I feel fortunate in my research because I don’t use an animal model. Most labs doing what I do use mice or rats for their research. We do so very sparingly, prefering to use a “stripped down” cell culture system, at least for our initial research. Animal work only arrives at the end of a project to provide proof of principle.

HEK cells. Thanks to The University of Hull

The cell culture system we use employs a type of cell known as HEK, short for Human Embryonic Kidney. It is, as its name more than suggests, a cell line harvested from the kidney of a human embryo. This harvesting took place decades ago, long before thoughts of patient consent were considered (Just ask Henrietta Lacks about that one). The cells are essentially just epithelial cells, the simple cells that form the linings of your mucous membranes. We can take these cells and “transfect’ them with the DNA coding for the proteins we’re interested in studying. To translate that, basically we infect the cell with DNA. A few days later the cell has made use of this DNA because it can’t tell the difference between the new we gave it, and its own. Because of this the cell is making the proteins we study.

I mentioned last week that I have the honour and responsibility of being the Chair of my institute’s Postdoctoral Association. This afforded me the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to travel to Boston and attend the National Postdoc Association annual conference. At the conference, there was much discussion and humming and hawing over acronym laden documents such as COSEPUP and COMPACT, but I feel if nothing else was achieved the meeting served to refocus the community on the strategic goals of the organization. Namely to represent postdocs at local, national and federal levels with the remit of improving our lot. And that’s not to say I think we achieved nothing. I think we did, but that’s for a different blog post.

One of the major foci of all the humming and hawing was mentorship and management. We still work within a system built decades ago when the academic world was a vastly different, and smaller, place. If postdocs are to be properly equipped to deal with the modern workplace we will need guidance from those already there. There is a great need for transferable, or so called “soft” skills that is often lacking in current postdoc training. I was forced to face the reality of the situation a couple of years ago, when I realized that my life long dream of becoming a professor at a major research university, running my own lab like a benevolent and lab-coat clad Gandalf, was never going to happen. Since then I’ve been considering my options and what to do about them. It’s all very well having the amorphous goal of being “a science advisor”, but about what and to whom? And with all due respect, just because you can perform the neatest and clearest western blots known to man, doesn’t qualify you to advise me on diddlysquat. Except perhaps how to prepare my western blot buffer solutions.

As I, and many others like me, weigh up the various options open to us I am reminded of something that was covered at the conference. “Personal Time Management”. I’ve heard of it before, and it always seemed silly that someone would have to coach you on managing your own time. But now I’m juggling committee work at the local and national levels, writing for this blog as well as for Lablit and a couple of other magazines (irons in fire…don’t jinx me), trying to balance an increasingly over-burdened chequebook…and oh yeah, trying to keep up with the literature and my share of lab chores as well as actually do my experiments. So, if anyone has any advice on “Personal Time Management” they’d like to share, or else a time machine I can use to add a couple of hours to each day, please let me know…

My personal evolution as a scientist began a decade or so ago, in a musty lecture hall at The University of Leicester, UK. Having failed spectacularly to get into medical school I was facing an uncertain future as a reluctant biologist. All that changed one afternoon during a lecture on excitatory amino acids. These are, as their name suggests, simple amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Glutamate is one of these and it also happens to be the major excitatory neurotransmitter in the mammalian central nervous system. Glutamate receptors at the nerve endings in your brain (synapses) come in two main flavours; either NMDA type receptors, or AMPA type receptors. It doesn’t matter what those two abbreviations stand for, but suffice it to say between the fast acting AMPA receptors and their slower cousins, the NMDA receptors, we have the entire neural basis for our ability to learn. The up- and down-regulation of these receptors by use dependent feedback causes a long term modulation of the current flowing across the neurons in your brain. Essentially, and as was elegantly demonstrated by Mark Bear’s group at MIT in 2006, this is a memory forming.

As the undergraduate lecture continued I learned about RNA editing (RNA is the message from your DNA, the step before a protein is made), and how a certain part in one certain AMPA-type receptor subunit must be “edited” at least 99% of the time, or else you die from epileptic style seizures not long after birth.

“But, how does it know when and how to be edited?” I asked.
“No one knows…Yet.” was the answer and that was that.

That was the day I fell in love with science.

I ended up becoming a technician in that professor’s lab, and then moving to the US to attend graduate school. I had a couple of offers in the UK, and everyone told me I was mad to move, but I was young, I was in love (there’s always a woman involved!), and I was looking for adventure. Well, I found it. After initially interviewing at the wrong campus, 150miles from my fiancée I settled into the daily rhythm and grind of scientific research in the quest for my Ph.D..

I have followed my love of scientific research across the synaptic cleft, between species and all over this fine continent. Now I’m a decade older and wiser I can look at the system that has trained me, and looked after me and I can see what’s good about it. I can also see what’s bad about it. Postdoctoral research has many benefits, but also many drawbacks. For example, there are still scientists out there working without healthcare, working for what equates to less than minimum wage. We’re the ones that drive the lumbering machine that is scientific endeavor, but we sometimes have the rough end of the stick. It doesn’t get much better if you make it to faculty, but now even fewer of us will find out. With the National Institutes of Health budget frozen, there is less money to round, and fewer faculty positions open. Postdocs nowadays need to train for careers away from the bench.

I’m Chair of the Postdoctoral Association at my institute. I was fortunate enough to recently attend the National Postdoctoral Association conference in Boston, Mass. There is a vibrant community of talented young postdoctoral researchers striving for change and I’m proud to be a part of that movement. This blog will record our evolution, as individuals looking away from traditional careers, and as a community fighting for survival.