{"id":699,"date":"2009-02-16T22:42:24","date_gmt":"2009-02-16T22:42:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2009\/02\/16\/in_which_i_ramp_up\/"},"modified":"2009-02-16T22:42:24","modified_gmt":"2009-02-16T22:42:24","slug":"in_which_i_ramp_up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2009\/02\/16\/in_which_i_ramp_up\/","title":{"rendered":"In which I ramp up"},"content":{"rendered":"

bq. My friend Richard<\/a> and I are moving in perfect reciprocity at the moment, so we thought it would be entertaining to plot our opposing curves simultaneously. I left science publishing to return to the bench, and he’s leaving the bench for a job in the same publishing company where I had my first editorial job. As he winds down in the lab, I find myself ramping up. You can read his side of the story over there<\/a>, and here is mine:<\/em><\/p>\n

\nIt all started on the day I formulated my first real hypothesis<\/a> last December. Up until that point, I’d been working full-time on a large-scale RNAi screen, hoping that some interesting gene would slip through the filter like a fragment of fossilized bone in a sieve of endless sand. It is absorbing work up to a point, but only in the way that hoovering is: there is satisfaction in making each square meter tidy, replacing chaos with order, but your heart doesn’t exactly pound at the thought of finishing the living room and moving on to the kitchen.<\/p>\n

\nBut on that December afternoon, darkness falling around four o’clock and a fierce rain battering the windows of the lab, I saw something amazing in the pattern of green, blue and red in my cells. A few threads clicked into place: my first major hit was starting to look promising. Suddenly a dozen ideas for experiments were tumbling out of my brain, and something very strange began to happen: I felt myself trying to metamorphose into my former self. <\/p>\n

\nWhat did I used to be like? My previous work ethic has been memorialized in the character of Andy in my first novel<\/a>, who spends nearly every waking hour in the lab. When I was a PhD student I subjected myself to regular eighty-hour weeks and never once lost that sense of excitement and enthusiasm about being there. But those are the excesses of youth. Since returning to the bench eighteen months ago, a little wiser and a lot older, I have been very strict about my time, arriving just before ten on the weekdays and leaving by six, and never coming in on weekends. I arranged my manipulations so that they’d run over the weekends and if that didn’t work out, I’d postpone things until Monday. And I did all that without a shred of guilt, and with full support of my boss: I am very efficient when I am in, and do not waste my day with excessive tea or lunch breaks. It all worked really well, and it gave me the time I needed at home to write my novels, edit LabLit<\/a> and do the freelance writing, broadcasting and engagement gigs that needed feeding on the side.<\/p>\n

\nBut ever since my hypothesis, I feel the tidal tug of obsession threatening to shatter my carefully balanced life. Because now, you see, I am doing actual experiments: I am perturbing signal transduction pathways to see how they respond; I am knocking down some genes and over-expressing others to see whether and how my pet protein is involved. I have made an antibody to this protein, and I am probably the first person in the world to see where it is localized in cells \u2013 despite the bioinformaticist’s prediction of nuclear localization and nucleic acid binding, I instead see it packing into discrete globules in the advancing, ruffling front of spreading cells \u2013 exactly where my hypothesis would predict it should be. Now the experiments that I perform answer questions, and lead to more questions, and \u2013 before I know it, six o’clock has arrived and I don’t actually want to leave. In fact, I’ve stayed until seven a few nights recently, and even then I’ve had to force myself to stop. <\/p>\n

\nWhen I first returned to the bench I found it hard to do more than one experiment at a time; now, like Andy in the novel, I am piling them one atop another to see how high the tower can get before it topples. The inevitable failures, which before were just part of the hoovering (like having to pause to empty the filters), in this environment become more frustrating because they keep away the truth for one day longer. Yes, the essence of it is that now, I am starting to care<\/em>. <\/p>\n

\nSomewhere under all the excitement and anticipation is a sense of danger. As much as this feeling reminds me of my youth, and reinforces my decision to return to the lab, I know I will to fight to the death to prevent myself from being sucked under once again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

bq. My friend Richard and I are moving in perfect reciprocity at the moment, so we thought it would be entertaining to plot our opposing curves simultaneously. I left science publishing to return to the bench, and he’s leaving the … 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-699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699","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=699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}