It is a tremendous irony that my present profession is closer to how I pictured an academic career than academia itself turned out to be.

I am a scientist. But what I also am, perhaps more even than a scientist, is a scholar. I love, always have loved, learning about things, and if you learn enough about a topic, you reach a point where one of the ways to keep learning new things is to generate new information through research.

There is undeniably a peculiar thrill and satisfaction that comes from using the theoretical and practical tools at your disposal to unearth something new. It’s something you can easily lose yourself in, burrowing after ever more precise insights into whatever theme currently holds your interest.

But if I’m being honest, I never really felt consumed by my own research. I enjoyed it and I was good at it, but research was never something that could sustain me by itself, and it’s something I began doing primarily because it felt expected. When I got to the end of my Bachelor/Master studies I knew that I (still) wanted to do a PhD and become a career academic…but research? I didn’t have a clue. This is partly because British science degrees at the time were so theoretical – I had learned a lot about biology, especially molecular biology, but I knew very little about the techniques used to obtain that knowledge (it’s one reason why, when I started giving lectures myself, I always taught the experiment, not the conclusion). I remember wondering whether I should do something that used quantitative PCR, because that seemed to be fairly novel at the time, but I never liked the idea of tying myself to one technique for an entire career. 

I was, however, smart and motivated and lucky enough to get myself into places where good training was available. I became good at benchwork, learned how to produce high-quality data, and I realised I loved – and always will love – refining protocols to ever more polished levels of precision, but I never for one second felt my research was going to change the world.

Maybe I would have felt that way if I’d found some thing, some question, some all-consuming problem that was to me the most exciting thing ever, and then I could have specialised on it with the laser beam focus that’s another modern requirement. But the problem was that there seemed to be interesting things wherever I looked! I did plant biochemistry for my Bachelors, yeast membrane trafficking for my Master’s, mammalian motor proteins and cytoskeleton for my PhD, parasite cytoskeleton and membrane trafficking for my postdoctoral and group leader period, and I loved them all. Was it directionless, or a sign that in fact my tastes were very broad and I found everything interesting?

With hindsight, I should perhaps have paid more attention to Peter Medawar’s advice that scientists should work on important problems rather than interesting ones, because all problems become interesting when studied in sufficient depth…but it’s rather difficult to identify important scientific problems when you’re in your early 20s and just starting out. Furthermore, I didn’t have a sense of what the big open questions in research were, and compared to the glory days of molecular cell biology, it’s possible that there was a bit of a dearth at the time. Research communities were settling down into an era of steady annotation and accumulation.

It’s notable too that I always found more intellectual satisfaction in university environments than in research institutes, even though the research infrastructure in the institutes was invariably better. At a research institute all you’re doing is research + mentoring, but at a university you get to do research + mentoring + teaching (and teaching is the best way to learn!). This always seemed closer to the life of the mind that I wanted for myself.

The unexpected revelation from the world of industry-funded biomedical research is that that life of the mind turns out to be even more accessible here than it was in a university: working in Medical Communications (MedComms) lets me continually be learning. Instead of being corralled into one tiny patch of intellectual ground, treading and retreading the same questions to get finer and finer insights into things I already know, I’m continuously on the move. In the space of three years I’ve worked on haemophilia, yellow fever, rabies, gastroenterology, lysosomal storage disorders, endocrinology, diabetes, chlamydia, uro-oncology, reproductive health, muscular dystrophy, and more. Not only that, but my strongest skills (writing, communicating, organising) turn out to be front-and-centre requirements in MedComms whereas before they were more nice-to-haves.

And so, ironically, I have rediscovered the joy for science and scientific research that I experienced as a PhD student but which was gradually leached away as academia became a fight for survival instead of a search for knowledge. MedComms has also got me out of the Medawar cage – everything I do now has real-world medical relevance, so its importance is a given and the days of existential angst over the value of my work are over. I am living the life of the mind that I always craved, with all the intellectual breadth and variety I could wish for. When I resigned from my position at the university I thought I was letting go of a dream, but in doing so I appear, unexpectedly, to have gotten all I ever wanted.

Acknowledgements: image generated using Midjourney.