collected
শয্যা- সঙ্গী
One of my first memories is myself, 5 years old, going to my mother
and declare to her, as serious as only children can be: “I will be a
scientist.”
Yesterday night I was in my office in the Department of Chemistry at
the University of Cambridge packing my stuff, resolved to not go back to
research again -at least not in the shortcoming future.
What has gone wrong?
Not exactly my pathway (I finished Ph.D. quite well), but well, you get the meaning.
I could write in detail what was horribly wrong with my project, and
for sure having a lousy project played a big part in deciding to stop
and change my path. You for sure want to change your path if you find
yourself in a mosquito-ridden swamp.
But if this was the only problem, I would have simply switched to
another lab. That’s what I thought until not too long ago (even if the
idea of quitting was really in my mind since a lot of time). But the
problem is the practice of science itself.
Don’t get me wrong. Every scientist goes on to do science for a
single reason: the love of science. Science doesn’t make you rich, it
doesn’t make you famous (can you tell me the last 5 Nobel Prizes for
chemistry without looking on Wikipedia? I can’t either) and doesn’t make
you comfortable. The only sane reason for starting to do science is the
dispassionate love of science itself. And I loved science. Like nothing
else. Since I was 5 years old. And I still love it.
But one thing is to love science; a completely different one is doing
it. Like the proverbial sausage, you don’t want to know how it’s done.
Actually, doing science per se is great. Doing experiments, analyzing
data, making calculations, programming code: I loved it all immensely.
However, with the partial exception of mathematics and theoretical physics, you can’t be a lone wolf in science. You need funding, you need instruments, you need resources. You need other people. And here’s where the problems lie. You basically face two choices.
However, with the partial exception of mathematics and theoretical physics, you can’t be a lone wolf in science. You need funding, you need instruments, you need resources. You need other people. And here’s where the problems lie. You basically face two choices.
No, it's not a satire or an exaggeration.
The first is going for the sky: doing great science in a first-class
place, make a great curriculum and look for a tenured position in the
end. The problem is that a lot of clever people want to go for the sky,
and there is much more people who want the sky compared to the
available positions. In general, science career is a race, where three
people go to the podium and all the others sooner or later will go back
home (See also this article from the Economist
on the problem). The competition for funding and positions means that
not only the hopes of getting a job are really lousy, but that people
become nasty. Like, really nasty.
I know of people that have given a purportedly crippled software
to a collegue to sabotage his project. I’ve been violently attacked
verbally for having dared talking with my supervisor of a project I was
collaborating with, because she feared that I wanted to “steal” her
credit. I’ve seen more than once people “helped” during a project, only
to find all credit for their work taken by the nice and smiling people
who scammed them by “helping” them. There are endless horror
stories like that. Everywhere. Now, do you want to work in a place full
of insanely clever people who are also insanely cynical and determined
to do everything to get on top of you? If so, you can do top level science.
It’s not all, of course. Top level science requires also an
absolutely mind-boggling determination and, overall, confidence in
yourself. To properly do science you must be absolutely sure that,
whatever you have in mind, you will do it, no matter what, and
that you’re doing it right, to the point of almost self-delusion. This
is so important that who wins in science is regularly not the most
brilliant but the most determined (I’ve seen Nobel prizes speaking and
half of the times they didn’t look much more brilliant than your average
professor. Most of them were just lucky, and overall were incredibly,
monolithically determined). Combined with the above, this means working
24/7, basically leaving behind everything in your life, without any
doubt on your skills and abilities and most importantly on your project,
while fencing off a competition of equally tough, confident and skilled
guys.
A friendly post-doctoral scientist in your group asking for a scientific collaboration.
The ones I’ve seen thriving in Cambridge, apart from geniuses (there
are a few), are the guys who cling to a simple ecological tenet: Find
your niche, where you are indispensable, and keep it in your claws at
all costs. This means basically that these people do always the same
thing, over and over again, simply because it’s the lowest-risk option. I
could have done the same (I was pretty skilled during my Ph.D. in a
quite obscure but interesting biophysics experimental technique) but I
thought that doing science properly was also about learning and
broadening your expertise. How wrong I was.
You can imagine yourself what does it mean also for research in
general: Nobody takes risks anymore. Nobody young jumps and tries
totally new things, because it’s almost surely a noble way to suicide
your career.
There is a second option, which is bare survival. You go from postdoc
to postdoc, perhaps end up as a long-term researcher somewhere in some
tiny university or irrelevant research center and basically spend your
time with a low pay, working on boring projects, crippled by lack of
funding and without any hope of a reasonable career (because the career
path is taken over by the hawks above described), nor any hope of
stability in your life.
Notice that, again, both paths do not offer you any guarantee
of sort. You can arrive to tenure track (itself an achievement) and
being kicked out after a few years, thus ending up as a jobless 40-year
something, with a family probably, too old to compete in the market of
real jobs. And bare survival is not easy as well.
So basically, if you are not cut for this kind of life, your chances
are zero. I tried, believe me. I tried hard. What happened during my
research career is that I spent 6 months on antidepressants, I got a
permanent gastritis, I wasted at least two important sentimental relationships, and I found all my interests and social life going down the drain.
All of this for having a couple papers about modeling obscure aspects
of protein behaviour, papers that will be probably lost within the
literally thousands of papers that come out every day? Until not so
long, I thought that it was worth it. It was something that I had never
questioned so far. I wanted to be a scientist since when I was five. I
had done everything to become a scientist. I was a scientist in one of
the top universities of the world, in one of the top five research
groups on the subject. I had won a personal fellowship to fund myself.
Most of my self-esteem, of my very concept of self-realization, relied
on myself being a scientist. The very idea of quitting academia was a
synonim of personal failure.
It has been long and painful to discover that it was just an
illusion. When I found that academia was not working for me, I got
immediately depressed -my whole worldview was crumbling. Then I
remembered that I had a life. I liked my life. I had a billion things
that I loved to do. I want to do them again. Quitting and reclaiming
back your life is not failing. It is waking up and winning.
A week ago I was with friends, talking about my job, and I found
myself comparing science to a drug addiction. Being a scientist, from
the brain chemicals point of view, is one week of adrenaline rush when
you’re finally on to something and pieces go together -followed by six
months (if you are lucky) of pain and suffering, only to get again that
adrenaline shot.
Well, noble addiction as it is, it is toxic the same. The next month I’ll be 30. It’s really time to get my life back.
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