A thread on Anna Kushnir’s blog has cast me back, somewhat painfully, to my brief career as a laboratory scientist. Thinking back after an interval of more than 20 years, it occurs to me that it would have been very hard to have devised a worse PhD project for anyone. People today (not least my PhD examiner) still profess amazement that I actually completed the course. Not that I didn’t do my best to make matters as difficult as possible for myself.

First, I decided to do a PhD because I’d enjoyed being an undergraduate so much, and wanted another round of being a student. This is, of course, the worst possible reason for embarking on a PhD.

Sadly, I couldn’t do a PhD at Leeds—the university where I’d spent three blissfully happy years doing my BSc in Genetics and Zoology—as they weren’t really geared up for a PhD in vertebrate palaeontology, my dribblingly insane choice of subject (“you do realize, don’t you, that there aren’t many openings in vertebrate palaeontology?” the zoology professor kindly opined, during my second year). Just before my final year, though, I got the chance to work in the Fossil Fish Section of the Department of Palaeontology at the Natural History Museum, where I spent an exciting summer. It might not sound exciting, but the Fossil Fish Section had been the epicenter of a revolution in evolutionary thinking known as cladistics, so a PhD in London would have exposed me to a great deal of intellectual ferment (I wrote about cladistics and my experiences at the Natural History Museum in a book, for anyone who’s interested). I also had the opportunity to do a PhD in London with the cladists – but due to a cock-up with timing and funding rounds, I turned it down, having accepted something else instead.

This was a PhD place at the Zoology Museum in Cambridge, working on a largely impossible problem, which was trying to tell the difference between postcranial bones of aurochs (fossil cattle) and bison in British Pleistocene deposits, which are full of the bones of large bovids that no-one can identify to species. I had almost no supervision, and almost nobody in the department had the expertise or time to guide me, though I’m sure they did what they could. So I worked in a research group of one (me). Ironically, I got most support on my many research trips to the Natural History Museum in London. Doubly ironically, it was my faux-undergraduate activities that got me through in the end … the only thing I really cared about was playing in rock’n’roll bands.

When people think about palaeontology, they tend to think of the adventure and camaraderie of fieldwork. However, I only got this long after my PhD was finished, when I visited a field camp in Kenya for a couple of weeks more in my capacity as a Nature editor (those experiences are in the same book too) and I can see why fieldwork is addictive. But my PhD was spent entirely in museum vaults, and museum work tends to be very solitary.

What’s more, nobody I knew had any direct experience with the material I was working on. Again, it was only long after I bcame a Nature editor that I only discovered another person who had been working on a similar problem, and she was in California, so the problem was not precisely the same. Nevertheless, it was great to have met, at last, a kindred spirit, who had encountered many of the problems that had foxed me during my time as a PhD student. A problem shared, as they say, is a problem halved.

But for the three years I spent doing my research, I felt as if I might as well have been an autistic martian for all that anyone gave a damn.