Still life Old natural history drawings continue to resonate

Yesterday I attended an RSA Fellows evening at the Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace. There, we were treated to a private viewing of the superb exhibition Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery, which was assembled by David Attenborough and the Royal Collection curators. (The exhibition is on until 21 September, so if you live in or near London I would highly recommend taking a look. And if you don’t, the accompanying book is lavishly illustrated and well worth the modest price.)

The exhibition was pitched to capture the excitement of enquiry at a time when so much of this planet’s flora and fauna was still unknown to civilization, and spans the 15th through 18th centuries. Many of the drawings and paintings seemed to me as lucid and vital as if they had been created only last week, glowing behind their protective glass like a portal through time and space. In some cases, the species depicted have lapsed into extinction, so the strange connection felt even more imperative.

Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches were an obvious attraction for my inner geek. The Queen owns an astonishing six hundred of his drawings, thanks to the acquisitive instincts of Royal Society founder Charles II, and a few dozen of his best were on display. That anyone could have wrought such fine details using a piece of sharpened red chalk is almost as remarkable as the state of their current preservation. I was in another universe, arrested before oak leaves and filigreed acorns bursting off the page, blackberries swelling on bramble begging to be picked, casual feline poses immediately recognizable to any cat owner. Snapshots from half a millennia ago. Nothing, it seemed, was beyond Leonardo’s shrewd inspection, a drilling down into the essence of life; he could make even the hindquarters of a horse or the dissection of a bear’s paw into a work of art.

Although Leonardo was obviously intended as the headlining act, I think for me, German naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) stole the show. Fascinated with insects and spiders all her life, she went to Surinam in 1699 to document the weird and wonderful species to be found there – a remarkable feat for anyone, let alone a woman at that time. In addition to the published product of this venture, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, she produced deluxe poster-sized watercolors on vellum of many of her compositions (one of which is pictured on the book cover in the image above). For compositions these are: not sketched as seen in the wild, but rendered as idealized tableau of plant and animals in complex and wondrous interactions. For Merian, beauty seemed to encompass death, and death, beauty. I stood entranced before caiman devouring false coral snakes, giant water bugs overpowering tree frogs, a hairy tarantula bringing down a hummingbird, all in deceptively serene Garden of Eden-style backdrops of passion flowers, water hyacinths, pomegranate trees and cassava roots.

The exhibition made me wonder what damage modern technology has done to our appreciation of nature. Of course the camera can render beauty, and remarkably well, but what the naturalists in this exhibition were trying to achieve seems far more than a precise scientific record of their subjects. Yes, they are painstakingly and anatomically correct, but the manner of their presentation – the artistic lens applied, in colors, composition and arrangement – seems to impart an emotion that even the most skilled camera operator would be unable to muster if restricted to real life. And if, like me, you respond to nature as much emotionally as scientifically, this distinction can make a big difference.

Hippie days Spot the blogger in this impromptu gig underneath Mudd Library, circa 1989

I should clarify that I am still a feminist, if you define feminism as the desire to see women enjoy the same opportunities and rewards as men for expending the same amount of effort. I adore men too much to be in the man-hating, bra-burning category, and neither am I a person who deludes herself that women and men are not different. Instead, my feminism these days is lumped into a larger ethos, that of loathing injustice in whatever guise it might take; for example, the thought of earning less pay for doing the same job quite understandably irritates.

Today I had the pleasure of enjoying my first female power lunch since joining the ranks of staff at University College London. Organized by the indefatigable Uta Frith, a well-known developmental psychologist and Fellow of the Royal Society, these lunches take place six times a year at the RS and offer an opportunity for so-called ‘high-flying’ female academics in the sciences to network – so I was thrilled to finally get the nod.

What transpired? We discussed a recent Current Biology article that Professor Frith had sent around for us to read beforehand, a thoughtful and balanced meditation on a female life in science by the Nobel-winning developmental biologist Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard. There was a lot of musing about why many at the table were earning less than their male colleagues, how UCL could get away with allowing a particular science committee to be held at an all-male private club, and what could be done to set up less formal and more frequent female get-togethers. All in all, thoroughly enjoyable.

Still, I must confess that I have always wanted to be a fly on the wall at an old fashioned, God-fearin’ old-boys-club networking session. In my mind’s eye, men are so sorted that they don’t have to talk about their situation. They are, I imagine, free to socialize and chat about sport or politics or whatever else takes their fancy. Women, on the other hand, get the opportunity so infrequently that they can’t afford to be anything other than meta about what they are trying to achieve by coming together. So I suppose that we’ll know we’ve arrived when the lunchtime topics are free to roam far beyond the constraints of gender.

I started thinking, then, how many stock phrases occur in manuscripts. Why is it, for example, that adverbs like ‘interestingly’ seem always to be deployed for the most boring results? When I voiced this rhetorical question aloud, we decided to stage an impromptu competition for more original adverbs.

“Earth-shatteringly, there was no significant difference,” someone proposed, getting into the spirit. Other top picks included ‘astonishingly’, ‘tantalizingly’, ‘mind-bogglingly’, and – a personal favorite – ‘Lo and behold’.

My own lab’s papers are not the only ones I’m helping out with, however. Over the past few months, word has spread throughout the institute that I used to be a journal editor. Now, I find that I have become an agony aunt of sorts. Hardly a day passes without someone making that pilgrimage up to the third floor, sheaf of papers in hand, to seek out my Delphic advice on various points of manuscript etiquette:

Does this cover letter sound too aggressive/wimpy/cocky/demure/over-confident/smarmy/fatalistic?

I realize they’ve rejected my paper outright. But if you read between the lines, do you think they might secretly want it back?

How can I imply that referee 2 is an imbecile without sounding defensive/insecure/unbalanced/violent/vindictive/petty?

Which of these experiments does the editor really want me to do, and which are just window-dressing?

Do you think I can buy four more weeks for this revision effort if I tell the editor that the first author is on maternity leave?

It’s only since I’ve been back in the lab that I’ve realized how much the publication process is like an elaborate mating game. With its rituals and codes, artifices and conventions, it is ultimately a relationship in which the authorial side was never meant to truly commune with the editorial. For me, understanding and empathizing with both sides is both a blessing and a curse. When it comes time to write up my own paper in a few months’ time, I can’t decide whether I’ll feel more like a schizophrenic or a double agent.

Rapt: Even the PRS likes a good story

When you strip away the formal scientific record, all that is left are the stories of the people who were part of creating it. Of course some scientists write autobiographies, but our collective library of scientific tales is primarily a verbal one: pub stories, rumors, speculations, fading memories, back-stabbing mutterings, second-hand accounts and urban myth. We know that even first-hand retrospective accounting is bound to be flawed and incomplete, warped by the perspective. Like snowflakes or Henry Gee’s anecdotes, no two are likely to be alike. And as scientists age, especially those who have made pivotal discoveries, we risk losing their crucial stories. This is why projects such as The People’s Archive, and others like it, are so important.

Last night I enjoyed the privilege of dining at the Royal Society with a small group of scientists who’d been invited to celebrate a public lecture given just before by Eric Kandel, professor at Columbia University and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2000. I was already primed to think about scientific memory thanks to the contents of Kandel’s excellent talk: an account of the neural systems and molecular mechanisms that contribute to learning and long-term storage. After the desserts were cleared away, Kandel tapped on his glass, uncharacteristically serious, and began to reminisce about the story behind the key discovery typically attributed to him. Was it this way, he asked; or was it that? Did this post-doc or graduate student make a key finding that pushed the momentum in the right direction? Did that colleague give up too soon, paving the way for someone else to take up the slack? One by one, the other men around the table who had been involved in the narrative began to offer their own accounts: Tim Bliss, John O’Keefe, Richard Morris, tossing the ball back and forth and seeing where it led.

I’m not sure if anything conclusive was decided in this spontaneous reexamination of reality, but it was a magical moment for me, and for the rest of the table too, to judge by our hushed attention – unexpected witnesses to a reassessment of history.

At one point I leaned over to Martin Rees, on my right, and whispered that it was a shame nobody had brought along a tape recorder. He nodded solemnly, then whispered back that it was a good thing I was taking notes.

I look at these now, and they are nothing: just a few random scrawls, dead on the page. The real story has been imported into my short-term memory, firing up second messengers and action potentials somewhere deep in my hypothalamus. But it will never be the same as the living, breathing moment that has already passed.

As for the rest, have any of you ever visited the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh? I first had the pleasure one summer long ago when I ran away from home on an ultimately ill-fated romantic mission, but ended up falling in love with their superlative Science and Industry collection instead. Since then, I’ve been back several times. You wander the hushed shadowy halls peering at the objects behind the glass and feel humbled by the weight and beauty of the history of science crowding just over your shoulder: astrolabes, sextants, microscopes, difference engines, compasses, telescopes; everything chrome and brass, copper and bronze, gold and steel, knurled and sculpted and buffed like an artefact out of a Philip Pullman novel.

Swanky kit: Goes from zero to sixty in ten seconds

They don’t, I’m afraid, make them like they used to. I was thinking about this the other day when I had to do a bit of microbiology, the first since resuming my career as a bench scientist. I wanted to inoculate some bacteria into broth, so asked around the lab to see who could lend me a platinum loop. No joy. So I trekked, then, around the institute, asking people at random: I either got baffled looks, or people saying, “Well, I always just use a yellow Gilson tip”.

A yellow Gilson tip? This is what happens when you earn your PhD in an old-fashioned, God-fearin’ American Microbiology department: you become really fussy about your instruments. (You also feel reluctant to drink from anyone else’s glass for the duration of your thesis, but that’s another story.) I don’t feel I am doing justice to sterile technique with disposable plastic: once the box has been opened, the masses of amp-resistant bacteria swirling around our lab are bound to encroach. Besides, there is satisfaction and ritual in the dousing of the wire into the alcohol, the purifying flame of the gas burner, the sizzle of the molten loop in the cool agar or broth. I was never one of these cavalier plate scribblers, either: no, my streak-outs would be conducted in the strict three-area method with colonies isolated to perfection.

Dear Reader, I purchased that platinum loop and holder. A really swanky, expensive one from Fisher Scientific, with a wonderful heft and weight to it, and a wire that sizzled like a fine sports car.

It felt wonderful.

This state of affairs is particularly distressing for someone of my temperament. In an older post, I explained how I am a compulsive documenter when it comes to my experiments: no piece of film, for example, is blank enough to escape my scissors and tape; no failed PCR gel is too smeary and inconclusive. I like, in short, to record every detail from triumphant eureka to notorious bellyflop, including scribbles, images, graphs and charts, snippets of email printouts from collaborators – more like a geeky scrapbook than the sort of documents a patent judge might want to subpoena.

Now, my attempts at summary grow increasingly half-hearted – most of my book is just an index, pointing to a series of files on DVD and a growing family of external hard-drives. Given the fragmented nature of the narrative, even I have problems following the logic of my activities some days. Worse, I don’t really trust DVDs and hard-drives; I’ve had enough of these spontaneously corrupt to know that I can’t rely on their permanence.

But then, it was ever thus: the ways and means of science have been briskly evolving since I entered the research game back in the late 1980s. My year in graduate school was the last group of students to paste photographs directly into their Ph.D. theses; flipping through it now, I marvel as the pages fan by, weighed down by Kodak paper and glue. I recall, too, the stab of jealousy I felt when the next year’s crop of students showed off their magna opera, all images neatly scanned and incorporated into the document. I’ve seen the conversion from slides to PowerPoint, and the PowerPoint fads come and go: yellow text on a fading gradient of dark blue; cheesy animation transitions; that entire grim year when Comic Sans was the only font you ever saw at American conferences.

Things change, and I’m going to have to learn to live with my stripped down, new-age lab journal. But I do confess, I won’t be able to love it quite as much as before.

Too much information: Scientific datasets no longer color between the lines

What triggered this idea today was Excel spreadsheets. Like them or loathe them, it’s not really possible to analyze a genome-wide screen without a large number of them. In the past I have got round my antipathy towards the output of this hateful Microsoft product by printing the damn things out at the first opportunity, impaling them spitefully with holes and filing them in a tidy binder with colourful tabs. Soon, the printed spreadsheet would acquire scribbles, notes, a rainbow’s worth of highlighter pen marks. Thumbed through until the corners were ragged, stained with coffee, I would know exactly where my experiments were and what I had to do next. I might feel the need to update or correct the electronic version, but it was never the working copy.

All well and good, but what to do when your spreadsheet has thousands of rows and more than fifty columns? No amount of column narrowing and font reduction can force one of these babies onto a piece of A4. Print it out and your machine will spew out a monster collage that would need to be pieced together like the Dead Sea Scrolls (along with about a hundred superfluous blank pages for good measure). But try as I might, I cannot seem to think when facing a small computer screen with multiple windows of information that I need to compare. Click one open and the other is immediately forgotten; click back and you forget why you left in the first place.

But there is hope: I liken this difficulty to the mental shift I had to make, in the 1980’s, when we all had to start composing words with a keyboard instead of a pen. Remember that, those of you of a certain age? I have a distinct recollection of sitting at a shiny Canon electric typewriter in my university dorm room, trying to force my creative juices to flow without a pen between my fingers. I felt disarmed, almost crippled. The typing movements of my fingers could not seem to stimulate the same neuronal pathways. Now, of course, my handwritten journals are what is rough and artless – only with a keyboard can I produce quality material. My brain, it seems, has adopted. And I have no doubt that the next generation will be able to perform these mental acrobatics, to think in virtual space, as naturally as breathing.

In the meantime, you’ll have to excuse me: I have a tide to catch.

Exciting revelations: The new-look RI should be completed by April’s end

The Fiction Lab, coming soon to the state-of-the art bar in the newly refurbished Royal Institution on Albemarle Street, will be a reading group dedicated to lab lit and other science-related or inspired literary fiction. Brought to you by the RI and presided over by yours truly, it may in fact be the world’s first science-in-fiction salon. Once a month, starting on 9 June, we will gather together to enjoy a drink and discuss a great novel that features science at its heart. Sadly, there isn’t enough new pure lab lit fiction—novels featuring scientists plying their trade as central characters—to sustain a monthly book group, but despair not: we’ll be supplementing this rarefied genre with novels that are generally inspired by science or scientific ideas. Each month’s selection will be chosen by the group, and you’ll have a month to read the book before we convene to give it a poke and a prod.

Our first book will be The Sun and Moon Corrupted by Nature’s own Philip Ball. Ball is a prolific author of popular science non-fiction, but this is his debut novel, out in May and available now for pre-order on Amazon. It is puffed thusly: A young journalist, Lena Romanowicz, goes in search of Karl Neder, a provocative physicist whose discovery of a new energy source made him an outcast. In order to find him she must follow his trail from the castles of Transylvania to the rocket labs of NASA, from Viennese cafés to the blasted borderlands of the Soviet Union. But as Lena chases his story across the world, she is also trying to outrun the buried motives that drive her. Tantalizing stuff.

As a special treat, the first Fiction Lab will feature a special appearance by Philip Ball himself, who (after we’ve have a chance to thoroughly decimate his magnum opus – just kidding, Phil) will rather bravely drop by at the end to share his insider insights with the group.

We’ll keep you posted on any further developments!

The course, still ongoing, spans three long weekends and teaches narrative, story research, interview skills, camera work, editing and other technical aspects. And I’ve run a few workshops with them about what science is really like: the processes, the lifestyle, the culture, the history, the myths and realities, the stereotypes – in short, the good, the bad and the ugly. In parallel, listening to the filmmakers’ point of view has been eye-opening. Aspects about science filmmaking that I despise – for example, the tired old narrative formula that BBC Horizon used to employ on every one of its films – were held up by the film tutor as shining examples to be emulated. Yet in listening to the justifications for these points of view, without being entirely converted I at least came away with something to think about.

This past Friday, they all came to my lab to practice filming scientists in their natural habitat. Have you ever tried to fit in eight cameras and affiliated paraphernalia, sixteen filmmakers, one tutor and two assistants into a lab containing only four bays? Come to think of it, have you ever had to pin down eight scientists and make them stay in the same place for more than ten minutes? The filmmaker mob descended just after lunchtime, lugging their cameras, wielding furry-tipped booms and looking around expectantly. The head tutor turned visibly pale when he saw that not a single one of my colleagues was yet in evidence. As tumbleweeds blew through the empty room, I attempted to round up my labmates by mobile phone: tutorials had run over; a train was delayed; a confocal experiment was playing up; our Italian undergradute really just wanted to finish her lunch in a leisurely fashion. I even had to commandeer a reluctant technician from the lab next door to make up the numbers.

But eventually we’d all settled down, each filmmaker pair interviewing and filming its designated scientist. I had had no idea how my colleagues would react to this strange invasion into their precious time, but soon was able to breathe a sigh of relief: real chemistry seemed to be developing and everyone was getting on splendidly. I did overhear a few altercations (“What do you mean, you don’t understand the words ‘apoptosis’ and ‘epithelia’?” the Chinese student demanded. “How else can I explain my project?”) and watched with amusement as one of the crews persuaded a post-doc who works exclusively with cell culture to hold a vial of fruit flies and squint at them down the microscope.

But now I know, at least in part, how some of those irritating scientist cliché memes get transmitted in science documentaries. When there is a camera in front of you begging for something televisual to happen, you can’t really help acting out the part. So it was that I found myself possessed by the Spirit of Channel 4, holding an Eppendorf tube up to the light and sagely inspecting it as I flicked its contents in agonizing slow motion, just as I’ve seen in thousands of canned shots before.

We all know how we’re supposed to act, and remarkably, this is exactly how it unfolds. How many other stereotypes are out of our conscious control?

I always knew our days were numbered: what a luxury, to send and receive that simple Jiffy-padded envelope full of vials of living fruit flies or nematodes, antibodies or plasmids or cell lines, dispatched from far-flung labs with nothing more complicated than the standard marker-pen scribbled mantra: ‘biological samples, non-hazardous’. Such was the collegial nature of such transactions that it would have been a breach of etiquette for the sender to even hint at the possibility of postal recompense, although I once liberated a vial with a cheerful note twisted around it that said “Buy me a beer the next time you see me at Keystone”. To share materials without complication; to desire and request a strain and to have it show up a few days later, no muss or fuss – such opulence. I always knew, in short, that we were somehow operating under the wire, and that if the powers-that-be ever suspected, we’d be in big trouble.

Well, our halcyon days are now officially over, at least in Blighty. Importing scientific reagents into the UK just became a lot more complicated. The laws were passed more than a year ago, but it seems they only decided to start enforcing them very recently. Our lab noticed the winds of change last week when a purified antibody, dispatched by Fedex from the States, failed to arrive on schedule. A few days later, we received an ominous missive from DEFRA (The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), an extract of which I reproduce below for your entertainment and edification:

“The import requirements for this type of import are set out in Importer Information Note (IIN) BAL-Live 1…This states that these animals may be imported with a declaration from the exporter stating that at the time of dispatch the animals showed no obvious signs of disease and that the holding of origin was no subject to any restrictions for reasons of Animal Health. If these animals are being imported from a Third (non-EU) Country it is necessary for it to enter the UK through a Border Inspection Post (BIP). For a list of BIPs and their capabilities please follow the link below. You must give 24 hours prior notification by a Common Veterinary Entry Document (CVED) which can be obtained from your local Animal Health Divisional Office (AHDO) or BIP. Part 1 must be completed and returned to the BIP of entry into the EU. To find your local AHDO please follow the link below. Products included in this requirement include blood products, serum and antibodies. … Once received the original copy of the documentation should be attached to the consignment prior to export so that it arrives with the correct documentation at the BIP. Failures to do so may result in delays to the processing of your consignment and to the eventual re-export or destruction of the consignment.”

(Anyone out there know how to spot a diseased antibody? Tiny sneezes issuing from inside the Eppendorf tube, perchance?)

In parallel, emails started to circulate amongst collaborators and colleagues, tales of lost packages, of delayed frozen materials that had arrived several days after the last of the dry ice had evaporated, of crucial manuscript revisions delayed because an irreplaceable reagent had gone astray, of epic telephone arguments with implacable officials at Stansted Airport (our nearest ‘BIP’, since you ask). People justifiably wondered why no one from DEFRA had bothered to alert any of the major universities and research institutions that the laws had been changed. Darker mutterings were heard too, conspiracy theories that had DEFRA infiltrated by Intelligent Designists or Christian Scientists.

All of this, I must say, was sounding a bit familiar to me after a four-year stint in a lab in the Netherlands. There, I tried three times to order COS1 cells from the American Type Culture Collection. Each time, my consignment was intercepted at Schiphol Airport for seven days as the vials were duly inspected by the official in charge of preventing the illegal trafficking of endangered species. COS1 cells, you see, were originally derived from an African green monkey, which is on the official endangered species list. Never mind that the cells in question were derived many moons ago, and that in importing an immortalized cell line, I was actually helping to perpetuate, not imperil, the species’ genomic existence. But to no avail: the checking procedure took exactly seven days, regardless of the logic of my arguments, and no amount of dry ice could withstand that amount of time.

So heads up, everyone: before you request that crucial perishable reagent from a mate on the other side of the world, gird your loins, obtain and fill our your CVED from your AHDO or BIP, post it to the sender…and ask them to put it in a box the size of a house with enough dry ice to sweat out the inevitable bureaucratic delays. Because, as the DEFRA notice helpfully pointed out, “Please note that the BIP office is not staffed on a daily basis.”

Anyway, we’d love to see you down at the Apple “It’s Really Quite Scarily White” Store on Regent’s Street from 7 PM tomorrow, and for a drink afterwards.

It’s never too soon to start thinking about seeing your name in lights, or those of your blogging friends, so feel free to begin nominating! You can nominate as many entries as you’d like, written by you or others and starting from 21 December 2007, by making use of this form.

As someone interested in the culture of lab life as much as the knowledge that emerges from it, I’d like to make a special editorial call for posts that transmit what it’s like to be a scientist in today’s world. I know that in some quarters the term ‘science blog’ has become almost synonymous with ‘science news’, albeit much more in depth than what you normally read in the newspapers. Although many bloggers do what is essentially great, unpaid, independent science journalism – and long may this continue – I’m also interested in fostering the more personal side of the scientific experience. Such rare glimpses into a hidden world of science life can be just as illuminating for non-scientists as are the explanations of the fruits of its labors. The previous Open Labs have included a number of excellent examples of both sorts, and I hope that we again get good balanced representation for the 2008 edition.

Enter my mini-sabbatical at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), an idyllic outpost nestled on a steep wooded mountain overlooking Heidelberg. Founded in 1978 and supported by twenty European member states, the institute houses over 800 biologists of many different nationalities and performs cutting-edge research in the fields of cell biology, biophysics, developmental biology, gene expression, and structural and computational biology.

Clean living: yet another shiny robot welcome me to Germany

It also houses international conferences; I attended one ten years previously, although the only thing I can recall – naughty me – is ducking off from a few sessions to eat Brezel, drink Bockbier and play a fiendishly clever card game called Skat in a smoky bar with a few other post-docs (you know who you are). And of course, I remember the food. The canteen is resoundingly famous amongst biologists: for a few paltry euros, you can gorge yourself on gourmet fare every day.

I’ve been sent here from London for about three weeks, thanks to the financial largesse of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), and the kind accommodation of my host lab, to learn more about high through-put RNA interference and automated timelapse microscopy. I got a bit of a shock when I was introduced to my lab space: they’d issued me an entire empty half bay, a tissue culture hood that hardly anyone else uses, ditto the microscopes and the freezer spaces, with an incredibly competent research technician who was eager to help me. Everything is spotlessly clean and tidy, which has had a wonderful effect on my brain: faced with so much order, I feel my actions and thought processes somehow aligning to fit in with my environment. In the evenings, the setting sun bronzes the woods outside the window by my desk, filling the lab with a coral-colored glow, and all the world seems infused with a little bit of euphoria.

And here’s where we get to the restful bit: it is wonderfully liberating to have only one problem to work on, and to chip away at it without any distraction. Back home, I have a lot of lab chores, and my attendance is required at an endless parade of research talks and group meetings. The research, as it is, seems perennially interrupted, such that you fit in your experiments around the obligations, and not the other way around. Here, free of any distractions, the only thing that matters is the sole scientific question: can I spot a microarray of siRNAs onto a glass slide and achieve transfection and imaging conditions such that I can follow my cell morphology phenotypes in focus over time and space for a forty-eight hours period? After a week here, I’ve made good progress, and though I work hard and return to my guest room exhausted, I still manage to feel exhilarated.

Everyone should get away once in a while. Perhaps periodic lab sabbaticals should be an integral part of every scientist’s research life, built into the budgets of their fellowships and grants. It doesn’t cost very much to send someone somewhere for a couple of weeks, but the mental and research benefits can be enormous.

A room with a view: looking west out of my room in Gastehaus Eichwald

Gospel truth: Lab kit advert targets GenX

In contrast, the ‘scientists’ in the BioRad advert, sporting headphones and the occasional cowboy hat and sunglasses, take turns singing lines such as “There was a time when to amplify DNA/You had to grow tons and tons of tiny cells” and “It’s amazing what heating and cooling and heating can do”. Many of the actors in the video resemble the original ‘US for Africa’ performers, such as Bob Dylan, Kennie Rodgers and Diana Ross, but in an intriguing twist, a few of them have also been given a subtle scientist look as well, so subtle that I cannot quite put my finger on what they have done to their hair and clothing to suggest this.

Undoubtedly the funniest part of this song occurs in the chorus. We’re told that one of the virtues of PCR, besides detecting mutation, solving crimes and facilitating recombination, is “when you need to find out who the daddy is”, at which point the gospel backup vocals respond with “Who’s your daddy?”. Near the end, as the chorus is reaching epic stadium proportions of poptastic euphoria, a thermal cycler is thrust into the choir and passed hand to hand overhead until one of the singers passionately embraces and kisses the humble apparatus. At the end, the earnest American voiceover declares: “For all the scientists out there doing PCR, BioRed salutes you.” A scientist friend of mine confessed she actually got a tear in her eye at that point – although she then owned up to having consumed an entire bottle of Pinot Grigio just beforehand.

The link has been e-mailed to me over ten times from a broad geographical area, which means that it has gone about as viral as anything scientific is likely to get. (I mean, we can’t really compete with sneezing baby pandas or shockingly inarticulate American beauty queens.) And the tune is perniciously infectious: in the past few days I’ve caught myself humming it several times.

I have a deep admiration for this clever bit of marketing. Not only is it refreshing to see a biotech supply company leaving the safe territory of cheesy slogans and puns that we all know and cringe over. But they are intimately communing with the perfect demographic on this occasion. I mean, think about it: who is actually in the market for a brand-new thermal cycler? Certainly not an old-timer, whose lab would already be well kitted out. And not a post-doc or graduate student: these folks don’t hold the purse strings. No, it’s precisely my age group they’re targeting – scientists who are old enough to have just started their own lab, give or take a few years, and are in need of core equipment.

And just at the right age, too, to have been in super-formative mode when “We Are The World” first came out. Scientists tell us that memories laid down in late adolescence remain the freshest and most precious. For recognizing this weakness and exploiting it, I can only say, on behalf of scientists everywhere:

“BioRad, we salute you.”

In short, I’m now smitten. Not necessarily with the Sony, which isn’t quite perfect, but with the entire e-reader concept. Whenever I thought about e-books in the past, I envisioned an ugly backlit screen inducing eyestrain and headaches. To say nothing of the fact that relaxation, for me, is an escape from the screens that already dominate so much of my waking life. Never mind the hype about Japanese schoolgirls reading novels on their mobile phones – could someone as traditional as I am actually curl up on the sofa with Bill Evans the cat and lose myself in one of these things?

The answer is yes: emphatically so. The technology, which I believe is called eInk and comes courtesy of Phillips, is amazing. The print is so paper-like that the page can only be read in the light – a complaint from some consumers but a distinct plus in my opinion, not being a big fan of reading in the dark. The text was also beautifully rendered, in all three handy sizes. After a few minutes perusing a sample e-Book, I found my right hand subconsciously floating towards the top right corner ready to turn the nonexistent page. To me this implies that my mind was completely fooled and thought it was a real book. Not being able to suspend disbelief would have been the death knell for this platform, but it was no problem at all.

For me, another key factor is convenience. The Sony is slimmer than a paperback and probably no heavier. I’m one of these sorts of girls who lug around too many things in a handbag, so lately my literary choices have been based more on width than on authorship and reputation. If I can’t commute easily with a book these days, it doesn’t get read. And imagine going on a trip with only one paperback-sized item instead of ten. Run out of material in a country that has no easy access to books in your language? You’re only a dodgy internet café away from topping up.

You can download your own documents onto the Sony as well, just by converting Word to rtf. It took me about five minutes to get my novel onto my friend’s reader, and the formatting was perfectly preserved. When I eventually buy a reader of my own, I will try to use it for my scientific reading. It will be easy to convert manuscripts and grants in preparation and those I’m helping to peer review, whereas I assume I can take the full-text version of a published paper, paste into Word and convert to rtf. No figures, of course, but I’m the sort of person who likes to go through the entire text first before examining the figures anyway. I’m already guilty about how much paper I waste printing out the literature (and often get a sore shoulder from the weight of my bag), so the reader could be a great solution.

If anyone out there has tried another type of reader, such as the Kindle, or has any reservations about the Sony, I’d be grateful to hear your feedback before I make the purchase.

In the meantime, I always thought I’d mourn the loss of paper books, a transition bound to be inevitable. But suddenly, I’m not so sure it will be as heartbreaking as I’d imagined. How many years away, do you suppose, are we from that world?

Parallel universe: What else is out there?

I don’t know about you, but I often become hyperaware of the invisible web around me, its threads spun from cause and effect, missed possibilities and lucky breaks. If I decide to take the bus instead of the train, I wonder what opportunity or mishap might have been avoided (or gained) in the process. Almost every job I’ve ever had has resulted from random collisions with strangers; my first position in publishing came about from a series of events kicked off by having dinner with the friend of a friend on a balcony one warm summer night in Amsterdam. It would never had occurred if I hadn’t followed the random events that forged that particular friendship, that led to my move to the Netherlands; neither would it have happened if the friend of the friend had not followed his own trail, dropping by our Dutch flat on a whim during a business trip.

And all of these possibilities go on forever, in all directions, all of the time. If you thought about it too much, it would either incapacitate your decision-making capabilities or drive you mad. But thinking about it a little, I think, is good for you. It keeps you sharp, and inspires you to put yourself in as many interesting situations as possible – the more threads in your web, the better.

Over the past half year, I’ve blogged about resuming a research career after a four-year break. When I made the switch, it was into a relatively shaky situation: eighteen months of funding on the tail end of someone else’s abandoned fellowship. When you are as far away from your PhD as I am, the possibilities for further funding are extremely limited. Just before I started in the lab, I applied for a Wellcome Career Re-Entry Fellowship : four years of solid funding, more than enough to get me back on my feet – and pretty much my last realistic hope.

The application was reviewed, and I was selected for interview. Life may be random, but I put a hell of a lot of effort this past month into being as prepared as possible for my big day. Because I am working in a new field, I haven’t studied so hard since I was an undergraduate: I wanted to know everything from first principles. I started with the superlative Cell Migration Gateway, then graduated to basic reviews, followed by more specialized reviews and primaries. I went to an Actin meeting in Bristol, and one on RNAi. The day before the interview, I put myself through a brutal mock interview with a few lab heads at the institute that nearly finished me off: for one brief moment, I fantasized about cancelling the whole affair.

The fateful morning dawned brilliant blue. I stayed home to do some last-minute preparations. I read and re-read my proposal; penned before I started in the lab, it contained a few vulnerabilities and grey areas now obvious after half a year’s experience. I practiced looking in the mirror and saying, with unwavering confidence and excellent posture, how I would respond if they asked me why I had left science, why I wanted to come back, why my work was important, where I saw myself in five years’ time. Before I put on the suit, I took a long run in the woodlands around my house. Everything was gripped in heavy frost, delicate white lace delineating each blade of grass, leaves like crystal shards, a thin film of ice on the ponds and streams, pebbles and gravel dangerously slick. Droplets of water rained down from the canopy: sky-high ice melting in the sunlight. Squirrels, magpies, robins, even a skittish young fox, scattered before me; the air was so cold in my lungs that it hurt. I told myself that it didn’t matter how things turned out. If I got the fellowship, my journey back to a scientific research career would continue unabated. If I did not, I would probably have to leave the lab at the end of next year, but I would find something else, and this something might be every bit as fulfilling. Either way could be the right path.

Today I got the call: I was awarded the fellowship in full. Multiple paths and unknown alternative opportunities be damned: I was ecstatic.

A hoarse of a different color: Pangdahai to the rescue?

My most recent experiment with the unknown has involved Chinese medicine. I’ve been struggling with periodic laryngitis for weeks now, and with a band gig this past weekend requiring me to be in good voice, I had tried pretty much everything Boots the Chemist had to offer. In fact, a few of my labmates swore they could sense my imminent arrival by the menthol and eucalyptus wafting down the corridors.

One morning our Chinese PhD student (and also a fully trained medic) brought in a small packet containing a handful of strange, furry-brown nut-like objects: Pangdahai – the dried seeds of the Asian tree Sterculia lychnophora. A ‘cold’ medicine, he informed me, to counteract the ‘heat’ of inflamed vocal cords.

Now, I don’t know much about the proposed explanations behind Chinese medicine, a lot of which sound to my untrained ear more metaphorical than mechanistic. But I do recognize that many of our most important Western drugs, from aspirin to taxol, come from plants, so there is no reason to think that with a few thousand years of experimentation, the Chinese might not have come up with some interesting botanicals themselves. After all, when the Neijing Suwen (The Basic Questions of Internal Medicine) was purportedly written around 2600 B.C., my ancestors were busy thwacking each others’ heads off with the latest must-have gadget: the bronze sword.

And then of course there’s that line from the 1987 film The Lost Boys: “Tell me, Michael, how could a billion Chinese people be wrong?”

My willingness to give Chinese herbal remedies a try was recently boosted by a Nature paper from Laura Parton and Bradford Lowell at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston which showed that genipin, derived from gardenia fruit and used in Chinese medicine for centuries against Type II diabetes, actually exerts its molecular mechanism by blocking UPC2, a protein that inhibits glucose sensing in the pro-opiomelanocortin neurons of the hypothalamus (doi: 10.1038/nature06098). Urban myth has it that a Chinese post-doc in the lab persuaded Lowell to let him give genipin a try in their system.

So. Pangdahai. Put the seed in boiling water, and allow it to bloom into a brownish-red gelatinous mass about eight times its previous size. Drink five changes of water, the second being the most potent. Not without some degree of trepidation, I might add. The result? It made my face tingle, and it felt pretty nice on my throat.

I’m not, however, entirely convinced it felt any nicer than hot water alone. Now where did that ‘control me’ get to?

Heartbreaker: mammalian cell division

But bravado unravels in the face of truly beautiful data. And I don’t mean ‘beautiful’ in the euphemistic sense that Nature authors use when they are trying to explain why their latest result both kicks butt and will cure cancer. I mean ‘beautiful’ as in the sort of image that catches your breath.

At the moment, I’m playing with a new human cell line kindly provided by a collaborator. It expresses histone fused to monomeric Cherry and alpha-tubulin fused to eGFP, and I’m filming these cells as I inhibit various genes with RNA interference. I’m supposed to be looking for cell shape and cytoskeletal defect phenotypes, but I keep getting distracted by mitosis because it’s so damned beautiful. The cells round up, their cherry DNA hearts beginning to glow like molten lava. Then the chromosomes muster out of nowhere and line up in a scraggly red row, the livid green spindle jostling them into place like fingers. Then whoosh – apart go the fingers, the heart is broken into two and the greenness goes diffuse and pinches apart. The lava cools and the two daughter cells form around them, fading back into the blackness.

My brain, knowing an interesting thing when it sees it, keeps forcing my eyes to zero in on the mitotic events instead of keeping watch on their flat, unassuming interphase colleagues. It’s like being told not to think of ten bald men.

(p.s. I haven’t made stills from my movies yet, so the above image was donated by a friend who wishes to remain anonymous. Cheers, mate!)

All hail to the mighty WellMate, mistress of aliquotification

To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve still got the stamina of yore, especially with my current nasty head cold. The Biomek, alas, is out of action – but this little beauty is going to help me all she can. Behold the Matrix WellMate, which can fill 384 wells with a defined amount of liquid in about four seconds. Isn’t she lovely? She makes a multichannel pipette look like an Ancient Greek pottery shard. With the Matrix WellMate, I don’t need to be afraid, or alone. My life has purpose, meaning. My soul can float to the top of the lab, free of all earthly encumbrances.

Or is that just the antihistamines again?

Wish me luck!

Journey into the unknown Detail from ‘Sentimental Journey’ by M. Daniel Rohn, taken on the Pelee Island Ferry, Lake Erie, 1953 (p.s. that’s my mother, Mary)

Dad, now retired in Colorado with Mom, is an emeritus art professor at Kent State University (whose academic reputation is still overshadowed by a sad incident involving four students gunned down by the Ohio National Guard in 1970). He started out as a painter and lithographer, including a stint earning his stripes as an assistant to Jasper Johns and bouncing ideas off his friend Roy Lichtenstein. Over the years, he’s worked with a variety of media and taught thousands of students, including most of the members of the New Wave band Devo (I can still remember the day he came home with the 45-inch single of ‘Whip It’). One of his paintings resides in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and in later years he began to work with 8×10 platinum photography, an art form rendered obsolete by George Eastman’s discovery of the utility of silver halide for coating printing paper around the turn of the last century.

Despite the expense of its materials, platinum printing has since undergone a small revival, and I can testify to its unearthly beauty: though strictly black and white, the hand-coated platinum/palladium mixture still manages to impart a subtle warmth, and a seemingly infinite number of pixels. Dad became known in this niche field and has exhibited and won various awards for his beautiful landscapes. In fact, one of his images of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s snowy garden was featured on the cover of a prominent collection of the poet’s complete works.

But when Dad was younger, he had another active passion: singing. With a lot of hard work, he became an up-and-coming tenor in the prestigious Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. Although he has never talked too much about the tension between these two passions, it’s always been clear to me that the decision to settle on an art career was a painful one – and that, over the years of getting ground down by the many thankless and unremunerated aspects of teaching, it might have been one he had cause to regret.

Previously, I always felt fortunate never to have had this problem. With single-minded intensity of focus, I had wanted to go into biological research for as long as I could remember; in the seventh grade, I was even bestowed a cheap plastic medal inscribed with the words, ‘Most likely to become a scientist’. Nothing could deflect me from my path, I thought – until I got knocked off it in 2003 in the avalanche of a biotech bankruptcy. Four years into my new publishing career, the doubts had been steadily accumulating. But when I tried to look at the problem logically, head-on, all I could think about was twenty-something Dad, wavering on a pivotal point between art and music before taking his fateful fall into one side of an irrevocable life decision.

But that’s the thing I finally realized. Nothing is irrevocable. It doesn’t matter how old you are when you realize you’ve made a mistake – you can always start again. I guess my generation has been lucky in this regard; back in Dad’s day, you got a job and you plied it for life, for better or worse. It is only by a lucky accident of birth, being raised in an era and a society when all things are possible, that has allowed me this precious second chance to get back on the right road.

Now, I haven’t had a chance to read the PNAS paper yet, but clearly, if the work is true, it’s an important piece of information for researchers to know about. Not just those who study the biology of small RNAs, either, but the even larger proportion of folks, like me, who use siRNA as crucial knock-down tools. The big journals say they can’t publish without a ‘mechanism’, but I suspect that if an RNAi luminary like Greg Hannon, Craig Mello or Thomas Tuschl had submitted this work to a top-tier journal, the referees and editors might have been a bit more receptive. In short, the inexperience of the authors was probably one of the main sticking point.

In some ways, I suspect it’s healthy to have your skepticism dial turned up to eleven when faced with inexperienced researchers. Not only are they more error-prone but, let’s face it, they are also packed full of youthful excitability. I can still recall in vivid detail during my first year of graduate school, on several occasions, racing from the darkroom to my boss’s office, so flushed with a good result that I didn’t even bother to check the precise order in which I’d loaded my samples onto the gel. And Julie would give me that look, frogmarch me back to my notebook – and I’d belatedly realize the whopping dark band I was celebrating was actually just the positive control.

How times have changed. These days, I’m treating cells with siRNAs targeted to novel genes and looking for phenotypes. I’ve had a beautiful phenotype staring me in the face for weeks; I’ve repeated it five times using different conditions, made cautious scribbles and sketches in my notebook about how there “appears” to be an effect – the images are annotated with circles and arrows and everything. I’m camped out by the microscope. But somehow, I just haven’t been able to truly believe it. And here’s the crux: I think it’s also about age, but this time the other side. We might be hyper-gullible about our results when we first start, but as we get wiser and more cynical, it gets harder to convince ourselves that our own data is real, let alone that of some green newbie fresh out of grad school. (Disclaimer: I am speaking generally. Some of my best friends are green newbies fresh out of grad school.)

Of course, thanks to hearing about this weird new activation role of small RNAs, my scepticism feels entirely justified. Just as I was feeling comfortable with my phenotype, I suppose I am now obliged to suspect that it was an artefact all along.

But no, it’s too late – I’ve already given it a name!

(See, I knew reading Nature was dangerous. Cheers, Erika.)

Non-negotiable oblivion

Had I really reached the state where being ill was only thing that could excuse me from my (entirely self-imposed) obligations and ambitions?

Now I know I’ve made quite a fuss about how it’s personally important for me not to spend too much time in the lab. But the truth is that I work very hard outside of the lab on personal projects. In addition to a variety of freelance activities, including writing, editing and consulting, I am trying to get several novels published. And of course, I edit LabLit, where we try to publish at least two new pieces a week – a goal that requires a lot of attending events, commissioning and chasing as well as editing and production.

This looming docket of duties, which are more of less omnipresent, makes it very difficult to relax. Whenever I am not working on something, I am fretting because I feel I ought to be. This past Sunday was case in point. It was a glorious autumn day: bright sunlight, spectacular clouds, a fresh wind, the last of the summer roses shedding petals onto the grass, golden leaves raining down in the woods around my house. When I rose at half eight and put on the coffee, I had the entire Sunday ahead of me. Unusually for me, my extracurricular workload was more or less under control and ticking over – I could easily have kicked back.

But it’s not so easy. A beautiful weekend day is not quite as good an excuse as a rhinovirus, is it? So out came the laptop, the only thing that can smooth away the guilt.

I rather think some reprogramming might be in order. Can anyone think of a non-infectious way to get me into that chaise longue next weekend?

Snacks: should be budgeted into the lab grant

What is this urge? It’s not the desire to succeed, to win the Nobel, to cure cancer, to get your paper in Nature. It’s not even the desire to make the world a better place. No, it’s hunger. And I don’t mean hunger in an aesthetic, I’d-quite-fancy-a-honey-roasted-chicken-sandwich-with-aioli-and-pesto kind of way. I’m talking nutrition. Enough nutrition, specifically, to make it through the day (and night, if applicable) without passing out and being discovered by the cleaners lying on the floor in a wild tangle of lab coat and electrophoresis leads at 6 a.m.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I often find myself not eating for long periods at the lab. This wasn’t such an issue in the editorial office; I’d work intently at my desk, snacking as needed. But in a lab, you have to make a definitive break: remove your gloves, wash your hands, locate your wallet and seek out that carbon source – overall, an activation energy barrier that sometimes proves too high to overcome.

I have to say that my current building is woefully underequipped. I’m a salty snack kind of girl, and the only sustenance provided in the Common Room besides coffee, tea and an array of sweet or chocolatey items is a small basket of Mini-Cheddar packets, usually decimated like a gazelle carcass on the savannah by 3 PM. There’s no vending machine and no canteen. Of course UCL is situated around hundreds of cafés and delis, but that would require actually leaving the building altogether (see above). I miss trekking to the basement for an icy-cold can of Coke, or dithering between ten different forms of fluorescent orange, processed cheese-inspired items, or – best of all – trying to decide which plastic-wrapped sandwich on the multilayered refrigerated carousel is least likely to be infected with Salmonella.

I’m not the only one obsessed by this topic. As a community service, one researcher rated all the many vending machines in his building, which includes the Vendtastic Burger Machine, the Junk Food Machine and the Fridge of Destiny.

I can only dream of such riches.

And she looks a lot sexier doing it, believe me.

Better living through robotics

I just had the opportunity to use her services, and I am smitten. You guys ever ten-pin bowl? As the gleaming bank of arrayed yellow tips levitates over the mother plate, preparing to swoop down and pipette up a discrete amount of siRNA, that’s what she reminds me of: the apparatus that picks up all the pins and sweeps the fallen ones away when you’ve just choked on the strike. The machine that erases your embarrassment in a clatter of lost moments to clear the way for future triumphs.

High through-put is not all it’s cracked up to be, though. Working with this so-called ‘labor-saving device’ has been the most exhausting thing I’ve yet done in the new lab. Sure, the actual automatic aliquoting only took a few hours. But the mother plates still have to be created by hand: it took two of us most of a day, after which my thumb and wrists were trembling with fatigue. And the thing about generating dozens and dozens of plates is that they still need to be labelled, sealed, spun, frozen and thawed, manipulated in bulk, treated with kid gloves. Like preparing a meal for thirty people instead of two, you worry that some quality has been sacrificed.

And ultimately, of course, once the experiment is done (by further robots), the images will need to be analyzed by eye. We’ve got people working on the algorithms, but for most cell biological readouts, no computer can yet beat the human eye. And then there’s the mound of data that has to be annotated and stored: spreadsheets with fifty columns, that sort of thing. To say nothing of working out What It All Means.

Genome-side screens are amazing, and if they work, they can generate tons of interesting data. But I will admit to a bit of wistfulness for my previous stint, when I worked, painstakingly and lovingly, one just one protein. I knew its quirks and habits intimately, and the hypotheses were linear, not trapped in an infinite matrix of possibility.

Still, I love a challenge. Together, the FK and I are going to change the world. One well at a time.

It’s true. I’d forgotten what it’s like to work in a scientific university environment in this green and pleasant land. The entire building seems to decamp to the tea room as a ritual occasion, once at mid-morning and again around three in the afternoon. A fair few can be seen lingering with an after-lunch cuppa as well, and the kettle in our study room is boiling pretty much constantly.

Thought facilitator or pesky distraction?

The tea culture is a steamy reflection of the underlying stretched-out time frame behind all the hard work going on. After a few years in a rather formal, nine-to-five, constrain-your-lunchbreak-to-an-hour-or-else office environment, the relaxed atmosphere of academia is a bit of a shock. Nobody cares what you wear; nobody cares what time you come in or leave. Nobody cares if you check your email or book a holiday or read the BBC website or nip out to the post office on ‘company time’. There is no company. There is only the organic whole of the laboratory, whose clock is individual and self-wound. People might be in the lab from ten until midnight, but the amount of actual lab work going on is nowhere near as long. There is time for reflection; time to chat with colleagues; time to sit in on the many seminars and group meetings going on. And time, of course, for another cup of tea.

After a month, I’m still not quite into the swing of it. If the Tube has problems and it starts looking as if I’ll arrive later than my (self-imposed) 9:30 target, my heart begins to race with anxiety: the phantom weight of corporate disapproval, bearing down on me. I still feel guilty taking the occasional peek at my personal email, and I can’t seem to get out of the habit of eating a sandwich at my desk while working at the computer instead of hanging out in the common room with the others, or skipping lunch altogether. I try to work hard and stay focused while I am there, and so far, with only a few exceptions, I’ve managed to leave eight or nine hours after I arrive. And no weekends. Even so, I think it’s entirely possible that I am getting as much done as everyone else.

Gone are the days of eighty-hour-a-week stints in the lab, for me. I’m at the age now when I realize that you can compress a lot of effort into a smaller amount of time, and what is important in life is to carve a space for yourself outside of work, to defend it rigorously, and to not let yourself be seduced by the siren call of “just one more quick experiment”. And just as importantly, I have learned not to care what other people might think when I am always the first to walk out the door.

Like tea, obsessive long-hours research is highly addictive. But I’m confident I can kick at least one of these habits.

Good clean fun

It’s all in our press release, but basically, Wynn and I got to chatting at one of the Nature Network drink sessions down at The Lamb. Somewhere between our second and third pint, we realized we were both deeply perplexed that the basic design of the white coat has remained unchanged for more than a century, especially considering how radically science itself, to say nothing of society and fashion, has evolved. (OK, at some point the coats did start sporting snaps instead of buttons, but that hardly counts as a couture innovation.)

White coats do absolutely nothing to flatter either male and female figures; they are eminently unsexy and their lack of color amplifies every stain. More subversively, they perpetuate boffin stereotypes, while forcing a homogeneous, drab image onto people who tend to be, collectively, diverse, colourful and individual.

So SciCult and LabLit are challenging fashion designers, from students all the way up to celebs, to reinterpret lab coats for the 21st century. The brief: the coats must still discharge a protective function, but they must also be fun, fresh, sexy and original in design (like, for example, one of the conceptual sketches above, kindly knocked up by Vera Bravo, a talented London freelance illustrator).

We will make a formal call for designs within the next few months and our panel of judges will make a decision on the shortlist in autumn. If all goes to plan, we will coordinate with London Fashion Week in Spring 2008 and host a gala catwalk event at which the overall winner will announced. In addition to the main prize, we will also give out awards for the best accessories, such as gloves, masks and safety googles.

If anyone’s interested in getting involved or needs more information, let Wynn or me know!

So come on, people, pimp my coat! I’m tired of putting on the same old stained, shapeless one every morning.

I never thought it would be easy, returning to a world I’d left behind. I’ve already shared with you the obvious, predictable problems: forgetting how to perform routine tasks; struggling to learn the facts and nomenclature underpinning an entirely new biological field; relearning how to think and read like a scientist instead of an editor.

But there have been things that have caught me off guard. Some, I am even ashamed to admit. For example, I’ve never been very good at mental arithmetic on the fly, being one of these sorts who always aced the English standardized tests but struggled more with the quantitative ones. I can do math well, but I require peace, quiet, time and a pencil to make it happen. So having to participate in rapid-fire conversations about complex robot-controlled nanomolar RNA-array plating schemes is proving challenging. Bioinformatics, too, has changed tremendously; a dozen or more whole-genome sequences later, I find myself unarmed for the current fray and hazy about the arsenal of tools that have sprung up online, rendering BLAST a quaint relic from bygone days.

“Just stop and ask,” my labmates, quite sensibly, advise. “Nobody is expecting you to master all this in two seconds.” But I, stubbornly, would prefer to hide my occasional inner panic from those higher up who might judge me. I’m not sure if it’s pride, or an innate sense of survival, but I need to appear at least nominally in control.

And yet. Amidst all this confusion during my journey up the steep learning curve, yesterday a glimmer of hope crossed my path. I was loading the PCR machine when someone from the adjacent lab came up bearing interesting tidings.

“Did you know,” she said, “that you’re at the lucky bench?”

When I shook my head, she added, “Everyone who’s ever worked at that bench has got a Cell paper. Absolutely everyone. So you’re bound to be next.”

Who am I to argue with my fate?

Those were the days…

Although I must have always known it intuitively, it only dawned on me a few days ago that modern scientific progress is always in the midst of change. It just occurs so gradually that we realize it only in retrospect. Looking back on my career now, I recall a few moments of fumbling in the dark, working on things before the truth was revealed. As an undergraduate back in the 1980s, for example, I did a summer stint at the National Institutes of Health, trying to understand why certain strains of human papillomavirus could transform cervical epithelial cells. We knew it was down to the viral proteins E6 and E7, but nobody had a clue why. And I have a distinct memory of feeling almost overwhelmed by a black universe of ignorance – it didn’t matter how many plates of cells I forced through the FACS machine or peered at down the microscope: we would never really know what was going on. We had no purchase, no frame of reference: HPV’s transformational properties were practically magical – it might as well have been raw meat spontaneously generating into maggots.

And then, of course, people worked out how the viral proteins bound to the cellular tumor suppressors p53 and Rb a few years later, and it all turned into humdrum textbook material. And now, when we discover new transforming agents, we have an arsenal of reagents to fall back upon – ignorance isn’t a universe, just a temporary and easily-remedied set-back. Thinking objectively, I honestly don’t think it was my immaturity that made me feel so lost at sea; I genuinely think that when it comes to molecular cell biology, we now know enough to be within spitting distance, at any one time, of all known pathways or effectors. We may not have the complete Google-Earth view, but we certainly have a low-resolution roadmap of how the cell works. And it just wasn’t like that in the 1980s. Hey presto – I have lived the before-and-after of the recombinant DNA era. Post-genomics, ditto. Someday, two hundred years hence, some scientist may be thinking nostalgically about the years that passed me by without their significance even registering.

It’s not just knowledge that accrues unawares. Technology, too, ticks steadily onward while you aren’t looking. On Friday, I watched a colleague prepare to do a Western blot. But instead of assembling an SDS-PAGE gel from scratch, she reached for a ready-made version sealed in foil, shelf life approximately six months. Now, this stuff was available when I last did research four years ago, but it hadn’t yet gone mainstream, and we certainly didn’t have any in our lab. Now, nobody bothers making it themselves, and all I could think was, Thank god. Yes, I’m afraid that pouring acrylamide gels is not something I can say I missed during my editorial sabbatical.

Maybe the biggest change I have lived through, technologically speaking, was the transformation of DNA sequencing from do-it-yourself to outsourced. When I was a Ph.D. student in Seattle in the early 1990s, I wanted to understand how feline leukemia virus envelope genes mutated. To do this, I had to sequence the envelope gene (all 2100 base-pairs of it) of viruses I cloned from various infected cats and different time points, over and over and over again. For four years. Effectively, this meant that every day, I was pouring a big, thin acrylamide gel (remember how fiddly that was?), doing radioactive sequencing reactions via the dideoyl chain-termination method, electrophoresing the previous day’s reactions, developing the film from two days before and (worst of all) manually entering all the sequences into the computer for alignment. The G, C, A and T keys of my Mac SE were visibly more weathered than all the others, and in a few months I found I had memorized entire stretches of the wild-type FeLV envelope gene by heart.

At one point, my Ph.D. supervisor noted my passage through a momentous milestone: I, like her, was a member of the One Megabase Club. Did I pause to celebrate? No, I was too busy silanizing my plates and de-gassing my gel solution.

Of course, all this should inspire us to try to guess what routine technique that we all do today might be passé in ten years’ time, or what stubborn barriers in our knowledge will be knocked through. Stuck in the present tense, though, we can only wonder.

Now, my normal inclination when planning an experiment is to squeeze in as many samples as humanly possible. And this, to be layered on top of a week’s worth of multi-tasking, leaving me with multiple experiments on the go and an absolute reliance on three-channel timers and copious lists to keep me sane. With due consideration of my long hiatus, I showed what I thought was a ridiculously stripped-down plan to the lab’s two leading experts on Drosophila cell culture RNAi: a pilot tissue culture experiment with a mere eight samples.

Tissue culture: the most fun you can have in a lab coat

I waited expectantly as the Ph.D. student studied my scribbles. But then he slowly started shaking his head.

“Your first experiment in four years?” he said dubiously. “Only four wells, maximum. Get rid of half of this.”

“Really?” I wanted to protest – I knew I could easily handle quadruple what I’d settled on – but the post-doc was nodding her head in agreement, and I found myself outvoted. Feeling like a lowly undergraduate rotation student again, I slunk back to my desk to drink coffee and get rid of four samples from my master plan.

When the time came, I was nearly tingling with anticipation. Remember, none of this was going to feel real until I had started actually working in the lab. In the past few days, one by one, the other lab denizens had finished unpacking and had started unfreezing and splitting cells, flipping flies, resuming their arrested work from a fortnight ago, gradually spending more and more time at their benches. I wanted to be part of it all.

I put on my purple nitrile gloves and a lab coat and began, shadowed by the very patient post-doc. Fetching ice, pulsing down the double-stranded RNA tubes, choosing which fly cell cultures looked the healthiest – and then I was sitting in front of the flow cabinet, ready to go.

Muscle memory?. It’s an absolute miracle. The minute I began to work, I felt like I was possessed by my former self – calm, poised, confident as I manipulated flasks, tubes, lids, hemocytometer, executed sterile technique, all free and easy as if in a dream. Where was all this coming from? What neuronal connections were being prodded from their long slumber – oi! wake up, she’s at it again. Why did the actions come so easily, when the facts and figures had been so recalcitrant and sluggish? Is it somehow more evolutionarily adaptive to remember how to do instead of how to write and speak?

Well, it seemed easy enough. But all bets are off if my cultures are contaminated on Monday.

My first day in the lab came equipped with its own intrinsic shock absorber, coinciding as it did with the entire lab moving into a new institute – all of us newbies, on equal footing. But I was rather pleased to be the first to arrive, wandering the corridors and stairwells until I found the space, stacked with moving crates and still littered with the discarded reagents and unwanted equipment of its previous owners. I pulled up a stool and sat down to soak it all it: the empty lab, alive with possibility.

All change: the new lab moves in

The room’s history pressed down on me. The outgoing lab head was a well-known scientist, a tough act to follow and difficult to forget with the momentous surname scribbled over everything not bolted down. To judge by the silence, broken only by the hypnotic hum of fume hoods and refrigerators, I was probably the only person on the entire floor. This was it – I finally internalized that my odd career move was more or less irrevocable. At least for the foreseeable future.

And then one of the Ph.D. students arrived, followed by a post-doc, and another. The dreamlike humming was replaced with laughter and chatter: an entire lab to unpack and set to rights. We were all in it together, wondering where the cold room was, how to order notebooks, on which shelf to store this or that box. I began to accumulate new possessions: pipetting devices, pens, pipette tips, colored tape, a box of nitrile gloves, Eppendorf tubes, test-tube racks. The tools of my trade, still as familiar as my own body. I tried not to let anyone see me turning them over and over in my hands like precious artifacts as I set up my square-meter of bench space in the designated bay, negotiated with my neighbor about placement of gas burners and Vortex mixers. With no accumulated detritus of several years to unpack, like the others, I was put in charge of unloading and alphabetizing the lab chemicals, agarose to citrate to glutaraldehyde to potassium nitrate to sodium chloride to yeast extract, all lined up in neat rows. I had forgotten the way labs smell, acrid with the hundreds of substances only thinly contained. I had forgotten how many times you have to wash your hands, how an entire day can go by without actually sitting down.

Home is where you hang your Gilsons

So now I am a scientist again. How do I feel?

Strange. I lost track of how many times the new institute denizens asked me that routine question, So what lab did you come from? No straightforward way to reply, though I refined my spiel with practice, trying out this or that tack until the balance seemed right. I was amused at how many people seemed horrified: Why would you want to come back?, as if I were some prodigal representative from the World Beyond. (The same reason you are here, I yearned to reply but didn’t.) With only one day in the lab before the weekend, mostly spent arranging things, HR induction, touring the building, drinking cocktails with the rest of the institute, it all feels rather dreamlike now. Until I actually perform my first experiment, my occupation will probably retain this sense of being a bit hypothetical. Yet my editorial past feels equally unreal now, four years shed like a flimsy skin.

Where does this leave me? Wide-eyed, ready for whatever might come.

To be honest, though the thought of what happens when I get there, and of my long-term future, is making me sweat a little, what’s truly worrying is the grant application deadline looming just a day after I start. All 33 pages of it. More specifically, the 3,500 word research proposal forming the heart of this not inconsiderable document.

First there are the stakes. This is a four-year fellowship, including a higher salary, travel and consumables. Eighteen months will pass in the blink of an eye, but with four years, I feel confident I can work out my next stepping-stone. As a non-EU citizen on a migrant visa who wants to remain on this fair island, and at my age (39), such considerations are not trivial.

But stakes aside, I seem to be as rusty with the grant-writing process itself as I most likely will prove to be with pipetting devices, microscope and gel apparatus next week.

This rustiness gradually became apparent a few months ago when I started brushing up on my new field. As a ‘civilian’, I was solely dependent on my future lab head to share his literature collection with me. Without a research affiliation, I am effectively the equivalent of a developing-world scientist. In the absence of a single subscription I rely on handouts; also, I find myself gravitating gratefully to the open access green fields of BioMed Central, Public Library of Science and Springer’s Open Choice. For many quick checks, I can only look at abstracts: frustrating.

But the real problem is a mental one. One of the main things you learn as a handling editor is to consider the big picture while more or less discarding the fine details. In essence, your brain becomes a highly trained, large-pore sieve through which the majority of items wash through. A scientific paper is a 6,000 word document of which only a small fraction really counts: the words that tell you why the authors chose to study their particular question; that tell you what, actually, is an advance over what is already known, and why we should care. An incredibly complicated document that must be assessed, digested and classified in a matter of minutes, and I can tell you that such an assessment leaves little room for registering, let along remembering, the little details.

But for a scientist, especially one writing a grant, the details are crucial. And initially, I found myself reading through papers with an editorial agenda, my mind automatically going to the default ‘skim’ mode, eager to race ahead, to discard the acronyms and gene names and conditions in favor of the big picture. At first, I would have to read the same paragraph five times to retain even a fraction of the nitty-gritty. Over the days and weeks, grimly determined, I patiently retrained my brain to absorb like a scientist instead of an editor. I made lots of sketches and penned line after line of questions in the margins – used a highlighter pen as profligately as an undergraduate. I pestered my future lab head by email with silly questions (to his credit, he answered them all with swiftness and good humor). And then I started to write: hesitant paragraphs slowly growing more confident as I got to grips with what it is I want to achieve in a four-year research program. Little by little, the skills come back: hypotheses, controls, caveats, differential outcomes.

And I suppose I am grateful that the grant deadline has made me address all this now. Before I pick up that pipettor and perform my first experiment, I need not only to be manipulating reagents like a scientist, but actually thinking like one.

Jaap and me, after our cozy nine minutes together

This Saturday’s edition came with a film whose name did not ring any bells. Eureka, it was entitled, with the strapline The best ideas come from the most unlikely places. God god, could this be about a scientist, some heretofore unrecognized example of ‘lab lit’? My heart rate accelerated ever so slightly. The cover showed a wistful, unshaven, vaguely foreign-looking European man staring into the distance, a background of green fields and mountains behind him. A zoologist, perhaps? Or a botanist? So far, so good.

And then I saw it: the familiar yellow and red logo in the bottom right-hand corner, and the small white print: ‘a Shell Films Production’.

A what?

Flip over the case. The ‘film’ is in fact only nine minutes long. Under a banner stating this to be a story inspired by real events, the synopsis reveals that the story is actually an advert thinly disguised. Chief Shell engineer Jaap van Ballegooijen, who is “passionate about saving the world’s energy resources”, comes up with an idea for a new technology to drill for inaccessible oil after a chance encounter with his son in Amsterdam. The ‘film’, in fact, is clearly a shameless advertisement packaged as fiction.

What the hell, it was only nine minutes – I couldn’t resist. With swelling music that would not be out of place in a Spielberg production, and Dutch subtitles for the cringe-worthy sequences when the intrepid Jaap has to interact with his teenaged boy, it’s made up to look like an arthouse film. But the acting and dialogue are terrible, and the content is sheer propaganda. A journalist who challenges Jaap’s vision of tapping occluded oil is told sharply that there are two sides to every story. Naturally, Jaap assures her, as he grits his teeth heroically out of the helicopter window, this method of scraping yet more oil from the nearly empty reserves is just to tide us over until alternative fuels are ready. Later, back in Amsterdam, when the Coke-drinking, spotty son complains that his father is always off galavanting in tropical countries instead of watching him play football back home, Jaap sharply retorts that he should grow up: geen olie, geen fris (loosely translated as, no oil, no infrastructure that would provide that beverage you’re drinking).

I’m not sure why this DVD annoyed me so much. Maybe it’s because I’ve just returned from an editorial trip to the 29th Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals, where there was a lot of green love in the proverbial room. I guess, mostly, that I am disappointed at the Guardian for peddling this infomercial as part of series in which its readers have grown to expect legitimate fiction. Although the warning signs are all over it if you look closely, in no place is it clearly marked ‘advertisement’ (a required notification had the equivalent fare, in essay form, been printed in the actual paper). Fiction, it seems, has become a clever medium for worming around the devices that protect us from taking self-promotion at face value.

On the lighter side, the DVD also came with extras: a ‘making of’ (all 90 seconds of it) and something alarmingly described as ‘interactive film mind challenges – creative brain teasers’.

I passed on those, needless to say.

(warning: the link to LabLit.com above constitutes shameless self-promotion)

Completely adrift

But what about the opposite direction? What about ex-scientists mired over on the Dark Side who decide to go back to research? How common are they?

Or maybe I should be more precise and rephrase the question: how common are we?

Yes, it’s true. I’m leaving science publishing to go back to the lab. Eleven years after earning my PhD and four years after hanging up my trusty pipettor forever (or so I’d assumed), I’m staring destiny in the face. And destiny is an up-and-coming genetics lab at University College London whose head somehow, miraculously, does not mind that I’ve been handling manuscripts for the past few years instead of composing them, that I’m not getting any younger, that I do weird things on the side like edit LabLit, work freelance in science journalism and write laboratory novels. Nor does he mind that I’ve never had Nature paper (except in the Books and Art section), or that the only grants I’m eligible for these days are those designed largely for mothers returning to work. Admittedly, he might have weighed the advantages of having my editorial skills on side to help him navigate his lab’s papers to suitable homes, but that’s a small price to pay for the priceless gesture of being given a chance to return to a career I used to love and never really wanted to leave.

Half of me is terrified, and the other half doesn’t quite believe it’s real. Am I actually abandoning my comfortable permanent position and salary for a universe of uncertainty? Apparently so, for I have accepted an offer, handed in my notice, and have one month left in publishing.

After that – the Void awaits.

I’ll keep you posted.

Of course I agree that such materials should be preserved, which is probably why I can’t bring myself to throw away the two boxes of gently moulding lab notebooks, spanning thirteen years of research, stashed up in the loft. I’m sure these are not the papers that Brenner and Roberts had in mind, though – they want to preserve the detritus of the Watsons and Cricks of this world, not of ordinary research folk like me.

But then I got to wondering. Why not? My lab notebooks might make pretty compelling reading to some future historian starved for scraps of how 99.9% of (non-celebrity) researchers spent their days and nights in the lab. Why not document the parade of meaningless or ambiguous data that make up most researchers’ records? The ‘non-Eureka moments’, if you will? The missing bands, the sickly cultures, the yeast-infested Petri plates, the unligated plasmids, the blank films? (I am still amazed that I used to carefully, almost lovingly, trim those squares of utterly blank x-ray film and tape them in for the record, as if it wouldn’t have just been enough to write “It didn’t work. Again.”)

And let us not forget the expletives. A good Midwestern American girl, I tried to keep the notebook language polite, but some of my colleagues’ entries ri