{"id":691,"date":"2009-01-05T22:27:49","date_gmt":"2009-01-05T22:27:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2009\/01\/05\/in_which_i_shed_my_lingering_frugality\/"},"modified":"2009-01-05T22:27:49","modified_gmt":"2009-01-05T22:27:49","slug":"in_which_i_shed_my_lingering_frugality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2009\/01\/05\/in_which_i_shed_my_lingering_frugality\/","title":{"rendered":"In which I shed my lingering frugality"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is nothing like coming back from an extended holiday to force you to take stock of your various research projects. This morning, after braving the iced pavements, flurries of snow and Underground carriages full of bewildered commuters who seemed, like me, to have lost their killer instinct after a few weeks of relaxation, I opened up my lab notebook and tried to remember just what it was that I had been so excited about<\/a> on my last day. After a few minutes of desultory page-flipping, it was clear that I needed to collect my diffuse thoughts into one big List.<\/p>\n

\nFor me, list-making is a ritual event, but there is a definite activation energy barrier involved in getting down to it. So after morning coffee, I found myself engaging in what psychologists call redirected response<\/em> behaviors. Like all the other cell biologists in the building, I made the new year’s pilgrimage to the kitchen and signed out a fresh bottle of medium, which I supplemented and filtered with great fanfare (after scraping a holiday’s worth of algae out of the suction traps). I thawed out cells. I cleaned off my bench and ethanol-wiped December’s orders from the white board. I chatted to people in the corridors who wanted to congratulate me about the effusive review<\/a>)01571-7 of my novel in Cell<\/em>. I took tea in the common room and listened to Martin Raff, our beloved professor emeritus, hold court in his characteristic Alan Alda drawl about the psychological motives of Bernard Madoff<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\nFinally, I could put it off no longer. The notebook was reopened and I doggedly wrote down headers for every minor project currently ongoing \u2013 about ten in all \u2013 before trying to scribble out exactly what remained to be done for each one. Although I’ve got plenty of loose ends to tie up for a manuscript, it was difficult to keep my mind from compassing in on the new exciting result. Soon I found myself faced with the need to shop: after a certain point, you need to know where your protein is expressed and what other protein partners it is flirting with. Although I am classed as a post-doc as far as the university is concerned, I am actually a Principal Investigator in the eyes of the Wellcome Trust, who have allotted me a generous consumables budget. The time had come: after a year of caution and frugality, I suddenly realized that the answer would come a lot more quickly if I finally got down to spending it.<\/p>\n

\nDear Reader, I did splash out on that antibody. What’s more, it felt damned good, and tomorrow, I sense that I will be spending even more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is nothing like coming back from an extended holiday to force you to take stock of your various research projects. This morning, after braving the iced pavements, flurries of snow and Underground carriages full of bewildered commuters who seemed, … 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-691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691","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=691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}