it’s been remarkably fair these past few months. I had a dig around the Met Office pages but couldn’t easily find the sunshine data I wanted. Fortunately Richard’s weather station, its shiny cups spinning tidily on the summerhouse roof like some steampunk NASA apparatus, could at least tell me about the rainfall. Sure enough, this January and February have been drier than any year since he started collecting data in 2018. It’s been so dry, in fact, that I’ve stopped checking the forecast before heading off to London, and have yet to be caught without an umbrella. What little rain we’ve had has tended to be overnight.

A graph of rainfall

But this is just quantitative data, dead numbers on a chart. They cannot conjure up the astonishing beauty of the mornings we’ve had. From the bedroom window, the dawn sky glows a million different shades, each morning subtly different from the last. Venus is tangled in the great sycamore tree lurking over the nearby park, as bright as an incoming aircraft against peachy or coral or golden streaks of cloud. To the left, there are a few minutes each day when the ships on the Thames far below glow like molten lava, until their moment in the sun is gone and they reclaim their drab grey.

Faraway ships on the Thames, set fire by sunrise

Atop Windmill Hill where I walk after dropping the boy at school, the sky changes further, so unique and lovely that my phone has filled up with portraits of the same horse chestnut trees over and over: the silhouettes never change, but each image is infinitesimally different in the colour and texture of its backdrop. I do my normal brisk circuit, puffing at the crest of the climb, crunching frost under my feet, sucking icy air into my lungs, greeting the same dog walkers, taking in the same maritime views of the flat silver ribbon of estuary below, yet it never once feels tired or overly familiar. I understand now that this formerly dreaded period is not a rigid stasis, but a subtly developing season-scape that you only notice if you are amidst it every day. Green shoots push up from the muddy earth, tree buds start to swell, the tenor of the songbirds eases and lifts, dog cherries bloom in the otherwise barren hedgerows.

photos of trees

The same trees, from different angles and days, January and February 2022

And there is light – acres and acres of light, so bright that it dazzles and spangles, colluding with the frigid air to make a tiny joyful headache deep behind the eyes.

I consider my pre-pandemic routine at this time of year. I would leave the house just after 6 AM, in darkness, work all day in a lab and office with no windows, slip out of the hospital around 5 or 6 PM into darkness again. The only time I could ever see the sun was on the weekends – when it was more often than not raining. Last year I didn’t have these routines, because of lockdown, but hadn’t started my morning walk routine, and in January, it was raining almost constantly. So maybe that is the simple answer: I’ve been starved of light.

Now Spring is nearly here: our garden blooms with hellebore, snowdrops, and the first crocuses and daffodils. It’s good to see them, but they slipped in without me realising they weren’t there. Because somehow, I’m not waiting for anything anymore.

Crocus

Joshua presents his first crocus of the year

Posted in Domestic bliss, Gardening, Nostalgia, Work/life balance | Comments Off on In which I see the light

In which I imagine a dystopian future

Posted on January 23, 2022 by Jennifer Rohn

Book cover: Vital Signals

Despite my dedication to promoting the Lab Lit genre, I’ve always been an avid science fiction fan too. I admire how a good dystopian tale can transport you into a terrifying alternative future so convincingly that when you emerge from the spell, the relief of having escaped this fate (so far) can linger for days.

I felt a little bit like that after seeing the film “Don’t Look Up” (spoilers follow). It had its flaws, but the agonising run-up to the loss of our beautiful world – and then its terrifying execution – were so well portrayed that, weeks later, I’m still wandering around on my morning walks giving quiet thanks for the sky, the trees, the birds, and everything else we humans haven’t quite managed to ruin.

(As an aside, “Don’t Look Up” also had some nice lab lit qualities at the beginning. We see the world-weary astronomy PhD student clock into her telescope session, headphones on and utterly blasé – until she discovers the new comet. Then she claps her hands together and gasps with joy like a child. I think all scientists have been there.)

I’ve got a lot to learn about mastering the art of dystopian fiction, but I had the chance to practice when I was invited to take part in the anthology Vital Signals, from NewCon Press. Out on 25 February and available for preorder now, the collection offers visions of our potential future and draws attention to how science and technology might alter us as a species. There are lots of great authors in the collection and it’s been beautifully produced and edited.

I contributed to the “Disease” section of the anthology with a new story called “The Needs of The Few” (my early geeky childhood TV viewing showing through there). This short fiction imagines one possible extreme consequence of antibiotic stewardship, which is our current policy of not over-using the antibiotics that still work because we are running out of alternatives. The global antimicrobial resistance (AMR) crisis, predicted by Alexander Fleming back in the 1940s, is still a serious issue to this day and growing worse. The crisis was caused by flagrant abuse of these miracle drugs over many generations – taking antibiotics for non-bacterial illnesses, not finishing the full course of an antibiotic prescription, dosing livestock wholesale to prevent infection. Each inappropriate dose selects bacteria that are naturally resistant to the drug, and allows them to thrive and take over until inevitably, the drugs we have no longer work. Add to this the stalled pipeline of antibiotic discovery and the sheer difficulty of devising new ones, and you can see why stewardship is deemed necessary. This tenant means that all antibiotics, and especially any newly discovered ones, must be used sparingly and only when absolutely essential.

Stewardship is a very sensible policy in principle, and badly needed, but a rigorous, one-size-fits-all interpretation may deny people antibiotics who genuinely need them. I’m thinking in particular of people who suffer from chronic urinary tract infections that don’t register on the old-fashioned diagnostic tests, either because they are low-grade or because the tests themselves can be very insensitive. Many such people with genuine symptoms of infection are sent home from clinical consultations without a prescription, and continue to suffer, some so terribly that they cannot work, cannot leave their houses, cannot sustain a relationship – or, in some tragic extreme cases, cannot face living any longer. In this unfortunate situation, a disease with suboptimal diagnostics has collided with the idealogical force of a stewardship policy that is sometimes, in my view, too rigorously enforced.

But what, I wondered, would happen if the need for rigid stewardship suddenly became species-imperative? What if a deadly bacterial pandemic swept the world (I wrote this story before COVID19 came on the scene), and only one newly-discovered antibiotic could cure it? And what if you were a scientist who had dedicated her life to curing diseases, and had the means to break the law to help people with infections that weren’t “important enough” enough to risk treatment?

If you want to find out more, do pick up a copy.

Posted in LabLit, Science fiction, Writing | Comments Off on In which I imagine a dystopian future

In which I break through

Posted on January 7, 2022 by Jennifer Rohn

Sometimes the things you fear the most aren’t as bad as the fear itself.

About two years ago, I gave my first media interview on what was then generally referred to as “the Wuhan coronavirus”. It was still three days before a case would be confirmed in the UK, so most people were thinking of it as a Chinese problem, remote and unthreatening, even the occasional punchline of British gallows humour. I’d already turned down a few approaches from Sky News when the press office twisted my arm, saying it couldn’t find anyone willing to speak out. We didn’t have any coronavirus experts on staff (that’s all changed now, of course, after diverse scientists from multiple disciplines rolled up their sleeves to expand their research questions), but they’d used me in the past for other infectious disease news items and were keen to get the university front and centre in what was shaping up to be a very large story. As I had a PhD in virology and a broad background, it seemed harmless enough as a one-off favour.

Jenny on TV

First coronavirus media appearance – before I invested in better AV equipment!

But within a week, I’d given a dozen interviews and was rejecting scores more – they flooded in by email, text, landline, FaceBook and Twitter, until I eventually switched off my phone in despair. It would stop eventually, right? Soon, however it became clear that, unlike all the other topics on which I’d commented, the answer was no.

Fast forward to today, hundreds of interviews later, and I look back on it all from this unusual perspective: the meta-COVID perspective. Whenever I prepare for an interview, I do a lot of research, filling up a few plain A4 sheets with scribbles that I try to memorise before going on air. Every once in a while I stumble over these sheets in the scrap paper pile, or find Joshua drawing on one. They are ephemeral time capsules about a quickly moving target, and I marvel at how obsolete the information is. All those pressing questions, long since answered, even though at the time they seemed so raw and perilous. Will the epidemic reach Britain? Will the epidemic, now arrived, get out of control in Britain? Will many people die? Will coronavirus come back in the winter? Will we need to go into a second lockdown? Will any of the vaccine candidates work? Will the vaccines we’ve bought be enough to end the pandemic in 2021? Will omicron send us back to square one, or herald the beginning of the end? I now wish I’d saved all these notes in chronological order, just so I could remember what we knew when. But of course you never realise you are living through history until you are looking back.

Despite my highly detailed knowledge about the twists and turns in the pandemic story, it was all still rather abstract back in December. But this was soon to change. A few days after my last stint in the lab before the Christmas holidays, I was congratulating myself on having avoided omicron, even though it was already cresting over the capital during my last few commutes on the crowded, largely mask-less Underground. I was quite worried about it, in a way that hadn’t really gripped me before. In this particular snapshot in history, all we knew was that omicron spread like the clappers, but its severity was still an open question. We did know that even people with a booster vaccine dose, like me, could still be re-infected, but we still didn’t know whether it would protect against severe disease. So I traveled around for over two weeks in this knowledge limbo, trading in my cloth mask for an FFP2 and hoping for the best.

A few days before Christmas, I developed a scratchy throat and eventually some congestion, sneezing and fatigue. None of my symptoms were on the allowable list for a PCR test, but I knew from my media research that omicron had a different spectrum and was more or less indistinguishable from the common cold. (One of my time capsules sheets from that period states “one in two cold-like illness in London is actually omicron”). Still, the lateral flow tests, based on a nasal swab, kept coming up negative. By Day 4 of my “cold”, I’d seen a lot of social media chatter about omicron coming up more easily, or earlier, when a throat swab was taken. As the first LFD kits had been combined tonsil/nasal swab-based before the nasal-only ones were phased in, I knew the correct way to sample the tonsils, so I tried it out in the spirit of scientific research, alongside a test swabbing the approved way (nostrils only). The throat sample came positive straight away, an alarming red line that coalesced as soon as the fluid flowed over the test area, while the nasal swab came back negative. A PCR test taken later that day confirmed the positive result.

Two years after those first Wuhan reports, I was SARS-CoV-2 positive. I wasn’t talking about the news: I was the news – especially when my tweet about throat vs. nasal swabbing went viral. (I’m relieved to see that this anecdotal report, one of thousands, is now backed up by actual data.)

How did I feel about joining the COVID club at last? The oddest thing was the overwhelming sense of relief. Although it was always possible that my illness could take a turn for the worst, my time capsules started recording reassuring data about omicron’s severity, first from Ground Zero in South Africa, and then in the UK. Risk of hospitalisation was slashed. The T-cells were mobilising even thought the antibodies were failing. The virus itself was intrinsically less able to replicate in the lungs, preferring the loftier expanse of the bronchi and the nasal passages, where it was better at transmission but less able to cause bodily havoc. I felt terrible, but my cough didn’t get worse; my oxygen saturation levels remained at 96 or above. I was one of millions of people in the UK (up to one in ten in London alone, says Wednesday’s time capsule) with prior immunity coming to the realisation that this particular variant of SARS-CoV-2 was manifesting as a bad cold. I was going to make it. I’m still concerned about how the already struggling National Health Service will survive the coming weeks and months of onslaught, and about potential longer-term effects of infection, but – at least for the moment – I don’t need to worry about catching COVID again myself.

Is this really the beginning of the end for the pandemic? Many people think it is. Others aren’t so sure. With so much of the world unvaccinated, new variants still have the space to breed and ferment. In line with my usual meta-COVID stance, I’m waiting for more data before I form an opinion worth sharing. But my own little COVID story feels like it’s reached a happy ending of sorts – at least for now.

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