The daily grind of trying to find Nobel-worthy results
The following account of a typical day at the lab is drawn from a week's worth of my actual experiences at the lab. It is a scintillating account of what really happens behind the doors marked "Authorized Personnel Only". You will very shortly discover that this is not really very much at all.
8:46:32. Pull into small parking lot immediately adjacent to the lab in already-doomed attempt to score one of the good parking spots. Moment of dejection upon realizing all spots have been filled by the employees of the drug company upstairs.
9:02:36. Rinse out four-day-old coffee residue from mug on desk; briefly pause to consider scientific explanations for attendant lack of mold. Determine that coffee must contain a potentially toxic compound with antifungal activity. Moment of fear.
9:02:38. Need for coffee supersedes anxiety over potential toxicity of said coffee. Pay visit to coffee machine.
9:03:01. Find someone's forgotten quarter in coffee machine change slot. Think to self, "Today will be a good day."
9:10:54. Open e-mail to find request to revise a recently submitted manuscript. Think to self, "Maybe day not so good after all."
9:10:56. Console self with prolonged visits to favourite useless websites, extended bout of Spider Solitaire.
9:32:40. Decide it is time to stop playing Spider Solitaire and get to work. This proves difficult. Have heart-to-heart intervention with self. Grudgingly begin working.
9:40:32. Begin prolonged effort of updating and organizing disparate data sources into a single spreadsheet in preparation for later analysis. Ponder whether Einstein would have sorted out relativity if he had to spend all day pushing Excel cells around. Conclusion: nope.
11:23:46. Spider Solitaire relapse.
11:26:59. Return to spreadsheet. Pound keyboard repeatedly in frustration. Reconsider career choice for 16383298th time. Emit resigned sigh and return to work for 16383298th time.
12:05:27. Spreadsheet complete. Punch air with fist in defiant gesture of triumph.
12:05:51. Time for e-mails. Somebody wants me to review something. Someone else wants to me review a different thing. Somebody needs something rewritten; somebody needs a graphic. I should attend this thing, that thing and this other thing, and ohdidIforgettomention this other thing is now cancelled. Someone wants to replace my hair and increase my penis size, but nobody wants to buy my couch off Craigslist.
12:30:00. Weekly lab meeting begins. Busy self during meeting with different tasks, including stealth fingernail maintenance, observation of neighbour's shoe, cat hair removal.
1:02:32. Meeting proves to be half as long as usual. Revisit concept that perhaps this is indeed a good day. Return to desk and celebrate good fortune with a round of Spider Solitaire.
1:10:46. Take triumphantly complete spreadsheet and pass it to a second piece of software for analysis. Spend next few hours poking at resultant data hoping for Nobel Prize-worthy insight.
3:23:21. Realize Nobel prize-worthy insight is not coming. Decide will settle for insight that makes boss happy.
3:46:19. Cake! Thank the chocolate cake gods that I work in a lab large enough that someone has a birthday once every 9.125 days. Lick icing off fingers and return to desk.
4:32:12. Repeated prodding of data ultimately generates potentially boss-satisfying insight. Turn insight into attractive and catchy boss-satisfying graphic. Weigh options: pursue story further tonight, or reward insight with a well-deserved break?
4:32:13. Spider Solitaire.
And that's a day at the lab. I pack up around 5:00 and head out, having tallied one cup of coffee, one piece of cake, one insight and accompanying graphic, 18 keyboard-smashing fist pounds, 37 cat hairs removed, and 53 attempts at Spider Solitare with not a single victory. Maybe tomorrow.
Tagged with
lab-life
| 
JENNIFER GARDY 
Comments
After all that excitement I would have taken a nap.
Dr Oliver Smithies, U of T's 2007 shared Nobel Prize in Medicine, has a great lecture at nobelprize.org where he describes 'Saturday morning' experiments where you get to do anything you want, no matter if it makes sense or not, I guess as a reward for being in the lab on a Saturday day morning. Ever have any of those?
His Nobel Prize lecture is very witty & engaging & is worth a viewing on the site.
The other thing I was wondering about is the proliferation of coffee table science books now in books stores for the gift giving season, for non-nerds only I think, maybe nerd want to bees.
"9:10:56. Console self with prolonged visits to favourite useless websites..."
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, Ms. Gardy, for providing one more of these to this grad student who knows the massive frustration (and occasional simple joy) of reorganizing Excel spreadsheets ad infinitum.
cake for lunch?
Your day in the lab sounds rather enjoyable. At least you don't have a supervisor similar to the one I had, who insisted on a minimum of 10 hours spent in the lab during weekdays and at least that many hours on the weekend. If I tried to escape the lab for a break during the day (especially during those 2 hour electrophoresis gel runs) by hiding in the library to surf the web, he would come into the library to "check" on me.... which reminds me - you missed one form of supervisor in your previous post - the crazy micro-managing control-freak supervisor who drives his students into the ground in the race to get tenure.
wow 9 to 5...I wish I could work 9 to 5. AND a car as well...suffice to say this is not typical for a postdoc.
Well... I avoided your plight but only to end up "pushing Excel cells around". Sometimes I wonder why I ended up where I am (government security) and I realize that making career choices based on 'I don't want to be bored' isn't necessarily the best way.
But at least I have boses (yes, plural) that let me do what I do and I get paid pretty well.
Unfortunately I am very B O R E D.
Wow! Your latest post certainly explains why you have not been able to find a job yet and are stuck being a post-doc. Perhaps the G&M; might consider replacing you with somebody that is more representative of real scientists. With work habits like yours, you will never going be hired by any self-respecting bio-tech company or as a professor/scientist in a major university. SECCESSFUL scientists generally work 10 hour days minimun and still have to suffer the comments from the uniformed that suggest that we are "lazy" or "elite". I am horribly dissapointed that you are helping to perpetuate the myth that scientists are merely wasting grant money when the vast majority of us are working as hard as possible to try and make progress on the causes of diseases etc.
Why is "A REAL scientist" reading a blog in the middle of the day? Sounds like A REAL jacka$$ to me.
I don't pretend to have the most lab experience in the world... however, from what I recall spending a large amount of time working on excel sheets and wasting hours on useless fun is fairly typical of grad students and post-docs.
Now this isn't to say that researchers don't work hard--it's just that when working upwards of 50 hours a week, even the most diligent people like to take some time.
To "A Real Scientist" above.
I spent enough time in your world to know that tying your hack project du jour to some disease or other is a key strategy in obtaining funding. Almost always bs. There is an awful lot of mediocrity in Uni Science departments. Mostly these are places where young scientists can cut their teeth and learn the process, which is fair enough. But don't make it out to be more than that, generally. Exceptional labs are...exceptional.
I failed to see any real importance in what I was doing as a grad student in a mediocre lab in a mediocre department and got the hell out of there- went to med school and never looked back.
@RealScientist: Oh, "Real scientist". You have missed 3 key points.
First, this is a humour blog, not a droll document of the minutiae of science. How exciting would a blog that read "Ran gel. Answered email. Wrote small chunk of grant. Ran more gels. Answered more emails. Got ice. Did a PCR" be?
Second, as mentioned in the blog, the above entry is cobbled together from a week's worth of lab life. If I actually blogged a single day, it would be pretty freakin' boring. Lots of data-crunching, meetings, tele-conferences and emails.
And third, if you had done your research you would have found the other blog comments that read just like yours, and my replies to them. For your benefit, I shall recap my answers:
1. I am a postdoc because:
a) I like it - it lets me pursue the research directions *I* want to explore without worrying about coursework, teaching, or perpetual grant-writing. It also gives me time to work on my not one, not two but THREE jobs, not the "none" you seem to think I have. (That would be postdoc, science writer, and science TV host if you're keeping track.)
b) I'm not even 30 - am I supposed to be a PI already? Srsly? I just finished my PhD a couple years back - let me enjoy the pre-real word period for just a little bit. :)
2. I *do* work as hard as possible to make progress on the causes of diseases - my lab (headed by a member of the Order of Canada) is funded by the Gates Foundation and we work on new therapeutics and singe-dose vaccines for newborns in developing countries, and my particular project has led to several new insights into the mode of action of our compounds.
3. Most "SECCESSFUL" scientists do work <10 hours a day because they realize that for most people to succeed in science, they have to live a balanced life. Chaining yourself to the bench for 12 hours at a time doesn't allow you to spend time with friends, family or external interests, and it is these pursuits that are required to grow emotionally and develop the creativity and the communication skills that are necessary for succeeding in science. Benchbots can churn out a lot of data, but most of them are lacking the EQ needed to communicate that data, forge relationships, and foster a good reputation in the community, which ultimately does them in. EQ seems to be something you might want to work on yourself, given your ad hominem missive above, so I would suggest you unchain yourself from the bench and take some soft-skills workshops so that you might play nicely with other scientists and take your research further. Good research is *nothing* without the soft skills to communicate it or the respect of your fellow scientists, which is certainly not earned through attacks like yours.
@EC: Our lab is quite well-funded and we hire good people who bring with them a good chunk of fellowship money, so most of the PDFs here have some form of automotive transport. We're not ballin' in a Hummer or anything, but at least we can stay dry on the way to work :)
I work in bioinformatics, so I'm not hampered by waits for PCRs or cell line growth so the 9-5 thing works. I must admit, that was one of the big appeals of bioinformatics :) I do sometimes work more peculiar hours - sleep in for a bit, come in around 11, and stay until 7 or 8 - and the nature of my work also allows me to tackle stuff from home easily.
@Former Chem Grad Student: My condolences! If I could make one thing clear to the PIs of the world, it's that your job is make your trainees into well-rounded scientists, not benchbots. You do this by letting them work independently for the most part, and giving them free time to enjoy other pursuits and develop new skills besides pipetting, extractions and pouring gels.
I hear even scientists need to sleep sometime. Quite a few apparently even have gotten ideas in their dream state.
If I'm not mistaken Rene Descartes for Cartesian geometry and the name escapes me but a scientist who first postulated organic molecule chains.
check it out
http://www.paperveins.org/dreamroom/scientists.shtml
@Jerry: Very cool! And the organic chem guy was Kekulé - he dreamed of a snake eating its own tail and poof! figured out the ring structure of benzene! One of the few bits of chem trivia I've managed to hold on to!
If you have time to write a blog, you are not a true nerd. I've seen scientists sent home from work because they haven't showered in weeks, and get 6 hours of sleep.
@Cartright: See my antepenultimate column - anybody that gets sent home for being stinky is definitely a dork-nerd, and not just a nerd. Us non-dork-nerds value baths as much as we do educational betterment! :) In fact, the bath provides an excellent and quiet reading place, ideal for digesting the latest treatise on particle physics.
I wonder whether Dr. Grady would be getting "you're not a real scientist" comments if she were a man and this blog were called "Nerd Boy."
To Michael Ezra...interesting point and it got me wondering if female post-docs earn less than male post-docs. Anyone?
nice portrayl of a lazy lab person - wasting away government and privately donated dollars to research... the very sector of society that will suffer from the current economic 'crisis'. Seriously - how many private donations, biotech contribution and extra government support do you think there will be - especially when there are people like you painting a biased picture of the research world??
And... a childish stab in your comments directed at those simply expressing their feelings?? seriously.. do you think anyone cares about your science writing and TV host career? That has nothing to do with the day to day life of most post-docs. Good for you - someone thought you had a pretty smile so they put you on TV - get over yourself. You could even take that statement as the perfect example of why you don't represent the 'standard' post-doc writing this blog - how many post-docs do you know that host a TV show? does anyone even watch the show?..
I get that you are trying to be 'funny' - but there are plenty of ways to be 'funny' and 'real' at the same time.
Most post-docs DO work 10+ hours a day... and yes, most of them fail miserably.. and no - most successful scientists don't work less than 10 hours a day.. and no - at <30 you aren't expected to be a lab head...
but you are expected to be true to your career. If you really love science, and you really love your post-doc.. you are part of the elite 2% of the world with a PhD - start acting like one...
stop doing the science world an injustice by portraying it as a world full of single minded, lazy individuals.
forgot one thing..
female and male post-docs make the same amount..
a post-doc is a post-doc.. a PhD is a PhD.. dog/ rat/ guy/ girl/ idiot/ smart person - they all make the same amount of money.. if the rat was awarded a better grant than the dog - the rat might get more money..
Aside from the assembly line workers at the big 3 auto makers & elsewhere, who really things anyone in an office or lab job spends each second with their nose to the grindstone. Not for a moment talking with their co-workers about their children yes even playing spider solitaire. I believe its called team building and destressing.
But if the critics on here really do mean they spend each second going full out, then all I can say is I'd hate to see you at the end of the day, let alone at the end of a year or at the end of your career. There's more to being productive than simple devotion to keeping the cogs spinning and nothing else.
To Chill: Sounds like somebody got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning!
Lab girl, do you have a phone number....
Reading this for the second time, I am amazed that (if it is intended as a humorous piece) it comes off so "matter-of-factly." I am also, once again, surprised that a new female PhD "cleans up so well." She looks like an Audrey Hepburn clone. I also have a doctorate, and the vast majority of my colleagues and confederates of both genders, while they are fascinating conversationalists and excellent people, are spotty, flabby, unprepossessing, and often beset by weight problems. Now comes the real poser -- do you have a life outside the lab and, if so, of what does it consist? Despite the fact that I play in two bands, have good social interchange with both my colleagues and students, and am active in my religion, I spend most of my off-work time sequestered with a book or playing computer games. I drive a 1988 car, because I can't afford anything better, and I probably will be out of a job this spring, because I've been teaching as an adjunct within a state system which has lost funding and is collapsing classes. What's your secret?
"nerd girl" jennifer is uber hot. where were all the hot nerd girls when I was in science?
ps: your coffee fear, I'm no botany expert but coffee is slightly acidic, and molds don't like acidic environments.
ps. if you abandon science and head to business like me, you will find your day not much different, in that you will have short bouts of doing what most people take all day to complete, interspersed with by plenty of time wasting activity such as "free cell", "some free chess application", or reading the news online. And most of your day would be described as tediously lame.
Wow ... great entertaining and humorous comments (I hope intentionally humorous, but perhaps not given the tone in a few).
To provide an outsider's view (I may be nerdy and/or geeky, but I am not a scientist or a "PhuD") and the view of a sometime contributor to grants, I find NerdGirl's blog entertaining and fun (also well-written, intelligent and witty) and chill's comments off-putting, narrow and, dare I say, unintelligent.
Thanks for the entertainment and, Dr. Gardy, I wish you continued success.
"Aside from the assembly line workers at the big 3 auto makers & elsewhere, who really things anyone in an office or lab job spends each second with their nose to the grindstone. Not for a moment talking with their co-workers about their children yes even playing spider solitaire. I believe its called team building and destressing."
1. Kids? Most of the postdocs don't have the money/time to have kids....
2. If you want to destress then please go home. No one is stopping you. Don't take up the space and stop sucking time out of your colleagues.
@Not funny
point 1, really? have you taken a survey or are you going off the top of your head?
next thing you'll tell me is that postdocs are like monks & sisters & don't like to have sex? in my employment I see lots of people who have kids but not the money, never stopped many that I know of
point 2, I can see where you would be fun to have at 99.9% of the workplaces out there, for example stop sucking my time Mary I don't give a darn that your kid was a flower in the school play & looked so darn cute, or drop dead Fred I don't want to hear anything about your coaching a junior hockey team, you would be as popular, as well as you are on this blog, Mary & Fred would not like working with you in future & how does that improve the work getting done?
I sure am glad I'm not working for some of the post-docs making comments here that may one day become PI's.
Good for you - you work twice as long as everybody else - get over YOURself. I don't care how long you work. I don't care you joke around at work. I care about the quality and quantity of the science you produce. And if that means keeping post-docs happy by allowing them to have a life then why would one jeopardize that?
Holy (insert onomatopoetic word here) Batman. The hostility of some people directed at the supposed "time wasting" is laughable. Lighten up, lads. She writes an entertaining blog with a little bit of refined sarcasm and self-deprecation. Jennifer clearly loves her work, and what she labels "pushing around excel cells" probably involves a great deal more effort than anyone gives credit.
As for those of you who insist that "real" scientists spend every waking hour working, etc ad nauseum, I'd like to point something out. I work a job where sometimes I am forced to go several days in a row working 20 hours. Even in such a high tempo environment, jokes are made. People take 10 minutes to reward themselves (smoke/coffee/Minesweeper). We ask how the kids' hockey games are going.
I'm with UBCgradstudent. I care about results, and prefer taking the happy route to get there.
I also like cake. I wish I got cake every 9.125 days.
[mandatory reference to Jennifer's good looks (zomglol!1!)]
haha probably those nasty comments are coming from supervisors/PIs, not postdocs/grad students! So be aware! Just act busy!
I'm with UBCgradstudent and Morgan - it is about results and not how one gets there - we all work differently. As Dr. Gardy notes, her "day in the life" was an average day. Not every day looks the same. Also, I have no doubt that Dr. Gardy's other pursuits - both professional and personal - are integral to making her a great scientist.
To Dr. Gardy, I love your blog and can totally relate to it. Bless.
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