Planning your independent research

Exactly what research would you be doing right now if you were given a free rein and your own independent group? Have you ever really thought about it? You may think the prospect just too far-fetched to waste time considering. I did too. But this was before I decided, amidst all the frantic hustle and bustle of everyday research life, to apply for a proper job, a permanent one. With hindsight my first shot at the big time came a bit early for me, having only just finished the post-graduate long-service award (or Ph.D. for the uninitiated). Needless to say I didn't get the job. What I did achieve was a thorough understanding of my research desires.

You see, when applying for a permanent job, a lectureship for example, a ten-year plan is what you need. Your prospective employer needs to see whether you can think big, but also whether your big plans fit in with their grand plans for the School, Institute or Department. However, a whole decade is a whopping great amount of research. We young scientists working deep in the mines of human knowledge are often so focused on the urgency of the next paper or grant application that our minds cannot deal with such hypothetical long-term scenarios. In just this overwhelmed frame of mine, I decided it was high time I took a long walk in the open air: time to reflect.

Often, when you listen to a scientist being introduced before a keynote lecture, you will hear that the person started out studying something quite different from his or her current field. Also, scanning back through other people's complete publication lists (not the censored ones on scientists' own Web sites) shows just how frequently scientists change direction early on in their careers. So, for those of you who are currently slogging away in positions less than well suited to your temperament and personal abilities, take heart, you can jump ship. You needn't worry about whether or not it will be detrimental to your track record. Just be upfront and nonchalant, and make sure you talk about it in a positive light – changing scientific discipline makes you a multidisciplinary person; you are able to reinvent yourself to follow your interests. At the end of the day, you don't have to stick with what you've done just because that's what you know most about. And, in any case, your resumé is more than a list of techniques mastered – remember all those people who bang on about transferable skills? Your major selling point is your aptitude to tackle and solve new problems. Top scientists don't flap if they need to use a new instrument and have never handled the beast before, they just find someone to teach them the basics and get on with it. This slightly arrogant attitude to learning new skills is part of the pathway to success.

If you have to write a progress report at a relatively early stage in your research, for example during the first year of a UK Ph.D., you may believe that you haven't got much to say. How wrong you are! You have plenty to write about, even if your results are a little thin on the ground. The first year of your Ph.D. isn't about amassing results; it's about making all your mistakes in one big batch before you start your research proper. Unless, that is, you made all your mistakes during your M.Sc. and extensive pre-Ph.D. industrial experience!

But, ignoring your many weeks fouling-up in the lab, what have you got to show for your first year? Are you still not sure? Well, neither was I until I started writing my first-year report. This humble report was possibly the turning point in my Ph.D. What's more it made me realise just how much I enjoy writing. You may be asked to produce a brief or extensive report, written in either thesis-speak or in the style and format of a scientific paper. Whatever the challenge, this is probably the first time you'll need to get your act together and think about what you've done so far and why you've done it.

It's a good idea to start writing your materials and methods section first. This is unlikely to amount to much yet, but this stuff is relatively easy to get down on paper.

Let's be upfront about one of science's biggest taboos: science can be unbelievably boring, especially other people's science. Doing most other people's Ph.D. or post-doc projects would simply drive many of us up the wall, so identifying your own is no trivial matter. Naturally, you become committed to your own projects partly because you know you just have to do the work. Hopefully, you are also genuinely interested in major aspects of your work; we all unconsciously ignore the boring bits to keep ourselves focused on the good stuff.

So an ideal start to a successful career at the ‘coal-face’ of human knowledge is to make sure that you pick a project that inspires you. Have you ever wondered why some people thrive on equations, whilst others are much happier staring down a microscope or trudging through the rainforest. What matters is that you identify your own little niche – somewhere you can work happily, animated by drive and passion for what you do. Finding the right project is a lot like falling in love: you might think you know what sort of person you'd go for, but that counts for nothing when your ultimate enchanter or enchantress walks in the room. Of my future partner my parents told me, ‘You'll know when you know’, and I have to say they were right.

To some people, the journey from school to post-doc must seem like a ridiculously long one. Looking back, I realise that the only thing I ever really disliked during all those years was that ‘perpetual student’ tag. But eventually I gained the respect of my nearest and dearest. ‘You mean, you've actually got people working for you!’, my brother once exclaimed, clearly impressed. I had just mentioned one of the undergraduate project students I was supervising in the lab. It suddenly dawned on me that, yes, I now have my own people: a couple of students and a part-time technician. But, if the idea of an extra pair of hands or two is appealing, it nonetheless needs careful consideration. You need to recruit someone worthwhile – so how can you improve your chances of attracting the golden candidates from amongst the undergraduate and Masters student population? And, when you've got them, how do you make best use of their time?

During your Ph.D. you probably showed undergraduate students or fellow post-grads how to use equipment or learn a new technique, but directing what research someone else does is a different kind of challenge. As a post-doc and fully paid-up researcher, you should be in the business of collecting growing lists of possible experiments. But, with the prospect of an extra pair of hands, how do you decide what on your list is worth ‘putting up’ for an undergraduate or master's degree project?

Freed from the steep learning curve of a Ph.D. and not yet burdened by a snowdrift of administrative paperwork, post-docs are the full-time researchers, are they not? Yet, if you are ever to aspire to have your own independent research group, you must get hold of the teaching skills you will need when faced with the demands of your first lecturership. Teaching is also one excellent way to learn how to improve your ability to communicate science. We all know the pre-eminence of excellent communication skills amongst the most successful members of our research communities. OK, so a class of first-year undergraduates may seem a world apart from our peers at a scientific conference, and we might need to dumb down quite a lot to reach them with our message. But, in all instances, we should adapt our content and delivery to suit our audience. And, if you are able to tailor your message to make it interesting and accessible to undergrads, then doing the same thing for your peers should be a piece of cake. It really is just a question of selectivity.

One of my first challenges on this long walk to lecturer status was self-imposed. I volunteered not only to run an undergraduate practical class, but also to design it from scratch. I found that the time-honoured practical class can be a microcosm of teaching practice.

It's hard to forget the first time you experience jaw-clenching pressure. I thought I had experienced the true meaning of pressure during my undergraduate finals. But I realised I was wrong when I first encountered real pressure near the end of my Ph.D. I had just six weeks to finish all my lab work. That's when I learned that there was another dimension of pressure that I still had to probe. When I met the real McCoy it left me physically short of breath. It was the kind of pressure that leaves you shaking inside, even though you try all the relaxation tricks you know.

So what plunges someone into this kind of cul-de-sac of stress? And, once you have driven down it, how do you manage to reverse out of ‘stress alley’? It is not a nice place to be. In recent years the ‘stress screw’ has been turned more tightly in all professions. Everyone now has targets and deadlines, and we all have our own personal league table to try to clamber up. Coupled with this, job security, by and large, doesn't exist anymore. OK, that's enough bleakness. You didn't buy this book to top up on depressive stories. You want advice to encourage and uplift you, so let me perform a little analysis of what I went through.

It has been suggested, on more than one occasion, that any reasonably intelligent, hard-working person can make it as a scientist. This statement is not to belittle scientists' mental abilities, but merely underpins the basic premise that published scientific work should be reproducible by any competent, suitably informed person. (‘Suitably informed’ means that you'd need to spend the best part of a decade getting academically tooled up for life as a scientist.)

Now this is all very well, but it seems to me that not everyone who could make it as a scientist can actually make it as a PI. Indeed, many research careers are deliberately shortened after the dawning realisation that there is often poor, if any, career structure for post-docs, not to mention mounting exasperation at the post-post-doc bottleneck in the permanent scientific jobs market. So who succeeds in this ruthless battle for the top of the heap? The following points are ten skills and attributes we all need if we are to make it as a PI. Before you convince yourself you are already on track for the top, you might want to ask yourself honestly if you've got what it takes.

Writing your thesis

I defy anyone to argue that there's an easy way to write a Ph.D. thesis. OK, so you can be organised and efficient about it, but, as far as I'm concerned, a Ph.D. isn't the top qualification without good reason. For me, the ‘good reason’ is the very process of constructing the thesis. Unless you are a natural born writer, it can be a bit of a slog.

After three years of hard work, and with the prospect of a salary only a couple of months away, I remember feeling a little radical towards my own thesis. So, I decided to break all the rules. I tackled the whole thing in one go, a sort of shotgun approach to thesis writing. Whilst perhaps unorthodox, I found this method extremely satisfying and very effective. The basic idea is to touch everything – every result, every paper – once and only once. You pick it up, look at it, make a decision and slot it right in where it needs to go. The object is to clear those piles of paper relatively quickly and get everything in electronic format as fast as possible. Once everything, and I mean everything, is on disk the battle is half won.

First, crack on with your figures and tables. Taking them each in turn, describe exactly what results you've got. You can use these descriptions as your figure and table legends, and a bit later on as the basis for your results sections.

Assuming you don't already know, sit down and work out your own personal reasons for putting yourself through a Ph.D. Once you discover what your true motives are, however trivial, never forget them. It may be a simple desire to see the title ‘Dr’ on a letter addressed to you. No matter. When you are up against it, it's that motive which will keep you going.

But, how do you translate this personal goal into a successful project? Scan a few job ads and you'll notice that the requirement ‘self-starter’ pops up with surprising regularity. To have any hope of completing your Ph.D. within your allotted number of years, you need to have this quality in abundance. First, you need the self-discipline to plan your days, weeks, and months yourself. Second, you have to motivate yourself to stick to your plan for the long haul.

Here are a few strategies that help to maintain momentum.

The daily grind

Most Ph.D. projects begin with an easy experiment that stands a good chance of working. This is a good model for the working day: start each day with a simple task. Doing something straightforward first thing gives your brain time to come online and builds your confidence if you can't face diving straight into a tricky experiment. However, once you've ‘woken up’ don't delay getting stuck-in; displacement activities can easily sneak in and fill up your entire day.

Early in your career, research can feel like a relentless round of grant and fellowship applications, posters, talks, and reports, not to mention boundary-pushing experiments. You can sometimes feel like a production-line worker in a world-class assembly plant. One of the obvious pitfalls of this time is that you can become more and more focused on your research, and lose sight of the big picture. This diminishes your chances of enriching your research by cross-fertilisation from other fields. Even at the earliest stage in your career, you really need to make these cross-links. Why? Because they could provide the ammunition you need to convince the powers-that-be that you're on to the ‘next big thing’ – your passport to a fellowship or an academic post.

So, how can you expand the breadth of your knowledge en route to that independent job? There are many simple ways. As far as reading goes, time demands mean that post-docs can no longer fritter away half a day in the library scouring obscure journals as they used to in their graduate student days. Abstract scanning is part of the answer, even more so if you're not in a position to access the full contents of all the weird and wonderful journals themselves. A lot of this general fishing around can be made much easier with discipline-specific Web sites such as biology's Faculty of 1000 (faculty of 1000.com). Other scientists' home pages are also good primers for an unfamiliar area.

Equilibrium lies at the heart of many of our models of the way the world works. Arguments within a diverse range of disciplines proceed from the premise that the normal state of being is a harmonious one. But that premise is not secure. Disharmony and conflict may be far more than aberrations from a normal state; they may be at the heart of the system. The essays in this volume explore the theme of disharmony and conflict, and the alternative proposition that a variety of systems are fundamentally informed, not just by a tendency towards harmony and equilibrium, but also by conflict.

These essays were first delivered as the 20th Darwin College lecture series. They explore conflict at a range of levels and scales, from the workings of genes and chromosomes at one extreme, and the evolution of galaxies within a ‘multiverse’ at the other. Between these two extremes, they focus upon an intermediate scale, that of human society. In this introduction, we draw out some of the themes that have recurred in the course of these diverse contributions.

An evolutionary imperative

Conflict has a resonance with one of the central ideas of Darwinian evolution, the struggle for survival. This resonance is a recurrent theme of essays by Haig, Wrangham and Cunliffe, in their respective contributions on genomic conflict, the evolution of great apes, and the deep history of the human species.

A few years ago, astronomers and astrophysicists did not agree on the age of the universe. Some said it might be 10 billion years old, others said 20 billion. You might think that we were completely clueless, not to know by a factor of two how old the universe is. But you have to consider that no-one was arguing the universe might be a trillion years old, or a quadrillion years, or a hundred years old. We were only within a factor of two of each other, and this was a pretty good thing. We knew we were nearing agreement. In fact the most recent data indicate an age of 14 billion years, plus or minus one or two. In the universe, quantities of time, size, temperature and distance come in such a vast range that factors of two between friends are not important.

Introducing powers of ten

In this chapter, we're going to cover that whole vast range. But if we're going to get through the entire universe in a few pages, factors of ten are the smallest differences we should worry about.

100 = 1

We'll start here, the number 1. This needs no introduction. The number 1 has no zeros to follow it, so we can write it as ten to the zeroth power. That zero tells us how many zeros follow the 1, if you're going to write it out. This fact turns out to be very important later on.

This is a lecture about the power of simple ideas in mathematics.

What I like doing is taking something that other people thought was complicated and difficult to understand, and finding a simple idea, so that any fool – and, in this case, you – can understand the complicated thing.

These simple ideas can be astonishingly powerful, and they are also astonishingly difficult to find. Many times it has taken a century or more for someone to have the simple idea; in fact it has often taken 2000 years, because often the Greeks could have had that idea, and they didn't.

People often have the misconception that what someone like Einstein did is complicated. No, the truly earth-shattering ideas are simple ones. But these ideas often have a subtlety of some sort, which stops people from thinking of them. The simple idea involves a question nobody had thought of asking.

Consider, for example, the question of whether the Earth is a sphere or a plane. Did the ancients sit down and think ‘now let's see – which is it, a sphere or a plane?’? No, I think the true situation was that no-one could conceive the idea that the earth was spherical – until someone, noticing that the stars seemed to go down in the West and then twelve hours later come up in the East, had the idea that everything might be going round – which is difficult to reconcile with the accepted idea of a flat earth.

Between the solitary and the social

Death is a solitary, individual and incommunicable event, perhaps the most private and intimate moment in the cycle of human life. Whether it marks, in religious terms, an exchange – whereby the dissolution of the body is contiguous with an entry into a new spiritual existence and, thus, the return to divinity – or whether, in the more secular encoding of what Sigmund Freud calls ‘the death drive’, it merely initiates the return to that tensionless, undifferentiated state of the inanimate that is beyond, grounding and prefiguring biological and social human existence, in either case the finality of death is generally acknowledged as the one certainty in any given life. It is the powerful fact against which, and in relation to which, all mortal existence is measured. At the same time it is impossible to know in advance what the experience of dying will be like, as it is also impossible to transmit any precise and definitive knowledge of this event to those who survive the death of another. In that sense death is also the powerful limit of all mortal knowledge; its ground and its vanishing point.

Yet dying, burial and commemoration are always also public matters. As cultural anthropology has shown, death, in that it removes a social being from society, is conceived as a wound to the community at large and a threatening signal of its own impermanence.