A career doing bench science has a lot of benefits; somewhat flexible hours, casual atmosphere, intellectual stimulation, relatively stress free, etc. I also feel that us academic scientists live in a funny middle ground between being in college and being out there in the "real world", greatly due to the fact that we do our everyday work at universities where we get flooded by the collegiate enthusiasm that can only be fully experienced by being in campus. Another aspect that is very different from most jobs is the concept of deadlines.
We do have deadlines in science, especially when it comes to the dates when our grants -basically a written work explaining why our work is important, why it should be funded- need to be submitted to the specific agencies (e.g. NIH). Unfortunately scientific research can have no sense of time and predicting when an experiment will work, never mind if it will work at all, can be anything but trivial. It is indeed when these two world converge, the grant deadline with the scientific experiment needed for said grant, that trouble arises.
I bring this up because our group is submitting a grant to the NIH this November. My boss would like for me to provide one piece of data for the part of the grant by the deadline. While I have been trying to get this piece of data for about 3 weeks , I have not been able to obtain the result that we expect given our previous evidence. This leaves me in a place where it is possible that no matter how hard I work I will be left, in the end, with no data to provide my boss four our grant submission.
The interesting thing about this is that this is the norm rather than the exception in bench science. While a rough time line can be developed, it is usually the case that things don't turn out as planned and the time line is scrapped from early on in the project. This is relevant for many reasons. An important one is in vaccine development. We all frequently hear news bits about vaccines, notably HIV vaccines, that fail clinical trials. Predicting when a vaccine will be available to the public is almost impossible. Even in the writing of scientific grants, one is expected to write a possible time line for the proposed scientific experiments, yet this timeline is likely to not hold up as one never knows of the holdups in the process. We have also heard, and some of us experienced, the varying levels of time it takes to finish graduate school. This variability has a lot to do with the time it takes for experiments turning out a positive outcome.
In the end, the one thing that always holds true is that science knows now deadlines.
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3 comments:
What you're saying is similar to what I've read in military history books and is also a sentiment that my combat medic brother has paraphrased: "No operations plan survives contact with the enemy."
So true, bam. In grad school, I always thought it was funny when people would say things like, "I'm going to finish up about a year from now." If you still have that much work to do, then you have no idea how long it's going to take. It's just not that predictable.
It is funny for me to look back at grad school. I miss the casual environment where you set your pace. But, 'science' always prevailed over that pace in the long run. So, it is nice to prepare for a huge exam, take it, and wake up the next morning and have it be over, as opposed to waking up that morning and setting up the experiment again. Uh, speaking of, I have to go study...
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