Mind the Gap

British academia runs on tea.

It’s true. I’d forgotten what it’s like to work in a scientific university environment in this green and pleasant land. The entire building seems to decamp to the tea room as a ritual occasion, once at mid-morning and again around three in the afternoon. A fair few can be seen lingering with an after-lunch cuppa as well, and the kettle in our study room is boiling pretty much constantly.

Thought facilitator or pesky distraction?

The tea culture is a steamy reflection of the underlying stretched-out time frame behind all the hard work going on. After a few years in a rather formal, nine-to-five, constrain-your-lunchbreak-to-an-hour-or-else office environment, the relaxed atmosphere of academia is a bit of a shock. Nobody cares what you wear; nobody cares what time you come in or leave. Nobody cares if you check your email or book a holiday or read the BBC website or nip out to the post office on ‘company time’. There is no company. There is only the organic whole of the laboratory, whose clock is individual and self-wound. People might be in the lab from ten until midnight, but the amount of actual lab work going on is nowhere near as long. There is time for reflection; time to chat with colleagues; time to sit in on the many seminars and group meetings going on. And time, of course, for another cup of tea.

After a month, I’m still not quite into the swing of it. If the Tube has problems and it starts looking as if I’ll arrive later than my (self-imposed) 9:30 target, my heart begins to race with anxiety: the phantom weight of corporate disapproval, bearing down on me. I still feel guilty taking the occasional peek at my personal email, and I can’t seem to get out of the habit of eating a sandwich at my desk while working at the computer instead of hanging out in the common room with the others, or skipping lunch altogether. I try to work hard and stay focused while I am there, and so far, with only a few exceptions, I’ve managed to leave eight or nine hours after I arrive. And no weekends. Even so, I think it’s entirely possible that I am getting as much done as everyone else.

Gone are the days of eighty-hour-a-week stints in the lab, for me. I’m at the age now when I realize that you can compress a lot of effort into a smaller amount of time, and what is important in life is to carve a space for yourself outside of work, to defend it rigorously, and to not let yourself be seduced by the siren call of “just one more quick experiment”. And just as importantly, I have learned not to care what other people might think when I am always the first to walk out the door.

Like tea, obsessive long-hours research is highly addictive. But I’m confident I can kick at least one of these habits.

Some of you may already have heard through the London grapevine about the plans Wynn Abbott (as director of SciCult) and I (as editor of LabLit) have cooked up to hold a competition entitled Stripping Off the White Coat. We got some good coverage from the Guardian on Tuesday, and now it’s all hands on deck to make this event happens on schedule.

Good clean fun

It’s all in our press release, but basically, Wynn and I got to chatting at one of the Nature Network drink sessions down at The Lamb. Somewhere between our second and third pint, we realized we were both deeply perplexed that the basic design of the white coat has remained unchanged for more than a century, especially considering how radically science itself, to say nothing of society and fashion, has evolved. (OK, at some point the coats did start sporting snaps instead of buttons, but that hardly counts as a couture innovation.)

White coats do absolutely nothing to flatter either male and female figures; they are eminently unsexy and their lack of color amplifies every stain. More subversively, they perpetuate boffin stereotypes, while forcing a homogeneous, drab image onto people who tend to be, collectively, diverse, colourful and individual.

So SciCult and LabLit are challenging fashion designers, from students all the way up to celebs, to reinterpret lab coats for the 21st century. The brief: the coats must still discharge a protective function, but they must also be fun, fresh, sexy and original in design (like, for example, one of the conceptual sketches above, kindly knocked up by Vera Bravo, a talented London freelance illustrator).

We will make a formal call for designs within the next few months and our panel of judges will make a decision on the shortlist in autumn. If all goes to plan, we will coordinate with London Fashion Week in Spring 2008 and host a gala catwalk event at which the overall winner will announced. In addition to the main prize, we will also give out awards for the best accessories, such as gloves, masks and safety googles.

If anyone’s interested in getting involved or needs more information, let Wynn or me know!

So come on, people, pimp my coat! I’m tired of putting on the same old stained, shapeless one every morning.

Tomorrow marks the end of my first month in the lab. You might expect me to report that the time has flown. But in truth, I have lived through each minute in painstaking real-time, and not all of it has been comfortable.

I never thought it would be easy, returning to a world I’d left behind. I’ve already shared with you the obvious, predictable problems: forgetting how to perform routine tasks; struggling to learn the facts and nomenclature underpinning an entirely new biological field; relearning how to think and read like a scientist instead of an editor.

But there have been things that have caught me off guard. Some, I am even ashamed to admit. For example, I’ve never been very good at mental arithmetic on the fly, being one of these sorts who always aced the English standardized tests but struggled more with the quantitative ones. I can do math well, but I require peace, quiet, time and a pencil to make it happen. So having to participate in rapid-fire conversations about complex robot-controlled nanomolar RNA-array plating schemes is proving challenging. Bioinformatics, too, has changed tremendously; a dozen or more whole-genome sequences later, I find myself unarmed for the current fray and hazy about the arsenal of tools that have sprung up online, rendering BLAST a quaint relic from bygone days.

“Just stop and ask,” my labmates, quite sensibly, advise. “Nobody is expecting you to master all this in two seconds.” But I, stubbornly, would prefer to hide my occasional inner panic from those higher up who might judge me. I’m not sure if it’s pride, or an innate sense of survival, but I need to appear at least nominally in control.

And yet. Amidst all this confusion during my journey up the steep learning curve, yesterday a glimmer of hope crossed my path. I was loading the PCR machine when someone from the adjacent lab came up bearing interesting tidings.

“Did you know,” she said, “that you’re at the lucky bench?”

When I shook my head, she added, “Everyone who’s ever worked at that bench has got a Cell paper. Absolutely everyone. So you’re bound to be next.”

Who am I to argue with my fate?

I have often thought about what it might have been like to have lived through pivotal years when scientific thinking or practice was undergoing a period of intense change. To have been a scientist in 1859 when Darwin’s Origin of Species was first published, say, and to find your frame of references turned completely upside-down, picked apart and stitched back together in some velvet-lined Victorian salon. Or to have been involved in the birth of molecular biology in the 1940s and 50s, seeing the light in a petri plate full of phage plaques and telling the world about your findings on a dusty chalkboard at Cold Spring Harbor or the Institute Pasteur.

Those were the days…

Although I must have always known it intuitively, it only dawned on me a few days ago that modern scientific progress is always in the midst of change. It just occurs so gradually that we realize it only in retrospect. Looking back on my career now, I recall a few moments of fumbling in the dark, working on things before the truth was revealed. As an undergraduate back in the 1980s, for example, I did a summer stint at the National Institutes of Health, trying to understand why certain strains of human papillomavirus could transform cervical epithelial cells. We knew it was down to the viral proteins E6 and E7, but nobody had a clue why. And I have a distinct memory of feeling almost overwhelmed by a black universe of ignorance – it didn’t matter how many plates of cells I forced through the FACS machine or peered at down the microscope: we would never really know what was going on. We had no purchase, no frame of reference: HPV’s transformational properties were practically magical – it might as well have been raw meat spontaneously generating into maggots.

And then, of course, people worked out how the viral proteins bound to the cellular tumor suppressors p53 and Rb a few years later, and it all turned into humdrum textbook material. And now, when we discover new transforming agents, we have an arsenal of reagents to fall back upon – ignorance isn’t a universe, just a temporary and easily-remedied set-back. Thinking objectively, I honestly don’t think it was my immaturity that made me feel so lost at sea; I genuinely think that when it comes to molecular cell biology, we now know enough to be within spitting distance, at any one time, of all known pathways or effectors. We may not have the complete Google-Earth view, but we certainly have a low-resolution roadmap of how the cell works. And it just wasn’t like that in the 1980s. Hey presto – I have lived the before-and-after of the recombinant DNA era. Post-genomics, ditto. Someday, two hundred years hence, some scientist may be thinking nostalgically about the years that passed me by without their significance even registering.

It’s not just knowledge that accrues unawares. Technology, too, ticks steadily onward while you aren’t looking. On Friday, I watched a colleague prepare to do a Western blot. But instead of assembling an SDS-PAGE gel from scratch, she reached for a ready-made version sealed in foil, shelf life approximately six months. Now, this stuff was available when I last did research four years ago, but it hadn’t yet gone mainstream, and we certainly didn’t have any in our lab. Now, nobody bothers making it themselves, and all I could think was, Thank god. Yes, I’m afraid that pouring acrylamide gels is not something I can say I missed during my editorial sabbatical.

Maybe the biggest change I have lived through, technologically speaking, was the transformation of DNA sequencing from do-it-yourself to outsourced. When I was a Ph.D. student in Seattle in the early 1990s, I wanted to understand how feline leukemia virus envelope genes mutated. To do this, I had to sequence the envelope gene (all 2100 base-pairs of it) of viruses I cloned from various infected cats and different time points, over and over and over again. For four years. Effectively, this meant that every day, I was pouring a big, thin acrylamide gel (remember how fiddly that was?), doing radioactive sequencing reactions via the dideoyl chain-termination method, electrophoresing the previous day’s reactions, developing the film from two days before and (worst of all) manually entering all the sequences into the computer for alignment. The G, C, A and T keys of my Mac SE were visibly more weathered than all the others, and in a few months I found I had memorized entire stretches of the wild-type FeLV envelope gene by heart.

At one point, my Ph.D. supervisor noted my passage through a momentous milestone: I, like her, was a member of the One Megabase Club. Did I pause to celebrate? No, I was too busy silanizing my plates and de-gassing my gel solution.

Of course, all this should inspire us to try to guess what routine technique that we all do today might be passé in ten years’ time, or what stubborn barriers in our knowledge will be knocked through. Stuck in the present tense, though, we can only wonder.

On Friday, I began my first experiment in over four years.

Now, my normal inclination when planning an experiment is to squeeze in as many samples as humanly possible. And this, to be layered on top of a week’s worth of multi-tasking, leaving me with multiple experiments on the go and an absolute reliance on three-channel timers and copious lists to keep me sane. With due consideration of my long hiatus, I showed what I thought was a ridiculously stripped-down plan to the lab’s two leading experts on Drosophila cell culture RNAi: a pilot tissue culture experiment with a mere eight samples.

Tissue culture: the most fun you can have in a lab coat

I waited expectantly as the Ph.D. student studied my scribbles. But then he slowly started shaking his head.

“Your first experiment in four years?” he said dubiously. “Only four wells, maximum. Get rid of half of this.”

“Really?” I wanted to protest – I knew I could easily handle quadruple what I’d settled on – but the post-doc was nodding her head in agreement, and I found myself outvoted. Feeling like a lowly undergraduate rotation student again, I slunk back to my desk to drink coffee and get rid of four samples from my master plan.

When the time came, I was nearly tingling with anticipation. Remember, none of this was going to feel real until I had started actually working in the lab. In the past few days, one by one, the other lab denizens had finished unpacking and had started unfreezing and splitting cells, flipping flies, resuming their arrested work from a fortnight ago, gradually spending more and more time at their benches. I wanted to be part of it all.

I put on my purple nitrile gloves and a lab coat and began, shadowed by the very patient post-doc. Fetching ice, pulsing down the double-stranded RNA tubes, choosing which fly cell cultures looked the healthiest – and then I was sitting in front of the flow cabinet, ready to go.

Muscle memory?. It’s an absolute miracle. The minute I began to work, I felt like I was possessed by my former self – calm, poised, confident as I manipulated flasks, tubes, lids, hemocytometer, executed sterile technique, all free and easy as if in a dream. Where was all this coming from? What neuronal connections were being prodded from their long slumber – oi! wake up, she’s at it again. Why did the actions come so easily, when the facts and figures had been so recalcitrant and sluggish? Is it somehow more evolutionarily adaptive to remember how to do instead of how to write and speak?

Well, it seemed easy enough. But all bets are off if my cultures are contaminated on Monday.

This past Friday, my interrupted career as a scientist resumed.

My first day in the lab came equipped with its own intrinsic shock absorber, coinciding as it did with the entire lab moving into a new institute – all of us newbies, on equal footing. But I was rather pleased to be the first to arrive, wandering the corridors and stairwells until I found the space, stacked with moving crates and still littered with the discarded reagents and unwanted equipment of its previous owners. I pulled up a stool and sat down to soak it all it: the empty lab, alive with possibility.

All change: the new lab moves in

The room’s history pressed down on me. The outgoing lab head was a well-known scientist, a tough act to follow and difficult to forget with the momentous surname scribbled over everything not bolted down. To judge by the silence, broken only by the hypnotic hum of fume hoods and refrigerators, I was probably the only person on the entire floor. This was it – I finally internalized that my odd career move was more or less irrevocable. At least for the foreseeable future.

And then one of the Ph.D. students arrived, followed by a post-doc, and another. The dreamlike humming was replaced with laughter and chatter: an entire lab to unpack and set to rights. We were all in it together, wondering where the cold room was, how to order notebooks, on which shelf to store this or that box. I began to accumulate new possessions: pipetting devices, pens, pipette tips, colored tape, a box of nitrile gloves, Eppendorf tubes, test-tube racks. The tools of my trade, still as familiar as my own body. I tried not to let anyone see me turning them over and over in my hands like precious artifacts as I set up my square-meter of bench space in the designated bay, negotiated with my neighbor about placement of gas burners and Vortex mixers. With no accumulated detritus of several years to unpack, like the others, I was put in charge of unloading and alphabetizing the lab chemicals, agarose to citrate to glutaraldehyde to potassium nitrate to sodium chloride to yeast extract, all lined up in neat rows. I had forgotten the way labs smell, acrid with the hundreds of substances only thinly contained. I had forgotten how many times you have to wash your hands, how an entire day can go by without actually sitting down.

Home is where you hang your Gilsons

So now I am a scientist again. How do I feel?

Strange. I lost track of how many times the new institute denizens asked me that routine question, So what lab did you come from? No straightforward way to reply, though I refined my spiel with practice, trying out this or that tack until the balance seemed right. I was amused at how many people seemed horrified: Why would you want to come back?, as if I were some prodigal representative from the World Beyond. (_The same reason you are here_, I yearned to reply but didn’t.) With only one day in the lab before the weekend, mostly spent arranging things, HR induction, touring the building, drinking cocktails with the rest of the institute, it all feels rather dreamlike now. Until I actually perform my first experiment, my occupation will probably retain this sense of being a bit hypothetical. Yet my editorial past feels equally unreal now, four years shed like a flimsy skin.

Where does this leave me? Wide-eyed, ready for whatever might come.

No, I can’t believe it either: exactly one week remains before I re-start my career as a bench scientist. In two day’s time I pack up my desk, bid a tearful, even maternal farewell to my lovely team of young editors and jump ship from science publishing. In the process, I leave behind a permanent position, a managerial role, a predicable career ladder and a comfortable salary. And next Thursday, I wash ashore at a lab in University College London, a newly-minted, badly out-of-practice post-doctoral fellow of molecular genetics with only eighteen months of not-quite-so-comfortable salary guaranteed. Beyond that, the aforementioned void lurks, an omnipresent nothingness in which hardly anything is certain or predictable.

To be honest, though the thought of what happens when I get there, and of my long-term future, is making me sweat a little, what’s truly worrying is the grant application deadline looming just a day after I start. All 33 pages of it. More specifically, the 3,500 word research proposal forming the heart of this not inconsiderable document.

First there are the stakes. This is a four-year fellowship, including a higher salary, travel and consumables. Eighteen months will pass in the blink of an eye, but with four years, I feel confident I can work out my next stepping-stone. As a non-EU citizen on a migrant visa who wants to remain on this fair island, and at my age (39), such considerations are not trivial.

But stakes aside, I seem to be as rusty with the grant-writing process itself as I most likely will prove to be with pipetting devices, microscope and gel apparatus next week.

This rustiness gradually became apparent a few months ago when I started brushing up on my new field. As a ‘civilian’, I was solely dependent on my future lab head to share his literature collection with me. Without a research affiliation, I am effectively the equivalent of a developing-world scientist. In the absence of a single subscription I rely on handouts; also, I find myself gravitating gratefully to the open access green fields of BioMed Central, Public Library of Science and Springer’s Open Choice. For many quick checks, I can only look at abstracts: frustrating.

But the real problem is a mental one. One of the main things you learn as a handling editor is to consider the big picture while more or less discarding the fine details. In essence, your brain becomes a highly trained, large-pore sieve through which the majority of items wash through. A scientific paper is a 6,000 word document of which only a small fraction really counts: the words that tell you why the authors chose to study their particular question; that tell you what, actually, is an advance over what is already known, and why we should care. An incredibly complicated document that must be assessed, digested and classified in a matter of minutes, and I can tell you that such an assessment leaves little room for registering, let along remembering, the little details.

But for a scientist, especially one writing a grant, the details are crucial. And initially, I found myself reading through papers with an editorial agenda, my mind automatically going to the default ‘skim’ mode, eager to race ahead, to discard the acronyms and gene names and conditions in favor of the big picture. At first, I would have to read the same paragraph five times to retain even a fraction of the nitty-gritty. Over the days and weeks, grimly determined, I patiently retrained my brain to absorb like a scientist instead of an editor. I made lots of sketches and penned line after line of questions in the margins – used a highlighter pen as profligately as an undergraduate. I pestered my future lab head by email with silly questions (to his credit, he answered them all with swiftness and good humor). And then I started to write: hesitant paragraphs slowly growing more confident as I got to grips with what it is I want to achieve in a four-year research program. Little by little, the skills come back: hypotheses, controls, caveats, differential outcomes.

And I suppose I am grateful that the grant deadline has made me address all this now. Before I pick up that pipettor and perform my first experiment, I need not only to be manipulating reagents like a scientist, but actually thinking like one.

Those of you who reside in Britain and are staunch Guardian readers will be familiar with the DVDs that come free with the Saturday edition. The films on offer are never interesting enough to entice you buy the paper when you wouldn’t otherwise – with some sort of cinematic karma, for every mildly welcome movie, there’s a particularly naff film like Letter to Brezhnev to balance it out. Still, it’s certainly worth a look before chucking each week’s offing into the bin.

Jaap and me, after our cozy nine minutes together

This Saturday’s edition came with a film whose name did not ring any bells. Eureka, it was entitled, with the strapline The best ideas come from the most unlikely places. God god, could this be about a scientist, some heretofore unrecognized example of ‘lab lit’? My heart rate accelerated ever so slightly. The cover showed a wistful, unshaven, vaguely foreign-looking European man staring into the distance, a background of green fields and mountains behind him. A zoologist, perhaps? Or a botanist? So far, so good.

And then I saw it: the familiar yellow and red logo in the bottom right-hand corner, and the small white print: ‘a Shell Films Production’.

A what?

Flip over the case. The ‘film’ is in fact only nine minutes long. Under a banner stating this to be a story inspired by real events, the synopsis reveals that the story is actually an advert thinly disguised. Chief Shell engineer Jaap van Ballegooijen, who is “passionate about saving the world’s energy resources”, comes up with an idea for a new technology to drill for inaccessible oil after a chance encounter with his son in Amsterdam. The ‘film’, in fact, is clearly a shameless advertisement packaged as fiction.

What the hell, it was only nine minutes – I couldn’t resist. With swelling music that would not be out of place in a Spielberg production, and Dutch subtitles for the cringe-worthy sequences when the intrepid Jaap has to interact with his teenaged boy, it’s made up to look like an arthouse film. But the acting and dialogue are terrible, and the content is sheer propaganda. A journalist who challenges Jaap’s vision of tapping occluded oil is told sharply that there are two sides to every story. Naturally, Jaap assures her, as he grits his teeth heroically out of the helicopter window, this method of scraping yet more oil from the nearly empty reserves is just to tide us over until alternative fuels are ready. Later, back in Amsterdam, when the Coke-drinking, spotty son complains that his father is always off galavanting in tropical countries instead of watching him play football back home, Jaap sharply retorts that he should grow up: geen olie, geen fris (loosely translated as, no oil, no infrastructure that would provide that beverage you’re drinking).

I’m not sure why this DVD annoyed me so much. Maybe it’s because I’ve just returned from an editorial trip to the 29th Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals, where there was a lot of green love in the proverbial room. I guess, mostly, that I am disappointed at the Guardian for peddling this infomercial as part of series in which its readers have grown to expect legitimate fiction. Although the warning signs are all over it if you look closely, in no place is it clearly marked ‘advertisement’ (a required notification had the equivalent fare, in essay form, been printed in the actual paper). Fiction, it seems, has become a clever medium for worming around the devices that protect us from taking self-promotion at face value.

On the lighter side, the DVD also came with extras: a ‘making of’ (all 90 seconds of it) and something alarmingly described as ‘interactive film mind challenges – creative brain teasers’.

I passed on those, needless to say.

(warning: the link to LabLit.com above constitutes shameless self-promotion)

All scientists joke about going ‘over to the Dark Side’ – in other words, leaving academic research for an alternative career. And these days the transit is pretty common. After all, far more scientists are produced than there are permanent positions in which to house them, or grants to fund their experiments. In parallel, the taboos that used to make even mentioning leaving academia a mortal sin have gradually dissipated. University-trained scientists no longer need feel ashamed to reinvent themselves as patent lawyers, biotech team leaders, investment consultants, science writers or editors – it’s all pretty humdrum stuff these days.

Completely adrift

But what about the opposite direction? What about ex-scientists mired over on the Dark Side who decide to go back to research? How common are they?

Or maybe I should be more precise and rephrase the question: how common are we?

Yes, it’s true. I’m leaving science publishing to go back to the lab. Eleven years after earning my PhD and four years after hanging up my trusty pipettor forever (or so I’d assumed), I’m staring destiny in the face. And destiny is an up-and-coming genetics lab at University College London whose head somehow, miraculously, does not mind that I’ve been handling manuscripts for the past few years instead of composing them, that I’m not getting any younger, that I do weird things on the side like edit LabLit, work freelance in science journalism and write laboratory novels. Nor does he mind that I’ve never had Nature paper (except in the Books and Art section), or that the only grants I’m eligible for these days are those designed largely for mothers returning to work. Admittedly, he might have weighed the advantages of having my editorial skills on side to help him navigate his lab’s papers to suitable homes, but that’s a small price to pay for the priceless gesture of being given a chance to return to a career I used to love and never really wanted to leave.

Half of me is terrified, and the other half doesn’t quite believe it’s real. Am I actually abandoning my comfortable permanent position and salary for a universe of uncertainty? Apparently so, for I have accepted an offer, handed in my notice, and have one month left in publishing.

After that – the Void awaits.

I’ll keep you posted.

In this week’s Nature, Sydney Brenner and Richard Roberts lament the ephemeral nature of online information storage, which may lead to irreparable gaps in the anthropological side of the scientific record. In passionate language, they urge scientists to save their notebooks and correspondence and donate them to historians.

Of course I agree that such materials should be preserved, which is probably why I can’t bring myself to throw away the two boxes of gently moulding lab notebooks, spanning thirteen years of research, stashed up in the loft. I’m sure these are not the papers that Brenner and Roberts had in mind, though – they want to preserve the detritus of the Watsons and Cricks of this world, not of ordinary research folk like me.

But then I got to wondering. Why not? My lab notebooks might make pretty compelling reading to some future historian starved for scraps of how 99.9% of (non-celebrity) researchers spent their days and nights in the lab. Why not document the parade of meaningless or ambiguous data that make up most researchers’ records? The ‘non-Eureka moments’, if you will? The missing bands, the sickly cultures, the yeast-infested Petri plates, the unligated plasmids, the blank films? (I am still amazed that I used to carefully, almost lovingly, trim those squares of utterly blank x-ray film and tape them in for the record, as if it wouldn’t have just been enough to write “It didn’t work. Again.”)

And let us not forget the expletives. A good Midwestern American girl, I tried to keep the notebook language polite, but some of my colleagues’ entries rivalled James Kelman’s Booker Prize-winning novel How Late It Was, How Late, which famously used the F-word an average of 25 times a page.

And then of course there are the stains, telling their own poignant tales. I actually have tear-stained pages, produced one evening when I had to go into the lab after a major relationship break-up. Blood, of course (just paper cuts, I hasten to add, as opposed to episodes of violent post-doctoral jealousy). Various laboratory substances: Coomassie blue, methyl red, ethidium bromide pink, bacterial broth brown. I have no doubt that if you checked with a handy Geiger counter, some of the pages would still be faintly radioactive.

Seed magazine might be ahead of the game in this cultural revival. Recognizing the hidden art behind everyday experimental write-ups, one issue last year featured a two-page ‘Anatomy of a scientific notebook’ in which two real notebook pages were reproduced in full size and annotated. The only thing was, this notebook was obviously from outer space. It was written in perfect calligraphy and perfect prose. And not a stain in sight.

So let’s embrace our grungy, mediocre notebooks and preserve them for posterity, even if no historian would touch them with a ten-foot barge pole. Who knows what stories they might one day tell?