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.

Posted in Epidemics, Media | Comments Off on In which I break through

In which pandemic storm clouds gather – again

Posted on December 12, 2021 by Jennifer Rohn

A hillside with trees

A number of months have slipped past since I last wrote here, two seasons under the bridge as my ramped-up academic life has consumed most of my free time. Then, it was the height of optimistic summer; now, the year trundles toward its endgame, short days of chill air and bright sunshine, followed by long nights under an icy-sharp moon. And all of it has been overseen by the ongoing pandemic, waxing and waning in neatly printed daily oscillations on infographic charts, lulling us into a sense of false vaccinated security over the warm months and now, poised to rain down on us all like poison from the heavens, blind and unrelenting.

“We can’t cope with another year like this,” the journalist Janice Turner lamented in yesterday’s Times, chafing against further restrictions. But the virus neither knows nor cares what we think: it simply gets on with the job: surviving long enough to reproduce, just like everything else on our planet that harbours greedy genetic information. It was the same in the lightning-struck, acrid primordial soup of 3.6 billion years past as it is today. We, the alpha species, can send people into space, but we can’t (yet) fight evolution.

And maybe it’s not us who are the alpha species after all; perhaps it is the microbes who inhabited this world billions of years before we swaggered onto the scene. Behold the mighty, big-brained humans with their smartphones and over-engineered cars, felled like harvest grain by a microscopic entity with only a dozen genes. When the host species conveniently failed to care enough to vaccinate the entire world effectively, the virus did what all the scientists predicted: it exploited pockets of neglect to mutate into the magic combination that now appears can evade even fully vaccinated people’s immunity. It turns out that sometimes doom and gloom scaremongering is not just a recreational pastime, a performance piece by ‘experts’ designed to ‘curtail our liberties’ – it is simply speaking the truth. And now we are almost back to square one in developed nations (and even worse off everywhere else).

Living through history is difficult: sometimes I can see the forest, and other times it’s all trees. On days that I don’t commute into the lab, I take the long way home after dropping off my son at school, trudging up to the top of Windmill Hill with its spectacular view of the Estuary Thames as it winds past the Port of London Authority, flanked by Tilbury Docks. Great seagoing vessels pause there awhile on their journeys, dwarfing the warehouses, rooftops and church spires while themselves dwarfed by the giant wind turbines dotting this serpentine zone of grey industrialisation. The morning skies have been streaked with lilac and coral, setting off the skeletal reticulated silhouettes of the horse chestnut trees. With breath fogging and fingers numb inside gloves, frosted grass crunching underfoot, the raw air reminds me of the fact that I am alive, that neither me nor my family has been rendered seriously ill, that I still have a job and plenty of money to live comfortably.

I think how the pandemic has reshaped some of the patterns of my life. In the Before Times I would never have dared to spare fifteen minutes out of my busy morning to clear my head and remind myself that there is a world outside of my work. I wouldn’t be so in shape if lockdown hadn’t encouraged me to get more serious about keeping fit, a habit that I now carve out time to maintain. And I’m eating healthier food, and trying to spend more time with my family, and I live in an almost perpetual state of thankfulness for all that I have.

Small boy with Xmas tree

Leading an undergraduate intercalated BSc course and revamping it almost from scratch has been challenging and rewarding, but it killed my summer and turned my autumn into a blur of stressful deadlines, one after the other in a relentless assault. Yet because of my enhanced pandemic perspective, all I can be is grateful. This will pass, and Britain may lock down once again, but Christmas will come and my family will be together.

This weekend, we bought a Danish fir tree and have taken down all the old boxes from the loft – more tape than cardboard by now and lined with newspapers bearing decades-old headlines (in both English and Dutch) – containing the precious family ornaments and relics. These, and the annual rituals, give us continuity, binding together our history with that of our families past. Richard ferments the eggnog and makes homemade mince pies and sausage rolls; Joshua and I bake the julpepparkakor and play four-handed carol duets on the piano. I fashion wreathes from fir offcuts and sprigs of holly and ivy from the garden, and bring out the narcissus bulbs I’ve been forcing in the garage. We light candles against the darkness and hope for better days – but the days we have together already are almost too good to be true.

Posted in Academia, Domestic bliss, Epidemics, Teaching, The profession of science, Work/life balance | 1 Comment

In which academic dreams come true: a belated professorship

Posted on July 30, 2021 by Jennifer Rohn

Lab scene

I have wanted to be a scientist since before I can remember.

I did all the right things: I studied hard, finished my homework, raised my hand in class, failed to hide the fact that I loved learning, even though the other children teased me for it – and worse. (Those Hollywood movies about the cruelty of the American school system? It’s all true.) I didn’t care. I was going to become a scientist one day, even though no one in my family had ever earned a PhD, and even though I had never met any scientists, let alone a female one. I’d only encountered them on the page, in the novels I devoured, teetering-library-stackfuls at a time. These characters were heroic and colorful, leading the sort of exciting lives that seemed so far away from suburban existence in small-town Ohio.

I was going to be a scientist one day, even though I constantly received pushback: the well-meaning high school guidance counsellor who suggested that nursing might be more “appropriate”. The male senior researcher in a summer lab internship at the National Institutes of Health who sneered that women made terrible scientists, and convinced the boss to redirect me from experiments to photocopying journal articles for him. Years later as a postdoc, the lab heads who told me I wasn’t cut out for academia because I had outside interests in writing, public engagement and activism. I’m sure they thought they were being kind, doing me a favor. Tough love.

Every time I hit setbacks, or I was told I couldn’t do it, I tried harder. At university, when I couldn’t get a lab job, I got a part-time position scrubbing shit from mouse cages, just so I could wear a white coat and be closer to action. In senior year when I didn’t get into any of the biomedical research labs for my Honors project, I persuaded a new group leader to let me work on plant genetics. Even that NIH internship didn’t happen straightaway; the summer before I’d papered my CV all over the Bethesda campus, but the only job offer I received was in the Health and Safety department. I took it anyway (and had a blast, teaching myself C from Kernighan and Ritchie and doing all sorts of bizarre odd jobs with my newfound programming skills).

The very worst set-back of all was after such a promising start – a PhD from the University of Washington, a postdoc in a prestigious London lab and a group leader position in biotech – it all unravelled in just a few months. The biotech bubble burst, I was made redundant and was on the dole in Amsterdam. The few interview offers I did receive dried up after my unemployment was official, and I was forced to go into scientific publishing to put food on the table. I don’t regret this now, as I learned a tremendous amount during those times. I wrote novels, I started a freelance writing career that continues to this day, I helped launch new journals, I found out what I was made of. But at the time it was devastating, and for several years afterwards I suffered from depression and a complete lack of self-confidence. Being a scientist had become my identity; now that had been stripped away, what was left?

Of course you all know how the story ends. I made it back into academia eventually, even though it took years to find my true calling. Re-starting a scientific career with no prior line of research to build on, in a new discipline where you don’t know anyone and no one knows you, is a very lonely business. For me, the worst was the sensation of having been left behind. First it was seeing postdocs with whom I’d shared a lab become professors. Then it was PhD students I’d supervised. I knew I was swirling in the dust when the PhD student of a PhD student I’d supervised became a professor too. When I ran into such former colleagues at conferences, I always felt awkward and embarrassed, even though I was sure they weren’t aware of how lowly I felt, and wouldn’t have dreamt of judging me. To them, I was that interesting person who’d published novels and organized a memorable political demonstration. But inside, I was the failed scientist who didn’t even have a permanent position, who was surfing, hard and desperate, on a wave of rolling short-term contracts, who was kidding herself, who wasn’t doing justice to the second chance she’d been given. I even allowed myself to be bullied on several occasions because deep down, I thought I deserved it.

Fast forward to today, a full fifteen years after re-starting my academic career. It is only now that I finally feel like I belong, and deserve, to be running a lab. I lead with a light but steady hand, confident in my choices; I have a clear scientific vision; I am respected in my new field. I play a pivotal role in the university. It hasn’t always been smooth sailing – a shocking and protracted incidence of collegial abuse a few years ago nearly threw me back into that roiling surf. But I got through it, and kept my head above water, and now I know that such terrible things happen all the time, but the trick is not to let those incidents define you or undermine your confidence or sense of self. The perpetrators are to be pitied, not feared or hated, and one day they will undoubtedly reap what they sow. Meanwhile, it strengthens my resolve to never be the sort of person who seeks to advance themselves by treading on others; to break the cycle of abuse by refusing to be bitter or changed; to encourage my trainees to shine brightly, to become their best possible selves.

Earlier this month, I found out that my promotion bid had been successful, and that from October I will officially be known as Professor Rohn. After all the heartache, obstruction and deviation, it seems almost unbelievable. I think this is why it took me so long to process the information enough to write about it. Somewhere inside me, a young girl is still scrubbing rodent poo from hundreds of cages; as she walks the corridors on her way out, tired and back-sore, she is peering into the brightly lit labs to the left and right and wondering what it would feel like to belong to one of them. But the long-dreamt-of moment has finally arrived. I survived. I made it.

The other day, on a whim, I looked up the sneering senior scientist online and found that he’d vanished without a trace from PubMed within ten years of our encounter.

Yet I am still here. In fact, I’m only just getting started.

Posted in Academia, Careers, Nostalgia, Research, Staring into the abyss, The ageing process, The profession of science, Women in science | 5 Comments

In which summers shrink

Posted on June 27, 2021 by Jennifer Rohn

Academics talk nostalgically about rosy-tinted times of yore when summers meant a lull in lecturing duties.

The months would unfold before you, a vast landscape of research possibilities. It was a time to write papers, craft grants, catch up with the technical literature, come up with new hypotheses, spend more time chatting with your team. It was a time to dream big, and then work out how to make it happen. It was a time to attend conferences – remember those? – and reconnect with your colleagues worldwide. Some of us might even be tempted back into the lab to do a few experiments personally, even though it would open us up to a bit of good-natured ridicule from the younger set.

These days, I fear, are gone for good. Long after the students pack up and scatter to the four winds, academics labour on. First there is the marking, and the mark moderation. Next comes the Exam Boards, and preparing new exam material for the Later Summer Assessment, for all the students who need to re-take. And more marking after that, and the LSA Exam Boards. In the midst of this, there is a new academic year just around the corner. With online materials becoming increasingly prominent, gone are the days when we could just dust off our PowerPoint lectures. Instead, we find ourselves having to update to newer platforms and widgets, adding transcripts to video lectures, developing interactive content, working out better ways to make our teaching engaging and useful. In departments where teaching is expanding, there are new modules to create and populate, and new courses. We have open days to attract new students, and taster days to keep offer-holders interested.

I am not complaining – I love teaching, and I love the fact that my role at the university continues to expand, embedding me more firmly into the fabric of the department. I love working with students and helping them to reach their fill potential. I even like the challenge of juggling teaching with research, alongside the entrepreneurial and engagement activities that I also pursue. It means my days are full-on and always busy, so that the hours fly by – to say nothing of the days, weeks and months. After so many years of not being sure, of exploring the fringes of where a PhD could take you, I have finally found my calling.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t miss that summer lull, when science truly took centre stage, and I could sink into it like a warm bath. These days, it’s just a quick shower – then I’m off to do something else!

Posted in Academia, Careers, Nostalgia, Research, Students, Teaching, The ageing process, The profession of science | Comments Off on In which summers shrink

In which normal life flickers just ’round the corner

Posted on April 10, 2021 by Jennifer Rohn


Today on a neighbourhood walk with my son, blustery and cold with a few flecks of rain, we passed a window that still had a faded child-drawn rainbow and the advice to “stay safe”. It struck me as rather quaint, like a decades-old newspaper you might find lining a crate of belongings in the attic. A world that was once new and perilous had evolved into a blasé shrug of familiarity.

It’s been more than a year since I first started being a scientist from home – aside from those brief few weeks in summer when the first pandemic wave had subsided enough for lab heads to be allowed to make an appearance. Even then, it was only a few days a week, since my officemate and I were not allowed to be in the room at the same time. With face-to-face meetings forbidden, I found myself sitting in my office all alone attending the same online meetings I could just as easily have done from home – with better coffee. And the three hour round-trip commute was costing me about £25 for the privilege of those hours being subtracted from my work time.

Like many other people in many other privileged professions, my dining room table has become a nerve center of focused and productive activity, and my HD webcam, a window into the exotic dining rooms, studies and bedrooms of other similarly fortunate colleagues. I have written successful grants, aced two funding interviews, reviewed and submitted papers, examined a PhD candidate, and forged several exciting new collaborations with scientists and clinicians I’ve never met in person. I’ve co-presided over an international conference, given hundreds of media interviews, filmed hours of teaching videos and taught ‘live’ many hours more. I’ve interviewed and hired a post-doc I’d never seen in real life. I’ve sat through faculty meetings, committees and webinars, given undergraduate office hours, and held weekly meetings and one-on-ones with my research team.

Each day, I’ve surfaced to take a little walk around the back garden for some fresh air. I watched summer fade to autumn, the great twisted willow tree losing its leaves all over the stone paths and the sycamore helicopters invading from the nearby park, showers of whirligig seeds that soon sprouted in the tubs of withered courgettes and begonias. Autumn morphed into the longest winter I can ever remember, bitter-cold gloominess relieved by only a few days of patchy snow that the neighbourhood children rubbed off almost immediately from the muddy hillsides. I witnessed the bare earth giving way to snowdrops and crocuses, then to daffodils, hyacinths and cowslips, and now, finally the first tulips and bluebells, unfurling into the near-zero temperatures of a springtime that keeps refusing to come. Our fruit trees and hedgerow are fuzzed with pinkish-white blossoms that fall like snow in the bitter wind.

Yesterday I went into work to get my second COVID vaccine in the hospital staff scheme, and a trip I’d made hundreds of times felt alien. Most of my team were on Easter holiday, but I stepped into the lab anyway, feet planted in what used to be our designated bay (now reassigned for socially-distanced “hot benching” to whomever might book it first.) The greater lab space was empty save for a white-coated researcher I didn’t recognize, who looked up and said “Can I help you?” I held out my hands, unable to find the words. This is my lab. I belong here, even though you’ve ever seen me before. A year in hibernation, taking its toll.

Various signs and portents, from the success of the UK’s vaccination scheme and the flattening of the second wave’s curve, to various hints spotted between the lines of staff bulletins, suggest this strange situation will soon be coming to an end. Any week now, I’ll be packing up my home AV equipment, dropping more than five thousand pounds on a season rail ticket, and ‘real life’ will resume with a judder. I will become far less productive, my foot problems will resume – but I might shed a few of these unwanted lockdown pounds, and I will be able to look my team in the eye.

I am not entirely sure how I feel about the closing of this chapter. But close it will, and I will be blown along with it, like those petals and sycamore seeds, waiting to find out what the new season holds.

Posted in Academia, Epidemics, Research, The profession of science, Work/life balance | Comments Off on In which normal life flickers just ’round the corner

In which we near end-game

Posted on February 23, 2021 by Jennifer Rohn

Sight for sore eyes

January and February are always my least favorite months, but I can’t remember a winter when I longed for spring as desperately as this one. It’s the pandemic, of course, which has sucked the world dry of what little joy remains, damp and grey and interminable.

Locked down and stultifying in the sameness of life, I did what I could to appreciate what pleasures were to be had. The scent of an old winter-flowering arrowwood tree over a neighbor’s fence, a powerful mix of cinnamon and daffodil. (The next day I bought two specimens to plant in my own garden.) The deeply colored yellow berries on our pyracantha shrub, picked clean in one afternoon by a migrating family of redwings. When we had our few days of annual grudging snow, we were out at the crack of dawn scraping the hill down to the mud with our sledges.

But what I have really been pining for are the spring bulbs. The wait for the first green spears to appear is agonizing, but then it seems like another eternity before they finally flower. At least you can say this for the daffodils, tulips and hyacinths, which are stately and slow. The snowdrops and crocuses seem to pop up and bloom out of nowhere, unless you really have your eye in. It’s all go now, with new beautiful flowers appearing every day, unstoppable. During a recent tromp in the muddy woods, the loam was pierced with a thousand nascent bluebells. The ornamental cherry and apricot tree in our back garden are about to unfurl pink blossoms; the furry magnolia flowers will follow soon after.

And high above, the great tits sing “Peter Peter Peter” with a tenor that you only ever hear when the worst is over.

After the nature walk

Joshua’s home-schooling is much better organized this time around, but it’s still difficult to juggle everything. I do miss the intensity of the first lockdown, when we were largely on our own and I had to come up with what to teach him. I was reminded of those days when we took a little nature walk last week as a break from school and work. I taught him all the bird calls we could hear, and the names of a few trees. When we got home, he sketched the birds he’d heard, using Collins as a guide. These are things that would probably not happen were it not for lockdown.

So, the end is near, as the UK vaccination programme rolls on successfully. Unless something terrible happens with new variants of the virus, schools will re-open in two weeks, restrictions will gradually ease thereafter, and normal life is set to resume in June. It has been so many months that I wonder how long we will still feel the rub of the cage bars once we are freed. What scars will linger? How will it affect us long-term? For the moment, we can only hope that soon this impossibly long year will fade into memory, that brighter days truly are ahead.

Posted in Domestic bliss, Epidemics, Gardening, Joshua, Work/life balance | Comments Off on In which we near end-game

In which life imitates art, and an epidemic leaps off the page

Posted on December 29, 2020 by Jennifer Rohn

In mid-November, a journalist from BBC Southeast contacted me about a perplexing rise in COVID-positive cases in the nearby borough of Swale, a mainly rural part of Kent known for its fruit orchards, beer hops and vast areas of marshland within the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The borough is dominated by windswept fields and open land dotted with the occasional factory or wind turbine – isolated and underpopulated. As the journalist remarked, it seemed an unlikely place to be incubating a mass of new infections compared with its mighty neighbour, London.

But incubating it certainly seemed to be. He quoted a concerning figure: at the beginning of September, the rate was just 6.7 cases per 100,000 people, yet it now stood at 531. The epicentre seemed to be the Isle of Sheppey, which protrudes out into the North Sea, separated only by the swathe of water that bears the borough’s name.

Later on, after pouring over the most recent maps, I speculated to the presenter on air that perhaps the surge was connected with the commuter belt, as it did seem to hug the High Speed 1 rail line all the way down to Ashford. But that didn’t entirely make sense – if the source were London, then why wasn’t London also as badly afflicted? The presenter wondered if it could all be down to risky behaviour – but it seemed unlikely to me that one small, relatively sparsely populated part of the UK could be breaking the rules enough to explain those numbers.

Of course we all know now what was happening: a new virus variant, B.1.1.7, had arisen, after evolving mutations that increased its ability to transmit from one person to the next. Being much more contagious, it resisted the second lockdown and the Tier 3 restrictions that followed, rapidly replacing the previous circulating strain. Just a handful of mutations, some of them in the Spike gene, was all it took – fast-forward to just before Christmas, when the variant had begun to dominate in London, the rest of the Southeast and East England as well, and over forty other nations slammed their borders to UK travellers, causing chaos at ports and leaving hundreds of lorry drivers stranded for days. Now the new strain has been identified in other countries and is probably unstoppable, the only saving grace being that it seems neither to cause worse disease nor to render the current vaccines useless. Yet.

Decades before all of this, when I started thinking about the plot of my third novel, Cat Zero, I wanted to discuss virus evolution in an entertaining context that did not diminish the science needed to track and understand it. Of course I knew a lot about virus evolution from my PhD work on feline leukemia virus, which involved six years painstakingly identifying and characterizing point mutations, insertions and deletions accrued in Envelope (the virus outer protein analogous to the COVID Spike) during the course of infection in live safari cats. Less familiar with epidemiology, I had a few chats with my friend Bill Hanage, now a famous scientist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School, who advised me on some terminology and methods that I could adapt for my narrative. (This included using R0 as impenetrable jargon – which thanks to the pandemic is now, unhelpfully, a household term.)

When I was deciding on the epicentre for my fictional cat epidemic, I looked at a map of Southeast England and chose the most remote and unlikely place I could find: a small island called Sheppey, separated from the mainland by a wash of sea known as the Swale and connected by only one road bridge. It was a perfect place for a fictional epidemic to be initially “containable”. I pinpointed the first case, my “cat zero”, to a small bungalow on Seaside Drive in the town of Minster. When my protagonist, a troubled but talented scientist, took on the case following alarming reports from local veterinarians, she was soon hot on the trail of a series of mutations that seemed to be propelling the workaday feline virus into an increasingly worrisome direction.

Every time I look at a case map of England and see the dark purple stain spreading outward from Sheppey, I think about life imitating art. One day, after the story has reached its denouement and we re-surface into real life, we will look back on this strange chapter of history, a selective narrative fractured through the prism of a million different perspectives. What I will take away is the sheer heroism of all the scientists who raced against time to save us, even in the face of public misunderstanding and sometimes even abuse. My hope is that we will remember the lessons of this pandemic well enough to apply them swiftly and decisively against whatever plague comes next – and that instead of slashing research funding and pandemic readiness systems as before, we will increase the scientific resources and infrastructure necessary to craft a happier ending.

Posted in Epidemics, LabLit, science funding, The profession of science, Writing | 5 Comments