Everyone who has ever worked in a lab knows about it. The flow. Those rare golden periods when everything you do just work. All controls turn out as you expect. Your Western blots are clean and give clear-cut results. Your DNA preps give maximum yields. There is a slot open at the fully booked FACS machine just when you need it. And even more important – your results make sense, they are coherent, and they point you in a clear direction. Everyone who has ever worked in a lab also knows that these flow periods are extraordinary rare – gifts granted by the lab gods after years of hard toil. And the only thing you can do when you happen upon them is to work work work. Run all experiments possible before the luck turns – just like Sabbi’s worms. So I have been submerged in work for the last week and a half. And still am. But I know this cannot last – for every experiment I run I get more and more nervous. The wait in the dark room before the film comes out of the developing machine gets more and more uncomfortable. Because I know for every completed experiment I get one step closer to the first failed one. To one of those results that raises more questions than it answers. Or is just a big smear where my bands should have been. And then life is back to normal. But for now, I’m going with the flow.

Last week I visited a career day held at the Karolinska – I had signed up for a workshop on how to use ResearchResearch to find funding. Once I had dragged myself over to the main campus from our forgotten little corner of the hospital area, I also signed up for a 15 minutes workshop on “Life and Career planning”. I thought it sounded like it could be interesting.

And yes, that workshop was…er…interesting. And somewhat scary. The workshop leader was a recruiter from some fancy firm (now headhunted to an even fancier one, to start next month, she informed us). She was armed with a beautiful suit and a huge lizard smile. Enthusiasm (madness?) was oozing out of every pore. Facing the hard task to try motivating the bunch off stiff and somewhat shocked scientists that was us she gave it all she had got – using large gestures and flashing that reptilian smile in all directions. She made it very clear to us that our lives were going to be revolutionized. The tool for this revolution was the “wheel of life”. This sounded impressive enough but turned out to be a form where you were to fill in how happy you were with the different parts of your life – family, love, health, personal development, money, work, and so on. She told us that we might now discover that all our problems at work were really because of our lousy love life, or failing health. But now worries, she could fix that – or rather, present us with the tools to do it ourselves! We all looked at her in astonishment.

After dutifully filling in that wheel things took a bit of an unexpected turn for our guide (who, to be honest, probably really wanted to help us). It turned out that all of us were actually happy with our jobs, but we all had the one worry – we were about to finish our thesis or post docs and were trying to figure out where to go next. This was not part of the plan for our guide, but she rallied quickly – “Oh, but that is easy! Just figure out what you want to do”!

Ah, right. Easy enough. Maybe I’ll just go to the pub first…

Last week I attended a lecture given by the development biologist Professor Lewis Wolpert who was visiting the Karolinska. I wasn’t familiar with Wolpert previous to this but was fascinated by his talk, and after some check-up reading I realized that he is very well-known.

Professor Wolpert discussed the truly amazing fact that one cell – the ferilized egg – will develop into a complete organism where all the organs will form in the right places, all body parts will be put together in the right order and size. "I hope that every night before you go to bed, you take a deep breath and think – ’Isn’t it amazing that I came from one single cell!’ ", as Wolpert put it.

And how does it happen? Many details remain to be elucidated, but it’s all because of gradients of signaling molecules – gradients that can exist already at the level of a single cell and will then guide all development and tell cells what to do and when to do it. These signaling molecules are a relatively simple and extremely well conserved set, such as the hox genes – Wolpert states “Cell behavior arises not from complexity of signals but in complexity in the response to signals”.

But Wolpert’s talk didn’t only get me thinking about gradients and development. Apart from being a scientist Wolpert is also, among other things, a vice-President of the British Humanist Association. You could tell – from quotes like “I’d like to be a creationist so I wouldn’t have to struggle with these difficult evoultionary problems”. If I hadn’t already been sitting to attention, this line would have woken me up. It’s very rare that anyone approaches the evolution vs intelligent design area in Sweden. I can’t understand why, since this topic seems to popular in most other places. I would like to believe that it’s because we are so rational that we have all understood and accepted the evidence for evolution and are keeping any potential religion on the side. Unfortunately, form the few allusions to this area that do pop up, I doubt that is the case. We might do good to discuss it a bit more – although then we are back to the problem of how to explain science .

I had quite a few interesting ideas for a post this time. Walking to work the last couple of days I have been musing, thinking, turning them around, and writing them within my head (crazy person, I know). Then I realized there was no point to post any of that, since I won’t be around this weekend to read any potential comments.

I’ll be heading out to a cabin in the middle of nowhere in southern Sweden. The plan is to spend the weekend with my cousin indulging in our girlhood live – horse-back riding – combined with tea-drinking and some serious gossiping. The place where we’re going doesn’t even have a TV, so there’s no chance of internet.

So instead of a long rant inspired post, I’ll leave you with this snippet I found in yesterdays paper about a survey on the professions with highest status according to people in Stockholm:

1. Medical doctor
2. Architect
3. Scientist
4. Lawyer
5. Finance analyst

I’m happy to find scientist so high up in the list, especially after reading Steffis recent post on how to explain science – maybe people actually do care what we say, at least a little bit! The finance analyst has me more surprised though, with the finance crisis and everything. But maybe it’s true that “all publicity is good publicity”?

Have a great weekend!

Turning back to my morning paper for inspiration, I’m caught by a discussion about the to be or not to be of University fees for extra-european students. Education is free at all levels in Sweden, for everyone. This didn’t use to be in any way controversial, since to be able to apply in the first place you had speak Swedish (and have the papers to prove it). This necessarily kept the number of non Swedish applicants low.

Now however, with the new European Higher Education Area were transfer between countries is facilitated and promoted, there are a number of new master programs given in English without any requirements of Swedish. This has led to a rise in the number of applicants, both from the rest of Europe and from elsewhere – and no one pays anything, all according to the system. Now some people are starting to raise the question why we should pay for everybody else’s education – because as Richard pointed out recently , nothing is really free , it just means that tax payers are signing the bill. However according to EU the same rules must apply for EU students as for Swedish students, so the only option would be to charge extra-european students (or everyone, but that is very controversial here).

I’m nut sure what I think of this. I agree that it’s perhaps not the mission of Swedish tax payers to educate the whole world. Also, if our education system couldn’t compete for students with low prices maybe they’d work even harder on the quality of the education to be able to compete with that. On the other hand I think it has value in itself to have students from many different places attending the university together, and we could do well with more of that. This mingling was a very important part of the educational experience for me, and part of why I like science so much. We will see what happens…

The Post Doc seems to be a popular topic at NN lately. Lauren has been writing about it, and Elizabeth just landed the perfect position. Now it’s my turn to speculate on this topic. As I told you in my last post I’ve finally met the publication requirements to finish my thesis, and the plan is to be all ready within the year. With funding application deadlines and whatnot that means I need to have some kind of plan as to where to do a post doc pretty soon. So, I’m trying to figure out what the perfect place to do a post doc would be like, if it existed. Would it be a big lab run by an experienced PI? Would it be a smaller up-and-coming group? How different a topic should I aim for, compared to what I’m working on now? I know you are supposed to shift a bit, but on the other hand you are also supposed to get something good out of a short time…

My take on this, as on everything, is to gather up a whole bunch of information and advice, and then try to make some sense out of it. So. I’m collecting information. I’m asking around. Pretty much any conversation I have these days is steered towards the post doc question. Mostly I get horror stories and what not to do (generally, the person I ask will tell me that whatever you do, don’t do it my way!). Sure, I also get some advice, but it’s pretty contrary. I realize that in the end, it’s a lot about chance and luck, but it’s anyway nice to be prepared. So please, what do you think? What is the ideal post doc position like? If you would decide?

Finally! My first first-author paper has made it up on PubMed, which makes if feel that much more official! It’s almost unreal – I’ve been working such a long time for this, and now it’s finally out there, looking so papery.

But not only is it nice to get my baby paper out, it also means that I can start thinking about the Afterlife – the After Defense, that is. According to Karolinska Institute rules we need to have two published papers (of which one has to be a first author paper) and one or two manuscripts (of which one as to be first author). With a second authorship from some time ago, and a bit of data that with some work can be distilled into manuscripts, this paper was the one thing I had to get to be able to finish. I feel very relived, but also a bit scared – now I have to start making some decisions and can’t keep hiding behind “once this paper is accepted, then I’ll sort out my future”…

These publication requirements of the Karolinska are often debated. Talking to students from other places I get the feeling that it’s quite unusual to have this kind of rule. The benefit is obviously that when we finish, we have something to our names, which will make future in science that much easier. The drawback could be that projects have to be published prematurely in order for students to be able to finish, or have to be divided so that more than one student can have a first authorship (although shared first authorships also count, so there are ways of getting around that)

What are your experiences? Did you have to publish to be able to finish your thesis? Do you think it’s a good rule? I’m curious, since this rule has been the center of my attention for some time now…

It’s that time of year again – Science week! Every day a new Nobel prize is awarded, but predictably enough my favorite is the first, the prize in medicine or physiology , which is decided by the Karolinska Institute Nobel Committee

This year, as I’m sure you are all well aware, the medicine or physiology prize went to Elizabeth Blackburn , Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for discovering Telomeres – the very ends of the chromosomes – and Telomerase – the enzyme that makes them. (As already guessed by many, including The Red pill blog here at NN)

The telomeres shown in white at the tips of the grey chromosomes

Many better suited will surely discuss exactly how important this finding is. I will leave it at saying that I think telomeres are cool, and that being able to maintain telomere length gives the cell unlimited replicative potential, which is one of the Hallmarks of Cancer , so for my area of research it’s a very important finding.

However, what I like best about this Nobel Prize week is that it’s actually a week when science is trendy. Science on the fist page of the morning paper, science on the ever present lab radio…Everyone wants to have a clue (or at least seem like they do – on the radio we got to learn that “chromosomes are parts of cells that give you eternal life”. I guess it is true in a very philosophical sense, but that was perhaps not what they intended). And to remedy the fact that school children don’t know the names of any contemporary scientists the papers have special issues on “cool” scientist. It’s kind of fun, for a week. And to day it’s time for the next!

This week I’m attending a course in commercializing science. I figured that even if I’m not feeling very commercial at the moment it’s good to have the general idea of how these things work. The course is interesting, and the composition of students maybe even more so – we are a mix of graduate students from all kinds of fields – quantum chemistry, medical imageing, business…This mix inspires a number of intense discussions. So far I have been most surprised by the realization that “we” (by which I mean hands-on scientists) are doers. I always felt that we tend to get caught in discussions but that is nothing to some of my new course mates. Very interesting discussions, and I learn a lot from them, but I can sometimes get impatient for reaching some kind of conclusion and going out and actually do something (preferably an experiment!).

Another good reason for taking this course when working with research in Sweden is the so called Teachers’ exception . The essence of this “exception” is that if you, while doing your research, finds something that you think you could patent, develop, and sell, then you own the rights to that discovery. This differs from the rules in most other places where the university has the rights to your invention. The course teaches us that in Sweden it’s completely ok for you not to tell anyone at your university about your idea, but to start your own company, patent your invention, develop and sell your product. The universities usually offer start-up help and may invest some money in your business, so most start-up companies go through the universities somehow (still, that only means that the university supports you, the rights to your idea are still yours). The benefit of this system is obviously that there is a lot of entrepreneurship initiative – many PI’s have a business on the side, and new patents are being filed regularly. On the other hand one could discuss if the universities and funding agencies should really pay for the basic research that will then benefit a private company. I don’t know enough to tell what system is the best. Clearly the Swedish system is fun if you want to become an entrepreneur!

The lab bench next to mine has got a new proprietor. A new student has arrived, and this one is amazing at keeping the bench in order. Everything shiny, labeled, and symmetrically arranged. She keeps trying to fight off the various items spilling over from my bench – which is covered in notebooks, protocols, free sample kits that I am intending to try maybe at some point, empty tip-boxes and I don’t know what. It’s not that I never clean my bench – I do a lot of RNA work and then I scrub the work area, pipettes and eppie stands clean clean clean (those nasty RNases are lurking about where you least expect them). The problem is that my cleaning frenzies don’t usually reach the outskirts of my bench. The edges remain untouched territory, and the piles grow for each central area cleaning. But as Jennifer pointed out some time ago, a clean bench could make you more focused and prevent cutting corners. Which sounds good. It’s that, and then I’m starting to feel a bit guilty watching my new neighbor fighting a battle against my mess she has no hope in winning. So: today it’s going to happen. I’m on my way to the lab and I have decided. Next week will be started in a clean way!