It is not easy being a scientist. There are the four-plus years of struggle getting your PhD only to find yourself on the postdoc treadmill dealing with lab politics, grants, PIs and the distinct possibility that your current project might end up being a total waste of time. This postdoc limbo is valuable time, that if not spent productively leads to less papers and less career opportunities. And the whole time the only people that will ever appreciate your situation are your fellow scientific competitors. Well that may be about to change with the publication of Allegra Goodman's new novel Intuition. I came across this novel via the Nature Genetics Free Association blog. Read on for a mini review of the first three chapters.
I haven't read the complete book yet, but based on the 3 chapters available on bookreporter.com, it is clear that Goodman has done her own research. The descriptions of a working lab in the opening chapter are painfully realistic. The novel tells the story of a struggling cancer research lab, when in their hour of need, one of the postdocs (Cliff) produces some spectacular results. The preliminary results are published against better judgment, and later called into question by another of the lab's postdocs (Cliff's ex-girlfirend). As others have noted the novel is timely given the recent Korean stem-cell scandal.The characters in the novel have been criticized as being too 'cartoonish', although the reviewer who made the comment goes on to say that many of these characters do inhabit scientific laboratories; in my experience this is also true. Although the themes are a compelling (objective truth, scientific competition etc.) what kept me reading though the first three chapters was the odd experience you have when a third party accurately describes your suffering:
It occurred to him now that he'd spent his whole adult life in a prison workshop. Years and years of manual labor went by. New results filtered through only on the rarest occasions, and always to other people. Miracles didn't happen, but Cliff and his friends kept on working. Like scientific sharecroppers, they slaved all day. They were too highly trained to stop. Overeducated for other work, they kept repeating their experiments. They kept trying to live on their seventeen-thousand- dollar salaries. There was not much poetry in that, or if there was, Cliff had certainly not been privileged to see it.
It could be worse.
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Life in science
I've always thought that the lives of working scientists could make great material for a novel or film. Not in the sci-fi tradition, but with the focus on the people - their lives, feelings, problems. Yes, scientists have personal lives too! This is often forgotten, I think.
Anyone recommend a novel or movie that they feel comes close to an accurate portrayal of the "tortured complex scientist"? Curiously, one of my favourites is a cult B-movie titled "Darkman", about a guy who invents artificial skin.
The slow pace of our own work
Probably most of us have talked about this with friends and colleagues. One of the most frustrating things about working in science is how slow our own work moves. Specially when compared to the pace of science as seen in the journals every week. This is for me one of the big challenges, to keep interested with the work that I am doing even if moves along so slowly. It is so much easier to just start something new after getting all excited with something we just saw somewhere recently. This is specially true for me when trying to finish a project, to continue working after the initial effort to establish if the idea has potential or not.