…then what dolls would you put in it? This is the question of the week for me. I am making slow but steady progress towards figuring out this whole finding a post doc business, and am starting to narrow down my list of dream labs. Luckily I have several friends in similar situations, and we are dissecting the subject every chance we get. The dream dream lab naturally has everything, but in reality we need to compromise. Hence the question: which one of the important things is the most important one? Being a scientist I decided to address the subject scientifically and have therefore listed all the attributes of the labs on my and my friends’ lab wish lists. And since I know NN is great when it comes to giving advice I am now leaving it up to you to vote. How would you grade the lab features when choosing a post doc lab, provided you want to try at a career in science at the other end of it? You get to grade the alternatives 1-9. Are the rules clear? Ok, let’s get to it:

• A. The lab publishes only in your favorite journal starting with N and it’s
  competitors

• B. The PI is a real hot-shot

• C. The lab has a lot of money

• D. The PI takes a lot of interest in your project, and will be around when you
  need her/him

• E. The lab atmosphere is friendly and people will share their things and
  knowledge

• F. The project is exactly what you would love to work on

• G. The project is in an area that you think comparably easy to get funded in
  when/if you want to keep working in it post-post-doc

• H. The lab is at a very impressive institute

• I. The lab is situated in a place where you could really really live (which means, it’s a nice place, and your significant other could most likely get a job there as well)

There it is. What do you think?

“So good to see you again! How are things?”

“Oh, good, just great. I’ve just started working as a high school teacher/IT consultant/nurse. And how about you, what are you up to nowadays?”

“Oh, me? Er…I’m a PhD student….in molecular cancer biology”

silence

“ah, wow, ok, that sounds really…er…complicated. Wow!”

some more silence

I’ve been trough this conversation any number of times, talking to old friends or meeting new people – and it always bothers me. The “wow, how complicated” followed by silence. They are right, it is complicated. Still, I’d like to be able to do some small talk about my work! Steffi wrote an excellent post about the difficulties of explaining science to non-scientific friends. My problem is basically the same, although maybe even more basic – I don’t want to explain why people are wrong (or admittedly, I do want that too at times, but more on that some other time). I “just” want to explain what I do at work – in a non-intimidating way that doesn’t make me sound like a complete genius/geek, but still conveys some of the awe and interest with which I think about my projects (on a good day. No need to convey any of the thoughts I have on a bad one).

When I try to explain my work, it easily turns into a lecture – you need to give a bit of background before you can get to the point. If I instead just shrug and change the subject I risk coming off as patronizing (“you would never understand anyway”) or as not seeming interested in what I do. Is there anyone out there who has the solution? The magic formula for condensing your research into a party friendly small talk package? Please share!

From beginning of 2010, there is no more monopoly on pharmacies in Sweden. Finally, if you ask me. Up until now, there has been one (1) pharmacy open 24/7 in the whole of Sweden – in Stockholm. If you live somewhere else and still need your asthma medicine at 11 pm or 5 am? Well, please spend the night at your local ER, and in some hours they will be happy to help…I really really hope this will change now.

With the monopoly (or even a couple of weeks earlier) disappeared the restriction on selling non prescription drugs outside pharmacies. (Amazing! I’m allowed to treat my cold when I get it, not the following Monday. Hurray!). Now the concern is that although you now can buy non prescription drugs pretty much everywhere, they still cost the same. This is attributed either to evil supermarkets or evil pharma companies (or to lack of time for competition to really begin, which I hope to be the real explanation). The current discussion brings the drug prices into the spotlight for the second time in a short while. Not long ago there was a big discussion about prices on generic drugs set in competition – or the absence thereof – between different pharmaceutical companies. Very simplified it seemed like the companies took turns to set the lowest price (and win the bidding for that time period) and then increase the price again for the next period, “letting” someone else win the bidding. Intentional or not, it kept the price from dropping in the long run, and it didn’t do anything to improve pharma reputation. Anyway, the discussion is on again, and I’m not sure what to make of it.

From media we generally get the picture that pharma companies are evil, withholding lifesaving medicines from poor developing countries. From some education in drug development, those of us who study it learn about the enormous costs and low success rates for developing drugs, and realize that pharma needs to get their money back (and to make a profit) somehow. So, are they good guys or bad guys? I really don’t know – probably somewhere in between. I guess we can’t expect pharma companies to have much higher morals than other companies just because the products they are producing can have such a big impact on peoples health and lives. But one could always hope?

I’m finally back from my amazing trip to southeast Asia and the bad cold I got afterward (50 degrees temperature difference overnight tends to do that to you…)

To celebrate the brand new decade I have made some revolutionary changes! First, as you may have noticed, I changed the title of this blog. Looking back at what I have been writing so far I realized that it was a lot less on science and lot more on science related things than I had expected when I first started out, so I thought this title a bit more accurate. I tried googling it to see if anyone had come upe with this brilliant idea before me. The closest match was an album called The science of things from the British group Bush (which I’ll probably have to listen to now), but I don’t think I’ll step on anybodies toes with my new title. If you think otherwise, please let me know!

Secondly, I changed my picture! I found this gadget on my mac book (just six month after getting the computer, pretty quick for me!) where you can take pictures and play around with them, so of course I had to do that.

Well, now I have some blog-reading to do to see what I have missed. Just at a quick glance I found I have to check out Elizabeth’s post about changing your name. And I can’t miss Squishy on the move. So I’ll see you around :)

Thick layers of white white snow are covering Stockholm. It slows things down, soothes things (except for traffic. Well it definitely slows traffic down. Let’s leave it at that). The holiday feeling is settling (partly thanks to Cath’s Christmas Carol Collaboration), and the last days of work before the Christmas holiday are stretching out before me. The lab is getting emptier and emptier. All of a sudden I have access to any machine I want, and can work my way through a whole procedure undisturbed. Not only the people are preparing for the rest – my cells are growing at an all-low growth rate, barely giving me enough for the last experiments before the holiday. The most probable explanation is too rough splitting lately, but somehow I think that’s not it. Instead, they are sensing the atmosphere – they are preparing to hibernate in the season of snow and cold. Or maybe they are actually a bit cold since the incubator door has been acting up – the mechanism sensing that the door is closed has somehow lost it’s sensitivity, leading to outbreaks of deafening alarms. No matter how many times you try to carefully close the door, the stupid thing just won’t shut up. Until I in pure desperation gave it a good kick – it immediately hiccuped and went silent. So for now I’m kicking the door shut – but I may need to discuss this with the repair guy after the holidays…

Anyway, after these last days I’m taking a two week break traveling to Singapore and Bali and a tiny island called Gili Trawangan – warm temperatures and long hours of daylight – can you imagine! I will be completely out of touch from the internet (a bit scary), so I won’t be back here with a post until 2010! See you then, and the very best of holiday wishes!

It happened yesterday – the Nobel Day, and consequently – the Nobel Party. My invitation must have gone missing in the mail, so I had to settle for watching from the sofa. The Nobel party has it’s entertainment value. First of all it’s a beautiful party in a extensively decorated Blue Hall in the City Hall (The Blue Hall, as you probably know, is actually red. The designer Ragnar Östberg liked the red brick walls so much that he kept them, instead of turning them blue as he first intended) . Then there is the farce-like quality. Party-dressed reporters who may have had a drop too much of champagne to calm their nerves mingle around the tables asking people clumsy questions without bothering to listen to the answers. And the comments! “Professor Jack Szostak is trying to invent eternal life – he is working with cells”. Hey, so am I! Does that make me Frankenstein too? (Amateur night at TV? But why? Such a good time for Richard’s PR just wasted!)

The Blue Hall

The party also offers opportunities for behavioural studies of the three main social groups attending. First there are the royalties and the rich people, who are in their right element at party like this. Then the politicians, who are feeling quite well at ease too, but except for the most conservative kind they are doing their best not to show it . And then there are the scientists, the laureates, who mostly seem a bit misplaced. The party is supposed to be about them, but no one really seems to understands them, so – at least for us TV viewers – the party is about about food and dresses. And sure, these things are important parts of a party, and the reason why so many are watching (and I also like watching nice outfits, so I kind of like this part). The clothes issue is without competition the biggest discussion in papers and TV the day after the party – who showed up in what and how well did it look. The biggest Scandal was back in 2002 when the Princess Madeleine had a dress showing (according to the press) a bit too much cleavage. The big issues of the Nobel Party!

Well that was all for this year. I am definitely looking forward to next time when Stephen will be attending!

Experiments – and thinking about what they can mean – is the most exciting part for most of us (I’m sure you’ve already read Jennifer’s great post on how far this can go). Doing the calculations and statistics is somewhat less appreciated – we tend to want to have it done with a fast as possible. Numbers! But maybe we should think again. Statistics Sweden recently did a survey on in which job categories it was the least (and the most) likely for the employees to get divorced. It turns out Statisticians and Mathematicians are the second least likely to get divorced! So – if you aim for a long marriage, go find yourself one (S/he can also help you calculate the power of your experiments, a definite added bonus).

In case you are thinking of an alternative career and wants to know how that would affect you marriage, the list follows below (in my translation – which was a bit trickier than usual…)

Top three least likely to get divorced:
1) Ore refining operator and well driller (0.6%)
2) Mathematician and Statistician (0.8%)
3) Blacksmith and maker of tools (0.9%)

Top three most likely to get divorced:
1) Garbage worker and Recycling worker (7.2%)
2) Pilots, Ship captains etc. (6.6%)
3) Travel guides/hosts (6.5%)

It was recently suggested by the Swedish Association of University Teachers that external scholarships as a means to finance PhD studies should be disallowed and that all PhD students in Sweden should be employed by the university they are studying at. The reason – to protect students paid by foreign institutions from not being included in the the social security system as well as occasionally making a lot less than those employed by Swedish universities. My morning paper was fast on the uptake and commented that since the doctorate is an education and not “really a job” (hmmph) one shouldn’t hinder students the chance of that education. Further, my paper stated, since the doctorate was an education, it wasn’t like anyone would systematically “import cheap labor” just because they could have some for free, but rather they would educate the double amount of students.

I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. I do think that people should be allowed to make there own choices – if you think that working for a lousy salary doing your PhD in Sweden is going to be worth your while, then of course you should be allowed to make that economical sacrifice – that’s your call. And I think most supervisors would accept both the conventional paid student and the free one, if having the opportunity. But to say that a doctorate is not work at all but purely education, and making it into a situation where the only one to benefit is the student and not the supervisor, that is taking it too far – in many research groups the students are the bulk of the “work force”, so of course there is a demand for them. Again – it’s great to have an international environment and possibilities should be left open, but there may be other ways of improving the situation for externally paid students then either preventing them to come or dismissing them as “being lucky to be here in the first place”.

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…