{"id":652,"date":"2008-06-08T19:33:24","date_gmt":"2008-06-08T19:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2008\/06\/08\/in_which_an_anniversary_passes_unremarked\/"},"modified":"2008-06-08T19:33:24","modified_gmt":"2008-06-08T19:33:24","slug":"in_which_an_anniversary_passes_unremarked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2008\/06\/08\/in_which_an_anniversary_passes_unremarked\/","title":{"rendered":"In which an anniversary passes unremarked"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past Friday, though I didn’t realize it until well after midnight, marked my completion of a full year back in the lab. Time, as it always seems to do these days, has sped by more quickly than I would have thought possible, so much so that I have difficulty now remembering how it felt to be on the cusp<\/a> of leaving the safety and security of an editorial universe for something much more tenuous.<\/p>\n

\nMy experience of returning to the lab has been an exercise in how not to take anything for granted. I can still acutely recall how it felt last year, in the bleak midwinter of 2007, when I had decided to go back to the bench but had only the faintest hope of achieving that goal. My scientific self then was still very much unallayed by four years in publishing, and it bled through in a thousand tiny examples. You could see it in the way I would measure water to the meniscus, and flour to the nearest tenth of a gram decimal place, when loading up the bread maker, and in how I experienced a twinge every time did so, remembering the life I had lost. Filtering my world through a scientific lens was not something that ever left me, even as my days were filled not with discovery, but tedious office politics, reams of manuscripts, freelance writing and all the other mundane trappings of a life more ordinary.<\/p>\n

\nMy enthusiasm may not have been blunted, but once I arrived back in the lab it became painfully obvious that the practical day-to-day skills of scientific research had grown rusty over the years, muscle memory<\/a> notwithstanding. In fact, I would say it is only in the past few months that I have finally felt like my old self. I had to retrain myself to read papers like a scientist instead of an editor; to multitask experiments instead of doing them one at a time. Every time the twists and turns of my project led me to a different technique, I would hit the wall of yet another approach that I used to command without thinking but which I could now no longer remember how to approach. Having been unable to locate my old mildewing protocols and notebooks in the loft, I would be reduced to scouring the internet or pestering friends to remind me how to prepare a gradient gel or make a stable cell line. Surprisingly, it was the need to do mathematics that revealed the biggest gaps in my memory but, like anything else, if you don’t exercise your skills, they become flabby. And over the past year I have plowed through the calculations until they have again became second nature. A year on, I no longer walk into the common room and feel like an impostor.<\/p>\n

\nIt is a cool twilight in my garden, and my skin is still faintly tingling from the doses of solar radiation I took earlier. Blackbirds twitter, swifts cry overhead, a cloud-colored crescent moon hangs over the rooftops. I don’t know what will happen when my fellowship runs out in early 2012, but that doesn’t matter at the moment. For now, I am a scientist again, and I’m not ever going to take that for granted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past Friday, though I didn’t realize it until well after midnight, marked my completion of a full year back in the lab. Time, as it always seems to do these days, has sped by more quickly than I would … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}