You may have noticed that John is primarily updating the blog lately (and thank goodness he is!). I have been working quite a bit lately between trying to advance my postdoctoral experiments and put together an application package for faculty positions. Unfortunately, and probably fortunately, I have had one of those jarring wake-up calls you get from time to time that makes you realize your priorities are all out of whack.
Since I returned from Lisbon, a month ago now, I have been having problems with my cell culture. The idea behind cell culture and why biologists use cells is beyond my capacity to explain tonight, but I hear the book "The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks" is a wonderful look into this arena and the personal and ethical stories surrounding the very first implications of using human cells in a petri dish as a method for studying the underlying mechanisms of life itself. Unfortunately, what happens when you make the conditions ideal for growing human cells is you make the conditions ideal for growing a whole bunch of things like bacteria, yeast, and mold. Unfortunately, those things all grow faster and so can quickly overtake your culture and destroy any hopes you had of finishing an experiment or making any progress. It turns out that now I know my contamination problems are wide spread in the lab and were unavoidable and we are now taking the necessary steps to fix it, but not before I lose something that has taken me two months to achieve. On the bright side those months included a lot of fiddling with things that I now know how to fix and so the next time around will be weeks to get back to the same spot instead of months. However, I've been a wreck over all the time I have "wasted" due to these problems. I realize the real emotional problem for me is not just that it will take me a few weeks to recover, but all those evenings I came home late and only saw Davis for a few minutes before he went to bed and all those weekends I went in to work are what I feel the most pain in losing by watching this experiment go up in flames. I now realize I have not been doing a good job of separating my personal and my professional life and it really needs to change so that next time this happens (and it will happen) I only know the small pain of losing some work time and not the big pain of letting my family down for what in the end is nothing tangible. It should be entirely feasible for me to work a normal amount and be there for my family and make progress and I hope to prove it!
On the job front, I have now applied to three Universities! (The current market for people in my position dictates that I should apply to 20 or 30 schools, so I still have a long way to go).
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