My office hasn’t improved much since the first days. I have yet to put up my corkboard, my papers are all in piles, my bookshelf is mostly empty, save for the treasured Fields Virology tomes (signed by both of the editors, because I am a giant dork). It’s all a bit of a mess, really. The only point of focus and motivation in my office is Debbie.

It seems silly to have motivational photographs, especially when they are not of family or loved ones, but she does me good. She looks super tough, doesn’t she? You wouldn’t want to mess with her, right? So whenever I have to send an email I reeeeallly don’t want to, or work on a project that makes me gag, I look to Debbie, in all her toughness, and steel myself for what’s ahead.

And you know what? It works. Partially because of Debbie (and mostly because of my loved ones) I revised the manuscript from my graduate work with just a few days to go in my 60-day resubmission window and resubmitted without a hope it the world of the paper surviving re-review. I was completely astounded, blown away, shocked, and brought to tears by its acceptance for publication a mere 48 hours after resubmission. Debbie, and the Journal of Virology, were good to me.

This acceptance was no small miracle. It’s been a year and a half since I left school, two years since I completed the work. My lab no longer exists, my advisor is unavailable (long and awful story there), and yet the paper is out. The whole graduate school business has closure now, and all is well.

I hope I am not the only one with emotional reinforcements in the office. If you want to borrow Debbie, feel free. She works wonders.

When I first started graduate school, a technological century ago, all our class presentations and lab meetings were prepared on overhead projector transparencies. It was impossible to put a presentation together at the last minute, unless you wanted to be super low-tech (read: slacker) and draw everything on the transparency by hand with overhead markers instead of printing the presentation on the transparencies from a computer ahead of time.

About a year in, LCD projectors became commonplace and bulky transparencies and overhead projectors were replaced by PowerPoint presentations. PPT seemed so formal, so fancy, so new. I loved it. It turned out that I am just the right type of OCD/anal-retentive person to love everything about putting together PPT* presentations. I line everything up meticulously and perfectly. I can spend an hour making sure that font on every slide is the same size. I love making animations and drawing overly complex yet boxy and bulky illustrations.

Imagine my disappointment when the end of my lab work brought with it an end to PowerPointing. No more presentations to give, no more slides, no more hours spent matching colors and text angles. That is, not until the wonder that is the Gantt chart entered my sad OCD life.

My company has had a rush of private clients lately, most of which are small bioengineering companies desperate for government research funds. Accordingly, for the last month, I have become a grant writer extraordinaire, writing the grants for the company scientists who a) don’t write well, b) don’t want to write, c) can afford to pay a company to do the writing for them. With grants, come Gantt charts. Gantt charts are a required component of most government grants. They are project management tools, which show a timeline of the work you propose to do and what you hope to accomplish at each step. The charts is a snapshot of the work, of the ideas and goals. Gantt charts are hardly ever used for NIH grants, as far as I can tell, but they are required for small business grants like the ones offered by the Department of Defense (Navy, DARPA, etc) and other organizations (BARDA, other acronyms, etc). Some companies buy expensive software packages to construct Gantt charts, but not us. We stick to good old PPT, lucky for me.

Oh dear Gantt chart, how I love thee. All the lines and text and the colors! So much to line up and deliciously obsess about. The vertical lines denote each week/month/quarter of the project’s performance period (aka the fixed amount of time you will be allotted to complete the work should you be awarded the grant). The tasks (= the specific aims) are represented by the blue boxes spanning the time period they will take to complete. The milestones listed on the right describe what you hope to have accomplished at the end of each task. The chart gives the grant reviewer an overview of the entire project, its feasibility, its significance and contribution, all in one easy to digest perfectly-formatted bite.

Gantt charts are a wonderful thing to behold and fun to put together (for someone as OCD as myself), but unfortunately, I see no place for them in basic biology research grants. There is no way to predict how long it will take to prove/disprove a hypothesis, no way to say with any certainty when work on Specific Aim X will be completed (although how wonderful it would be if you could!). Engineering and technology firms get to have all the Gantt fun, it would seem. At least for the time being, until someone figures out an alternate strategy for project management in a lab – one that has deadlines and realistic goals, and achievable bite-size milestones. And PowerPoint slides. Lots and lots of PowerPoint slides.

*I know that PPT is far from an optimal tool presentation design tool, but I am OCD in a completely non-technology-aware way.

I couldn’t wait to leave the lab scales and timers behind me. I left lab (not science, but lab), and haven’t looked back since… Until I looked in my kitchen, that is, and saw the same scales, the same timer as I had in the lab. And then I hiccupped a little, and realized that I “aliquot” my home-made chicken stock into single use Tupperwares, and slip, kinda often, by saying that I am incubating my chicken instead of marinating it. I can’t help it. Scientific tools and terminology fit really well into the kitchen, which is something of a scientist’s playground, with food standing in for reagents and pots and pans for the gel rig and centrifuge.

The scale is indispensable for weighing out just the right amount of beans for the perfect cup of coffee, for weighing out the precise amount of dough for equally-sized tortillas, and it makes executing European recipes – written with weight instead of volume measurements – a breeze. I learned so much during my time in lab – reading, writing and rithmetic, as they relate to science – but I never thought that I would take those skills into my kitchen. I guess I got a lot more out of grad school than I imagined. That’s a sweet bonus.

I am all settled in now. Settled into my work, settled in my home. My partner, he who gave me so much crap for moving to DC, is now slowly starting to enjoy the city, and has signed on for a post-doc with a huge PI and a huge lab at the NIH. I am slowly falling in love with my neighborhood and continue to be interested and challenged by my work. I get up in the morning, I go to the gym, I go to work, I come home and make dinner, and then I go to bed. Every day. And herein lies the problem. I am settled, for the first time in my life.

Before now, there was always a next step. There was graduate school after college, then post-doc, then a job to find and start. I am used to moving often, jumping from step to step, on down a preset path to new schools, new cities. Now, there is just… living my life. I know that life’s hurdles are hardly cleared, but I do feel a little nervous about the many years to come playing out exactly as the ones before. In other words, the transition from student (and I include post-docs in the student/training category) to a grown-up in the real world is proving more jarring than I had expected. I am relying on all the great bars and restaurants around my apartments to alleviate my continuing neuroticism and analysis. I think it’s working, for now.

Exactly one year and two months after the day that I graduated with my PhD (having listened to a beautiful commencement address by JK Rowling), I finally submitted my manuscript, which covers a large portion of the work I did during my years in school. The relief was immense, the anticipation dread of the reviewers’ decision is even greater.

There is a perfectly good explanation for why it took me an entire year to complete the manuscript. I couldn’t make myself do it. I couldn’t make myself look at those same gels and graphs yet again, after all the time I spent poring over them before my defense. And then life got in the way, my job search got in the way, a number of episodes of CSI got in the way, and I just wasn’t getting the manuscript ready.

And then I started to feel really bad. I had my degree, but without a publication, it felt empty, not fully mine, or not fully earned. Yes, I have a diploma, but without a first author publication, does it really mean anything? The program I graduated from is one of the few – I think – that doesn’t have a publication requirement for graduation. A number of schools are now requiring one or more first-author paper before they let you out with your degree. I always thought that was ridiculous and barbaric, considering that projects are different, time scales are different, and luck, or luck is so very different for each student. But on the other hand, it sure would be nice to have something to show for my time in grad school besides a thick book and a close up picture of JK Rowling. Something others can refer to, search for, some outside evidence of the work that I did.

Hopefully, my paper will get published and offer me the closure that I have lacked this past year. I am hoping to uncross my fingers soon. They are starting to cramp a little.

I think I got it now. I think I can finally explain my job. A little bit.

I work for a consulting company, so every project is different, and many are running at any one time. We bid for government contracts by writing long and painful proposals, or RFPs. If we are lucky, and our price is right, we are granted the contract, the money, and the time to do the work.

I just finished writing my very first RFP, for a contract with the FDA. The FDA would like a company to track and assess the FDA/CDCs use of social media in spreading the news about the last huge salmonella outbreak that was eventually linked to contaminated peanuts. [Social media? Check. Food? Check. That’s pretty much my life, in a nutshell (pun intended), which is why I was called on to write the proposal.] It’s really pretty cool – the FDA is looking to embrace social media in their work of alerting consumers to product recalls and contaminations, and they want someone to take a look back, and trace forward, to figure out how effective their approach is. The FDA set out a list of requirements for the work – what they would like to see in the interim and final reports, what analysis they need, what statistics they would like to see. In addition to characterizing how social media was used in the aftermath of the peanut-salmonella outbreak, the contractor is to track the response to two future outbreaks in real time.

My very own office. I have an office! There is more stuff on the walls now, but not much.

Writing a proposal is no different than writing a grant, it turns out. You tell the funding body (in this case, the FDA) how you are going to approach the problem, lay out the experimental detail and list alternatives, should obstacles be met. You then describe how you will process the data once it’s acquired and what it will mean, in the grand scheme of things.

The glorious view out of my office window. It could be worse.

So that’s what I did. I wrote out a list of search engines, blog platforms, and other sites that we (Gryphon staff) would use to find mentions of the peanut outbreak and a future, unnamed outbreak, and how we would gauge their use. I then discussed the pros and cons of all sorts of social media sites, such as Facebook and NN (as if I was going to let this opportunity go without a plug), and how they might be best used for the FDA’s purposes. Did you know, by the way, that the FDA has a Twitter stream? They do, and it’s a little sad. It mirrors product recall announcements on their main website and not really utilizing this particular social media tool to it’s fullest potential… that, of course, also went into the proposal.

The second part of the proposal was a list of our relevant corporate experience, meaning what projects in our past give us the experience and knowledge to complete this one successfully. The third part is the money. We break down the number of hours each proposed team member will spend on the project and how much that will cost.

And my desk, already messy after just a week. It’s not any cleaner now. Nor are the shelves any fuller. I am taking my time.

And that’s about it. The proposal will get sent off tomorrow, along with my Gryphon-formatted resume (no longer a scientist’s CV, mind you, but now a consultant’s resume, legible and comprehensible to all manner of government employees). We won’t hear the FDA’s response to our bid for months. If we are lucky enough to win the contract, we won’t begin work for 6 months to a year. It’s a slow and painful process, as I said, but the payoff for a small company like Gryphon could be pretty big – some of our contracts each bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue.

Overall, I think it’s great that the FDA is thinking about how to use new media for their purposes. I also think that they have a ways to go before they fully grasp what social media means and all the strings that are attached to it – internet discussion forums are tempestuous mistresses, one wrong word and they will swing against you faster than you can say ‘backlash.’ I got the feeling that they didn’t quite know what they were dealing with, or what they were asking for. One of the pieces of information that the contractor is supposed to provide the FDA as part of this project is traffic statistics for sites mentioning the outbreak, and site visitor demographics. If I could get that information, I would be so rich. I wouldn’t be working, I would be eating ice cream aaall day, on a beach, with my laptop and hordes of marketing firms begging for a minute of my time. In other words, it can’t be done. And I told the FDA that, in my proposal (not in so many words). We’ll see how it goes. For now, I am happy eating ice cream on my couch. With no hordes of any kind in sight.

I did not have too much luck explaining what it is that I do at my new job in my last post. I think I will take a break from that uphill endeavor and return to an old stand-by: the rant. Here we go.

I get to go to quite a few conferences as part of my job. The conferences range from interesting talks on threat agents, to mind-erasing discussions on how to set standards for biological assays (I seriously contemplated harakiri by the second day). The attendees are invariably 80% men (of the Caucasian persuasion) in suits (the ill-fitting kind). The meeting I attended last week, however, was exceptionally interesting, with science almost edging out the government-speak.

I felt so terribly official with my nametag… and the suit I borrowed from my Mom, because I still don’t own one. Sad.

The meeting, held at the National Academy of Sciences Keck Center, focused on synthetic biology. It brought together rock star-level scientists (Drew Endy – Best. Speaker. Ever.), BioTech CEOs and CTOs, heads of major funding bodies, and attorneys to discuss the progress in synthetic biology, approaches to educating and keeping the public engaged on the topic of synthetic biology, and of course, how to regulate it to prevent misuse.

National Academy of Science Building in DC. One of the perks of living in the Nation’s capital is the proximity to the hearts of many influential organizations.

One of the biggest concerns surrounding synthetic biology is the potential for generating something more virulent, or entirely novel and pathogenic. The gene synthesis industry has been subjected to the most intense scrutiny, because of the potential for bad people to order the synthesis of bad agents. The public’s fear of synthetic biology and mistrust of scientists is natural, especially for a field with a name as ominous and vaguely threatening as “synthetic biology.” Skynet, anyone?

The speakers and participants in the conference all stayed mainly on track, save for the one ethicist in the crowd who expounded on his belief that there is no such thing as “the public” or “society” and we need to change our attitudes/language to something else, somehow, someday, I didn’t understand at all. One of the last speakers of the event, from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a public policy group, talked about the difficulty in disseminating valuable information about synthetic biology at a time when most major media outlets are cutting science sections and science reporters. He went on to say that all science reporting is slowly dying and that there remains no good way to get well-researched, accurate information out to the public. And I quote, “you can’t expect a blogger to do that, now can you!"

Can you tell where the rant is going to come in?

I swear to you, I gasped audibly. Gasped/peed pants, it’s all the same. I was absolutely livid. That single statement went against everything I believe in and worked toward while at NN and at home, blogging.

Luckily, there was a savior on that last panel of the meeting. He and I locked eyes after the offensive comment was made, in sympathy and commiseration. Or more like I stared at him in disbelief and he may have turned his head in my general direction, it’s all the same. That savior? Adam Bly, the founder and editor-in-chief of SEED Media, the publisher of SEED Magazine and backer of ScienceBlogs. He was there (the only one there) to represent the media’s perspective on educating the public about new scientific developments. He did not let me down.

Calmly and eloquently, he outlined for the apparently non-internet friendly audience the role social media could play in picking up the slack of traditional media outlets, all while tugging at his beautifully fitting suit. He respectfully but insistently disagreed with the previous speaker and described the basis and vast reach of ScienceBlogs in spreading and explaining scientific news in an approachable way. He then urged the attendees to “bypass the mainstream media and develop and use alternate tools to communicate with the public.” He preached to my personal choir that one should “look to new media, because you can.”

I was so grateful he was there to stand up for bloggers, and the internet, and the little guys (ok, me). However, I maybe wouldn’t have gone as far as he did in advocating a complete capitulation of efforts in trying to use traditional media for science communication. There are tons and tons of people in this country (and beyond) who have not entered blogs, or even the internet, into their daily routine. They deserve and need to know all the latest science as much as any geek with a broad-band connection.

So what did I learn this last conference?

- Adam Bly has nice suits.
- The people tasked with keeping their finger on public opinion of science do not see the enormous potential of blogs and social media. This is a problem.
- I have great self-control because I a) didn’t yell from my seat in defense of blogs, and b) did not throw anything heavy and pointy at the social scientist who told us there is no such thing as “the public.”

Long rant, over.

P.S. The audio of the conference is available here. For the anti-blogger remark that got me so huffy, and Adam Bly’s response, scroll to Session 7.

The question I am asked most often about my job is, “Umm, so what is it that you actually do?” I can’t blame anyone for asking. Before I took the job, I had only a vague understanding of the types of projects that I would be working on, or what the word “project” really means in the context of a government consulting firm.

Fourth of July fireworks from my DC rooftop. Non-sequitur, but pretty.

Almost a month in, I am just starting to understand the work and the system. I now have an idea of why science consulting for the government is not well known or understood by those in science and beyond – much like science, the government has its own language and its own rules. If you thought scientists use a lot of acronyms*, just you wait till you read a document written for/by the government. Oy vey.

The basic structure** of the work we do goes a little something like this. A government agency, such as the FDA, DOD, or DHS, asks for private company bids to solve a specific problem, or provide potential solutions to a broad challenge. These requests can cover anything from a threat analysis of a specific biological agent to a study of how social media can be used to spread information important to consumers (just finished writing a proposal for that project, so keep your fingers crossed for me). A number of companies write proposals and hope to win the contract to perform the work for the government. Work on a contract typically culminates in a written report and presentation for government representatives. The process of winning government contracts is not easy and it’s not fast, but the pay-off could be huge, especially for a small company such as the one I work for. Contracts can take as little as a few months (or even weeks) to years to complete, with compensation ranging from a few thousand dollars to millions.

Capitol Hill on the left, Washington Monument on the right, in front of the fireworks.

Government requests for services (some of which are posted on FedBizOpps) come in many different shapes and sizes, all of which involve copious amounts of acronyms.

RFI – request for information. This is a preliminary request, asking companies to submit their experience and qualifications for the solution of a specific problem; an RFI is occasionally referred to as a white paper. Average length 5 – 15 pages.
RFQ – request for quotation. The government agency asks for price quotes on how much a company would need to complete a specific project. A response to an RFQ would likely contain a detailed budget, time line, and list of personnel.
RFP – request for proposals. This is the big one, a fully detailed proposal on how you would solve the problem at hand. This includes a technical approach, a budget, and personnel breakdown. Average length 15 – 15^2 pages.

The companies whose proposed solutions fit the agency’s concept of the problem and budget, are encouraged to proceed to the next phase of selection. Those who do not fit the bill, are not left writing full-blown RFPs with no hope of winning the contract.

Now that I have been at my job for almost a month, I still struggle to distill into a few words what it is that I do, especially when I have to describe it in a bar casual setting. So far, I have come up with the following: Science. Consulting. Government. Let me know if you have a better idea!

*Can you please resolve my samples with SDS-PAGE, transfer to PVDF, cut out the band and submit to MS/MS, and maybe run RT-PCR on the RNA from the ChIP? K, thanks.

• This is the general organization of how a science consulting company makes money. This is why the post is short on detail (like most of the government briefs I read). I hope to be able to write more specifics about my work shortly.

Something about clearing out one’s lab bench is terribly cathartic. One has to pour out bottles and bottles of complicated solutions, ones with trillions of ingredients that took an hour to measure out and three to dissolve (on a good day). It’s a little like baking every day for a year and holding on to all the delicious cookie results, only to dump them all in the trash. Trying to pawn off one’s solutions on lab mates is useless. “Trust no one” is the motto in most labs – never use a reagent you didn’t make or check in some painfully meticulous way.

It’s sad and wasteful, but also cleansing and refreshing. You have to clean, put away, file and label, so that some poor shmuck grad student can one day go through the reagents, trying to make sense of the legacy you left, either in plasmids, cells, or viruses. Clearing out helped me see the marks, both big and small, that I left on my many assorted labs, and made me feel comfortable with moving on.

I cleaned out my bench for the third time in the last year, packed up my car, and drove down to DC just two short weeks ago. It’s pretty here, if you like men in suits and buildings that look like monuments (and monuments that look like buildings). I have almost settled in to my apartment on Capitol Hill, about 6 blocks away from the building itself. I stare at it every day on my drive home from work and from the roof of my building. I can’t get enough of it. I find it magnetic, somehow, and beautiful.

On the drive home.

Importantly, I love my new job. I never thought I would hear myself say it, but here I am. I love the job. It’s really interesting, challenging, and fun. The work is making my mind flex and bend in ways it has never been asked to before, and I am loving it. I am excited to write about it, as I feel I am now seeing a part of science and applications of science that are rarely discussed and explained, and that’s a shame. More soon!

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This is going to be a short post, isn’t it…

I won’t miss the constant sense of looming failure.
I certainly won’t miss the mice.

I am kind of going to miss the shaming and passive aggressive signs.

Don’t worry, neither Ben nor Jean were seriously injured during their tenure in my lab.

I will miss all the empty boxes.

Shipments come into the lab daily. Some in large boxes, some in tiny ones. Some huge boxes contain nothing but tiny vials, victims of over-packaging, over-protection, and over-charging for shipping. Moving is a breeze with so many boxes around.

Handy, really, since I am moving. After long and painful deliberation, I decided to accept a job as a senior analyst at a science policy consulting firm in DC. I will be moving there at the end of next week, and starting my new job on June 8. I don’t yet know what I will be working on*, but I was told to read up on the front content of the Economist in order to get an idea of the current science policy issues facing the United States. I do know that I will have my very own office, along with my very first set of business cards, and a business laptop. My new apartment in DC has a roof-top deck with a giant grill and a view of the Capitol dome. Taken together, that means I am now just one dog and one washer/dryer unit away from acquiring everything I consider necessary for full adulthood.

As I turn away from lab (yet again) I feel no nostalgia, no longing, no regret. It’s time for me to move away from bench science, back to enjoying science my way – by reading and thinking about it.

Now I have to get back to packing and finishing lab work. It took eight years for me to build a happy life and home here in Boston. It will only take a week to take it all apart and start again, from scratch, in a new city and a new industry. Wish me luck. And air conditioning.

*Another reason I don’t yet know the exact projects I will be working on is that the job requires a government security clearance. Eeek. I hope that security clearance is not as dark and sinister as it sounds.