Glancing at the calendar this morning, in these holiday-stagnant, seminarless summer weeks in the lab, I realized that I am coming up to the midway point of my current research appointment. Like that strange illusion of endless summer that most American kids probably experience when school breaks for three months in June, January 2012 seems like a long way off to me. For me, here, I’m still a child in July: the summer birds yet linger, the goldenrod has not yet started to bloom and the evenings continue to glow right up to bedtime.<\/p>\n
\nToday, I exist as a pure research being: setting my own agenda, following the science where it leads. I have a salary, a secure semi-independent affiliation, a generous consumables budget and no obligation to write grants. But sure as the leaves will turn gold, the geese will fly and the mornings will become edged with that perfect crisp coldness, this dreamy period is bound to end. And when the metaphorical autumn comes, I will need to have published a few decent papers if I want to carry on in my new\/old profession. <\/p>\n
\nPublication: it’s been weighing heavily on my mind these past few days. Because I was re-entering research after a four-year career break, it took nearly a year for me to get up to speed. Yes, I orchestrated three very large screens and generated quite a number of solid results in that time, but it took a good dozen months for my brain to re-engage with the knowledge and skills needed to truly hit my stride. And for the subsequent six months, instead of tidying up the unexciting loose ends needed to dispatch my screening paper to the Great Beyond, I’ve been testing the biological promise of a select few key hits that came out. To be sure, I need a bit of biology to elevate the screen to a publishable level, but the characterization has been led more by excitement and instinct than by strategic, manuscript-style thinking. In other words, I have been chasing glimpsed hares through the forest rather than herding my data like sheep.<\/p>\n
\nMy boss isn’t helping. He’s been urging me drop everything and tackle those promising leads, the genes that might reveal not just small cogs, but entire machines. And he’s right: this is the fun part, and the activity most likely to lead to the sort of high-profile papers I will need to compete. But personally, I don’t like unfinished business. If something needs to be written up, it really ought to go out the door. Besides a splash of biology, closing the deal will require a lot of hard, unexciting work: analysis, statistics, the tidying up of annotation. Pie-graphs. Lists. Supplementary data. Cajoling a major co-author who’s understandably distracted by a new lab, a new project. Long hours staring at Excel spreadsheets and MetaMorph screen review apps.<\/p>\n
\nReally, I ought to be able to do both: devoting a large fraction of my time to sheep-herding, chasing a few hares where I can. And I keep saying I will \u2013 <\/p>\n
\n\u2013 after the next fun experiment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Glancing at the calendar this morning, in these holiday-stagnant, seminarless summer weeks in the lab, I realized that I am coming up to the midway point of my current research appointment. Like that strange illusion of endless summer that most … Continue reading