The year of living dangerously–Part 1

As those of you who have been paying attention will realize, I’m changing career next year. This is exciting and scary, which is as it should be. It’s not, actually, the first time I’ve left academentia, and I’d like to tell you a little story about that.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

In the latter half of 1997 I had been in Oxford for ten years, and was looking for a change. My first post-doc had gone reasonably well, but it was time to move on (and get away from the medics who kept cluttering up the lab). I interviewed for four jobs over the space of about three months: the first I thought went well but I didn’t get it (a plant biochemistry project at the John Innes), the second I came second (the chap was very apologetic; wanted to hire me but needed someone with a touch more pre-installed bioinformatic prowess) and the third I was offered. I turned it down: although it was in Cambridge I still thought I could find a plant project.

The fourth application was to a small start-up (yes, redundant, I know) in Cambridge and I heard nothing for weeks. When I’d about given up on them I got an email saying that although I hadn’t made the shortlist the first time around, they wanted to interview me on the strength of my communication skills. Which I remember being slightly odd, but went along anyway, and was offered the job.

The feeling I had on the train back to Oxford, looking out at the harvest, was not dissimilar to that of being on the plane back from London four weeks ago: a slight sadness at the passing of an era; an excitement at the prospect of a new venture; and gibbering terror at the thought of getting everything organized and sorted in time.

My boss was upset that I was leaving. I suspect there was a little bit of jealousy, and disappointment at ‘selling out’. It was only at the end of a rather tedious rant that I received a very grudging ‘congratulations’.

During my notice period I found myself fielding phone calls from the CEO, trying to get me to start earlier than my current contract would allow. He made the point quite forcefully that this was a ‘market-led’ company. As I discovered from Dilbert a few years after I’d left, this is code for ‘we blame our customers for out lack of innovation’. Oh, and ‘we can’t figure out why we’re five years behind the competition’. He had an ‘open-door policy’ and I also had to fill in one of those personality tests (not that, as I was to find out later, they took any notice of it). All these would have made a more mature head send insistent ‘run away, quickly’ signals to its legs and ‘scream, loudly’ signals to its mouth. But what was I to know? I even thought that stock options in an unlisted company wasn’t a bad idea.

And so I started in industry, as a ‘senior scientist’. On a salary that was more than my academic one but certainly well within the dreams of avarice. (According to the psychotic secretary who was employed the year after I started, we were paid ‘industry average’. This was true, as long as you figured academic salaries into the calculation.) We managed to find a nice enough house just south of Cambridge and I started commuting by car, a novel experience for me.

My first task in the new gig was to redevelop a range of manual DNA prep/extraction kits. The company was founded on the basis of a one-tube method of making plasmid DNA from bacterial cultures, but the machine that was supposed to run twelve of these simultaneously in under twenty minutes failed at market launch (because it was crap): so while it was undergoing emergency surgery the company needed to make money some other way. I also had to man the helpdesk and accompany sales reps on site visits to interpret them to the scientists and vice versa. Seeing as we weren’t actually selling much at the time, and only had two sales reps, I was mostly in the lab.

After a couple of months I’d re-vamped the kits to my satisfaction, and tested them against the so-called market leaders. My plasmid method in particular was superior in every way, compared with the brand that starts with ‘Q’ and doesn’t have a ‘u’. Better yield, longer sequencing reads, could use rich broth (2xTY instead of LB, for example) without swamping the matrix, and significantly faster. The only downside was that you had to use a matrix suspension instead of pre-made spin columns: but that helped us keep the price down (I was told that the leading brand cost 18p per prep but retailed at £1.09p. We were cheaper). I even persuaded The Powers That Be to source and include in the kit a collection tube with an extended neck so that you didn’t have to cut the lids off in the centrifuge. It took Qiagen about six years to catch up with that innovation.

My plan for world domination was foiled by the useless marketing division. My kits did not exactly fly off the shelves (although of our two sales reps one smelt like an ashtray and the other seemed to be barely out of nappies). Nonetheless, upper management were impressed with what I’d done and asked me to take on the task of making the AutoCrap(TM) machine (not its real name) ready for market. Two less senior scientists were placed at my disposal and I was told to get on with it.

(To be continued…)