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.