How I found my first post-doc job

At the end of the second year of my Ph.D., I began thinking about my first proper research job. I started by ‘cold-mailing’ a few project leaders to see what funding they might have in the pipeline. I just sent them a one-paragraph e-mail, selling, but not overselling, myself. This approach resulted in a range of responses: ‘Contact me again in a few months' time’; ‘Can you send me your resumé?’; ‘You might like to apply for this job I'm advertising in September’; and, best of all, ‘Perhaps you'd like to come and visit my lab’. OK, so they were far from offers of formal interviews, but what did I expect at this stage? Only time would tell whether these first contacts might lead to something more concrete later on. At least I'd got in early and hopefully made a positive impression. But, as it turned out, my first post-doc job didn't result from any of these tentative approaches, nor from any of the job advertisements in the scientific press. I was fortunate enough to secure my first job without ever having an interview. I created it myself. If this strikes you as unlikely, let me explain how I did it, and try to convince you that you too can have a crack at controlling your own fate.

Laboratory manipulation of the virulence of pathogenic microbes had been a central component of the birth and life of Pastorian microbiology. Pasteur and his disciples had fashioned their assorted vaccines by exposing microbes to a variety of changed environmental conditions—heat, cold, air, and so on.They had also found that passage through animal hosts tended, eventually, to restore such artificially diminished virulence. Given this practical focus on microbial malleability (along with other cultural and certainly personal factors), it is unsurprising that Pasteur did not himself come up with a formula for a strict, “one microbe produces one disease” specificity. Pasteur and Koch roughly agreed on microbial specificity; Pasteur was simply willing to admit more flexibility within a species. Mazumdar has argued that it was Pasteur's disciple and successor at the institute's helm, Emile Duclaux, who attributed the “discovery” of disease specificity to Pasteur. In fact, as Geison notes, although Pasteur's interest in the manipulation of microbes did not go so far as challenging the borders of their “species,” he was, in theory, willing to push the borders of disease species still further, even suggesting that the relationships between hosts and parasites evolved over time—and that there would be new diseases. Emile Roux also raised the possibility of disease evolution in his Cours; however, neither he nor Pasteur pressed it much further. Charles Nicolle did.

In 1930, Nicolle published his classic treatise on disease evolution, Naissance,Vie et Mort des Maladies Infectieuses [NVM]. He wrote much of the book while recuperating from his long illness in 1929. In the text, the invisible forces of inapparent infection and inframicrobes found central positions— as did his father's natural-historical inclinations and his brother Maurice's immunological models.

As has been widely noted, social media has played a central role in the series of protests and uprisings that has swept the Maghreb and Middle East since 2010. In the regions whose political regimes often exerted complete control of the official news outlets, the spread of information and communication among the millions of participants in these events was made possible by the various products of the ongoing digital revolution. The graffito “twitter” sprayed onto the wall of a building in Cairo's Tahrir Square—featured in the documentary project this article will discuss in relation to Brecht's concepts and techniques—can serve as a synecdochal testimony to the relevance of new technologies to what the West refers to as the Arab Spring.

Presumably on account of Egypt's position as the largest Arab country and the longevity of Hosni Mubarak's rule, his ouster received more global resonance than any other event in the series, as confirmed by the volume of commentary that the January 25 revolution has generated. The John P. Robarts Research Library catalogue search I conducted on September 10, 2016, using the phrase “Arab Spring” in combination with the names of five countries where the wave of demonstrations and protests manifested itself most forcefully (Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen), yielded the following results: Egypt—144 books and 5418 articles; Libya—72 books and 3617 articles; Syria—79 books and 3826 articles; Tunisia—91 books and 3672 articles; Yemen—42 books and 1991 articles.

Mubarak had not yet been ousted when the American journalist Jigar Mehta and Egyptian software developer Yasmine Elayat joined creative forces to launch 18 Days in Egypt, a web platform where documents of the revolution could be posted, consisting of streams that combined text, images, and sound. The democratic expression of the Egyptian people's political will was thus to receive a creative analogy in the shape of a work based on the Internet's decentralized, uncensored, and widely accessible nature. Already the combination of the work's novel form and topical subject evoke Brechtian aesthetic predilections, but a closer analysis reveals more profound affinities and differences alike.

I refer to 18 Days as a “project” to suggest both its status as a work in progress and the impossibility of defining it in terms of a single medium.

The second juan of the Array of the Five Talismans (Taishang lingbao wufuxu 太上靈寶五符序 DZ 388; hereafter Array), consisting of dozens of medicinal recipes, presents us with numerous textual problems. This chapter will only be able to touch upon a few issues. In her 2011 study of the second juan of the Array, Ikehira Noriko 池平紀子 primarily used Dunhuang manuscript S.2438, the Yunji qiqian 雲笈七籤 DZ 1032 (hereafter YJQQ), and Methods for Abstaining from Grains from the Scripture of Great Purity (Taiqingjing duangu fa 太清經斷穀法 DZ 846) to compare textual variants of recipes. While she examines multiple sources and variants, Ikehira’s stimulating discussion centers on Buddho-Daoist interaction. This essay builds upon her work.

The discussion of textual variants is not merely a philological exercise to determine the correct, or best, reading of a text. The very existence of different textual recensions forces us to recognize the materiality of texts in medieval China as hand copied manuscripts circulated among initiates and within lineages of practitioners, and only sometimes available to more public view. Single recipes, or collections of recipes, circulated independently of the texts in which we find them today, and were often copied and reformulated within different compilations.

A. The Basic Textual Sources

I begin my examination with textual criticism in order to obtain a definitive version of the Array. The first step in this process is to ascertain the correct words of the text. These two tasks are very difficult. While the Zhonghua daozang edition has only one instance of emended textual criticism of the Array, I believe there are several tens of instances where textual criticism is needed, but I am currently unable to fully emend the entire text. While I still have doubts about certain passages, I have no evidentiary basis for emending them.