The things they don't teach you about being a scientist

One of the frustrating issues in a science career is the limited extent to which each career stage prepares you for the next. An undergraduate degree in science will typically focus on teaching established science theories and testing them via examination. The research proportion is limited and shrinking due to budget constraints.

Then you finish undergraduate studies and start a PhD, and the ability to learn established theories and sit an exam is completely useless. Instead you need to completely reorientate yourself to research skills, both practical (in terms of benchwork) and theoretical (in terms of experimental design and analysis). Exactly where your PhD mentor expects you to pick up these new skills is a mystery, as there are no lectures or classes to teach it. Throughout your PhD and postdoc you know that you are going to be judged solely on your research output. Do experiments and publish, do experiments and publish, anything else is irrelevant.

So you finish your postdoc with a lot of research experience and a handful of publications and manage to land a faculty position. You are now an independent principle investigator and all the skills you have learned to date are redundant. No time for benchwork anymore, you need to master a new set of skills within a year or fail miserably and end with a whimper. Having only written one or two short fellowship applications at the end of your PhD, you now need to master the major project grant. A detailed and elaborate research proposal which needs to be tailored towards the language and politics of the particular granting body (information which is never given on the website of course), your grant has to compete with successful investigators who have been operating in the field for decades.

While you wait for a year for the grant results to come back, your startup grant seems to disappear - quick, learn the skills of an accountant! So far you've only spent money in the lab, now you need to know the complete salary costs (including taxation status, social security contributions and yearly increments), equipment depreciation costs, which items should go on which budget (international staff on the VIB budget can gain expat taxation status, but international students on the KUL budget are exempt from social security), the cost threshold for requiring multiple quotes, how to negotiate with reps for good prices, and so much more. When you have mastered this you realise that you wasted far too much money on furniture when the university has a hidden basement full of free cast-offs and that expensive piece of equipment you bought already exists unused in a laboratory two floors down.

Of course, while you are becoming a grant writer / accountant, research needs to occur, so you'll need staff. You are a complete unknown, so no high power post-docs coming with their own fellowship. You didn't teach undergraduate classes last year, so good luck in snapping up a student able to attract a scholarship. You place a few adds in Nature and for the next six months you get ten applications a day from India and China. How to judge them? Hiring decisions are a science in themselves, then labour contract law is a mine-field. Nevertheless, with a few bumps along the road you somehow manage to put together a surprisingly talented and hardworking team. You already knew from personal experience that a lab can be an emotional boiler-room, now you need to manage that or manage the consequences. You need to understand every staff member as an individual, what makes them tick, how to keep them happy and productive, the best way to redirect them when they go off-course. Skills that can take a lifelime to learn about your partner you need to pickup within a few months about six strangers from six different cultures. Plus you'll need to leave your computer enough to spot trouble brewing in the early stages. The small things matter, the person irritated about someone else casually borrowing pipettes and not returning them happens to have a habit of writing directly on glass bottles. And let's face it, scientists are not exactly trained in emotional intelligence.

Think that you can do research now? Equipment, check. Reagents, check. Grant money, check. Staff, check. Stir the pot and research comes out? Hah! You would be breaking a surprising number of regional, national and international laws. You'll need a liquor license for that ethanol to clean benches, a permit to use sedatives on mice, ethics clearance of course but also an animal use license. Biosafety permits, equipment certification, occupational health and safety monitoring, a fire-warden. The most frustrating part is that there is no check-list to work down, you only find out about a requirement when you think you are there and you hit a brick-wall.

Then there are the unpredictables, that sap away your time until you are ready to scream. Your immunology department is the only one in the world without a flow cytometry core unit. The research assistant you hired to look after the mouse colony turns out to be afraid of mice. Your contract unexpectedly stipulates that you become fluent in Flemish within three years. That assay you used to do in your sleep simply doesn't work in Belgium. Your post-doc falls in a legal loophole that makes them ineligible for fellowships designed for both locals and foreigners. The SPF mouse house didn't tell staff to set up breeders inside a hood and all your imported mouse strains are contaminated. Your weeks of slaving over an FWO grant are wasted because you didn't know that the FWO does not have anonymous peer review and requires you to submit your own reviewers. You find out that your start-up grant also has to cover your own salary and you over-hired in the first year. You have a hundred meetings, departmental politics, collaborations to foster and suddenly a year has gone by and you didn't even manage to finish off that project that was nearly ready for publication at the end of your post-doc.

Of course, I could be externalising. Perhaps I just missed the training session.

The inefficient consequences of evolution

Vertebrates are unique in developing an immune system capable of anticipating pathogens that are yet to evolve. Birds and mammals have taken this "adaptive" immune system to the pinnacle, with T cells and B cells using a randomised form of genomic engineering. The advantage of a system based on randomised generation is striking - by making every T cell and B cell unique it becomes exceptionally difficult for pathogens to "out-evolve" their hosts. Regardless of how a pathogen will change, pre-existing T cells and B cells will be capable of recognising the new modified pathogen. The importance of the adaptive immune system to humans is evident in the fatal consequences of its absence, such as patients with end-stage AIDS or primary immunodeficiencies caused by genetic mutations. These benefits greatly outweigh the cost of the adaptive immune system in resources used and the threat of autoimmune disease.

But does the adaptive immune system make vertebrates more healthy? There is no obvious evidence that it does. In a key essay on the topic, Hedrick argues that vertebrates do not appear to have a lower pathogen-induced mortality rate than invertebrates. Instead, he argues that the development of the adaptive immune system provided only a short-term benefit, with pathogens rapidly being specialised to vertebrate hosts. The result is an immunological arms race, with each side incrementally ratcheting up the armaments. Vertebrates are essentially impervious to non-specialised pathogens unless rendered immunodeficient, but the additional mortality from specialised pathogens is probably equivalent to the invertebrate state.

This still-controversial hypothesis high-lights an important aspect of evolution by natural selection. It has highly inefficient consequences. Natural selection takes place at the level of the individual and evolution takes place at the level of the species. Most importantly, natural selection only occurs in the present. An individual who has an advantage for even a single generation will be over-represented in the next generation. A species that has an advantage for a single generation will be able to exploit more resources for reproduction. The long-term consequences - that each species will waste more resources in an ever more expensive battle - is irrelevant.

The evolutionary arms-race between host and pathogen is one incredibly important example. A more illustrative example of the patent futility of this arms-race comes from Sir David Attenborough, one of the leading science communicators of all time. In Life in the Undergrowth, he films two species of harvest ants living in the desert. Each population needs to collect seeds to survive, however the number of seeds produced in the desert is so low that there is fierce inter-species competition. One species of ant is diurnal, the other nocturnal, and each is capable of collecting the entire daily seed dispersal. In order to survive, every second night the nocturnal ants spend an evening carrying rocks to cover the entry hole of the diurnal ants. The diurnal ants can't collect seeds the next day as they need to spend a day clearing the rocks from the entrance. This gives the nocturnal ants a night to harvest the uncollected seeds. The following day the diurnal ants are able to collect every seed and that night the nocturnal ants spend carrying rocks. Two species end up literally carrying rocks backwards and forwards every second day.

The elegance of evolution is the beauty of such specialised behaviour, but the consequences are gross inefficiency in resource use. If each species simply spent alternative cycles conserving resources both species could survive with a higher population density than currently exists. But neither species can be the first to stop the wasteful use of resources, as that would give a fatal advantage to the other, and so they are trapped together in a cycle of carrying stones. The battles of night ants vs day ants and of hosts vs pathogens illustrate the bizarre, elaborate and ofttimes perverse consequences of evolution by natural selection