This one is actually a collaborative effort, called The Alternative Scientist. The focus is on “alternative careers” – slightly misnamed since most PhDs don’t end up in a traditional tenure track position these days. But you get the picture – the blog features posts from several authors on non-traditional career options for scientists.

So far we have posts on non-tenure track academic positions; adjunct teaching; scientific administration; industry (biotech and big pharma, no less); advice on negotiating salaries; and my own posts on marketing and grant writing.

I’m sure there’d be a lot of interest in posts about journal editing and related careers, so if any of the Nature staff who haunt these blogs are interested in contributing, let me know! Alternatively (oh I’m so funny), you could leave comments on this post describing your route into the profession and any tips you might have for people who want to steal your jobs follow in your esteemed footsteps. I will cross link or copy and paste (with attribution) as appropriate.

Talking of feet… (you knew I wouldn’t let this lie, right?), the RCMP have now announced that the only left foot found so far matches one of the four right feet that have washed up in the region. Details of the associated shoes have also been released, including probable dates and locations of sale. And a foot has washed up in Sweden... the plot thickens.

The paper involves a growth factor binding protein that promotes cardiac development.

So what do you do?

It turns out that the two proteins studied by the Glasgow group interact with the protein studied by my new colleagues.

This somehow reminded me of an interrogation suffered by a postdoc friend of mine one drunken Glaswegian evening. When quizzed about his relationship with the neighbouring lab’s postdoc, he said “well, I work on [enzyme], and she works on [enzyme substrate], so it’s a match made in heaven, really”. (Protein names removed to protect the guilty innocent, who are now married to each other. One of them is actually a professor, which scares me).

Now that we have all these amazing online social networking tools, maybe we can start forging links to people whose proteins of interest interact with our own. Imagine – a whole new network based on satisfyingly geeky biochemical data. You might even find your next date in this way (100% success rate, n=1).

Matt, can we have a new category on the “Your Network” page please?

The Drosophila people will probably have the most fun, as usual.

That’s actually not a bad description of parts of my job, which includes writing lay summaries of research projects for grant submissions and websites. This is actually one of my favourite duties, to the surprise of many of my colleagues.

Word must be spreading, because I’m getting more and more requests to provide lay summaries for various purposes. What bothers me though is the language used in these requests. There is a definite trend towards making nouns and adjectives into verbs.

I’ve had:

“please can you lay this language for me”

and

“if you could just laymanise this technical abstract”.

Please, people. It’s painful. Can anyone on Nature Network suggest a better term? I suppose I’ll let you verb a noun if it sounds better than the alternatives above…

But at least we can rule out an orca with a one-sided foot fetish as the suspect.

My friends fall into several groups, with only minimal overlap. A couple of groups are almost exclusively scientists, but in another I am the only person with any science background at all. I tend not to talk about science much when I get together with the latter group; I have been known to go off on long alcohol-fuelled rants about Why Creationists Are Wrong, which is apparently quite amusing on an occasional basis but should not be allowed to happen too often.

I was compelled to stick my neck out twice in one pub dinner last week though. Apparently I just can’t help myself. My husband already calls me the Word Police, and now I’m the Science Police as well.

I am lucky enough to work in an award-winning, eco-friendly, purpose-built research centre. It’s a huge step up from the converted bakery that the centre lived in when I first arrived in Vancouver (baker’s yeast spores in the wall of your tissue culture lab, anyone?) and is a pure pleasure to work in. The 15th floor roof-top patio with a view of the harbour, mountains, and the local bald eagles is a particular highlight.

On top of all this, the building is on one of Vancouver’s many designated bike routes. These are side streets with bike-activated lights at major junctions, and other favourable traffic calming measures. My door-to-door cycle to work is around 6 km, of which only 4 blocks are not on a bike route.

And there’s a bike storage room in the basement! Right next to the showers! Hooray for biking to work!

But…

Thanks for all the excellent advice on answering endless questions from creationists. I’ve now closed comments on the offending post with the following:

The obligation to accurately describe and interpret the results at hand is a given. But do we also have a duty to continue to engage with our readers? To answer the same questions over and over again, even when it’s clear that it won’t make the slightest bit of difference to the commenter’s beliefs?

Even when it’s been almost a year and we’re heartily sick of it?

Yes, I’m talking about a specific blog post. And yes, I’m hoping that your comments will help me to justify not spending hours and hours answering more questions. But I am truly ambivalent about this issue and would like your honest opinions!

I filled an entire bin full of the thousands of dandelions and other assorted weeds; dug in some satisfyingly dark, rich compost; transplanted my tomato plants; seeded courgettes, onions, peas and cucumbers in the aforementioned haphazard fashion; and, due to the inconvenient ban on using Agent Orange, had to tackle the lawn with our trusty, rusty old push-mower.

The exercise brought up some questions:

Consulate General of Canada
Immigration Regional Program Centre
3000 HSBC Center
Buffalo, New York

Notice anything strange there?

A few people had sent it to me, but I thought it was a PhotoShop job.

Here’s a rare gem from this week’s local news.

A few years ago, a body emerged from a melting glacier in Northern BC. When I first heard this story I inevitably thought of Oetzi, the Austrian iceman, but the BC remains turned out to be much more contemporary. Kwaday Dan Ts’inchi (“long-ago person found” in the local language) may have been born as recently as the early 18th century.

So what can this find tell us about the life and times of Kwaday Dan Ts’inchi?

Those of us who work on grant applications that involve human or other animal subjects are used to this kind of thing. But our plant biotechnologist colleagues? Not so much.

Yep, as if submitting grants wasn’t stressful enough already, Swiss biotechnologists now need to consider Plant Dignity in their applications.

Maybe they could start by defining it.

I wonder if the comments on this article will get as crazy as these ones on a Nature News article about induced pluripotent stem cells. Thanks to Kyrsten Jensen for sending me the link to this very entertaining exchange, which degenerated into name calling, extensive comment moderation, and a stern reprimand from Nature staff.

The reason I know about this riveting story is that it broke when she attended a charity benefit. The charity happens to fund the work of one of the PIs in my department, and its name is therefore on my Google news alerts list.

If I get one more email about Liz Hurley this week I’m either going to throw my computer out of the window or be fired for misuse of network bandwidth.

It’s not quite as bad as when I worked on the Jun family of proteins and would receive random alerts about papers published in the month of June.

People in both places are exceedingly grateful for the support they receive, but staff attitudes to reciprocal funding differ enormously.

I just realised that half of my slides have them, and half don’t. I went through and added punctuation to the lines that were missing it, went for a cup of tea, then came back and deleted all the full stops again.

The presentation has to be sent to my supervisor within the next 80 minutes…
_
1. Periods, if you’re in North America. Dots, wherever you are.

I’ve been haunting the Nature Network for a few months now, and haven’t seen any other carnivals hosted here in that time. I may have missed a carnival post somewhere along the way, but in an effort to be the hostess with the mostest, I’d better make the pertinent introductions to make sure that we all play nicely and everyone has a good time.

Nature Network, meet the Tangled Bank . One of the broadest blog carnivals around, it is named after Charles Darwin’s famous metaphor¹ and features articles from across the fields of science and medicine. Reading a carnival gives you access to posts you might never stumble across by yourself; contributing to a carnival brings your work to a whole new audience. Submit your posts to the next edition, why don’t you!

Tangled Bank, meet the Nature Network – it’s like a sensible, grown-up Facebook for scientists, with the added bonus that your workplace probably hasn’t banned it. Use the headings above to find people you know, groups and forums of like-minded scientists, and a whole heap of excellent blogs. If you live in London or Boston , you get even more features to play with. If you live in Canada, you get to join my group .

Let the tangling begin!

Turn to the Worst Result Ever blog for solace. There are some real stinkers on there.

See? Things could be so much worse¹.

My own Worst Result Ever was a CAT assay that should have been renamed as a FROG assay. (Mitigating circumstances: it was March 18th ).

I need to brush up on my seriously rusty stats skills, which were never all that shiny to begin with. Can anyone recommend a good textbook that will remind me about power analysis and all that good stuff? Preferably something called “Statistics for Dummies who have Advanced Biology Degrees But Know Nothing About Statistics”.

Thanks!

I hope it turns out to be something cooler than “a Lake Trout whose tissue decomposed rapidly, making its teeth more prominent”.

I’m a life-long non-smoker who has already benefited greatly from BC’s previous laws, which prohibited smoking inside bars and restaurants. Moving here from Glasgow in 2002 brought instant relief from having to wash my hair as soon as I got home from a night out, and my clothes after every use. Now that the UK has its own smoking ban in place, going home is much more pleasant than it used to be and I am no longer addicted to second hand smoke. (I swear when I first moved here I used to inhale deeply every time I passed a smoker).

So I should be delighted with the new laws, right?

Wrong.

I like being cited, and when a few likely looking candidates came up in this week’s Pubcrawler alert I thought I was on to something.

Now why would these big deadlines cluster together in this way? My exhausted and over-caffeinated brain has come up with the following explanation:

The various PIs and clinicians who I work with often ask me to write all, or part of, the grant’s introduction section. Due to the wide range of projects I cover, this is often on a subject that I’m not all that familiar with. Luckily this is something that I enjoy and am good at, and the more I do it, the more I see a pattern in my literature searches.

Actual conversation in a Glasgow pub during my PhD days:

Me: How’s it going?
Friend: Bad.
Me: How come?
Friend: Another bloody yeast infection.
Me: Another one?! What’s going on?
Friend: Don’t ask me, I wear gloves all the time and it just keeps on happening.
Guy at next table: Snorrrrt cough cough

It suddenly dawns on us that most people don’t think of cell culture problems when they hear the words yeast infection…

Occupational hazard I suppose. Any other good ones out there?

The downside is that immunising everyone with the universal strain might put pressure on the targeted viral protein to evolve into a form that can evade the host’s vaccine-stimulated antibodies.

Unfortunately it tends to be the few bad apples that make the news. Consider these two stories from the BBC website:

This seems to be a common career path for many biological scientists; I’ve met several other people who’ve made their way down the chain from large interesting mammals to tiny interesting genes. (I suppose quantum physicists are the people who took that journey to its logical conclusion, although I suspect that they may have started with rocket ships and black holes rather than dolphins and whales).

Apparently you can’t delete posts once they’re up!

Technorati Profile” rel=”me”

I’m also going to take the opportunity to insert lots of links to the more scientific posts on my other blog. Purely to give you a taste of the kind of research that I’m interested in and that is likely to crop up here. I am not a blog pimp. Oh no.

Anyone who has read VWXYNot? will know that I’ve got a bit of a thing about endogenous retroviruses and other transposable (or repetitive) elements. This sometimes causes arguments with creationists, which is very entertaining and satisfying.

Yes, last week I received an invitation out of the blue to start blogging on the Nature Network. And how could I refuse? It’s every scientist’s dream to get “published” in “Nature”, right?

Because I do still consider myself to be a scientist, despite leaving research in 2005.