Abstract
Laboratory science sometimes looks like it’s built exclusively for young
people, but if you look closely, you’ll find another group of scientists
waiting to join your lab: those of us who didn’t quite launch our
careers on a normal trajectory. Welcoming a second-career scientist into
your lab takes time and resources, but may just be well worth it. Here’s
what one second-career scientist wants you to know about supporting
second careers in immunology.
Sometime in between peering at bands of dye in one of the hundreds of
agarose gels I’ve run in the last two years, and mentally doing the math
to figure out how much of my paycheck is earmarked for the babysitter
this month, it occurred to me that you might be wondering what I am
doing here.
I am a second-career scientist, and I am in your immunology lab.
This idea may not make any sense to you. Sometimes it doesn’t make any
sense to me. Life was good before immunology came knocking. I’d waded
through bumpy career moments in my twenties and early thirties. I saved
a house from repossession during the financial crisis of 2008 (the
single purchase I made on my own that christened my entry into official
adulthood). I met a guy at a speed-dating event in Seattle, married, and
started a family. But behind the smiling face in the family photos on
the fireplace mantel, there was a secret that only those close to me
knew. Thirty years ago, I went to college intent on a career in
science—and gave up on myself.
As the Facebook relationship status listing says, “it’s complicated.”
When I was younger, I thought B’s were failing grades. My parents were
struggling, and I was sad and withdrawn. My father would be dead of
obesity-related heart disease before I earned my first college degree.
In a lot of ways, I was an adult before I ever had a chance to be a kid.
In that environment, college chemistry and physics felt impossible.
After a childhood of being tracked into every science program my public
school system could find for me, I left it all behind.
Or so I thought.
Like a functional lentivirus, the siren call of science was still
lurking inside my cells, waiting for its moment, even as I pursued other
careers that came more easily: journalism, documentary filmmaking,
marketing, management consulting. In early 2020, right before COVID-19
shut down the world, my cell phone rang while I was dropping off my
four-year-old at preschool. It was a friend who worked at one of the top
cancer research centers in the United States.
“Have you ever thought about working in a research lab? We’re looking
for someone, and I think you might like it here.”
Beware the casual phone call from a friend right before the world shuts
down in a global pandemic. What my friend knew was that a few years
earlier, I’d quietly started premed classes at a local community
college. When Covid hit, work evaporated, and so I became a full-time
caregiver to our son. Classes went virtual, so I woke up early to catch
up on the lectures. A year after my friend first told me about her lab,
I was climbing the walls at home, impatient for the world to get back to
normal. Then, the moment of opportunity arrived: a job listing appeared
on the lab’s website. My friend’s lab still needed a part-time helper
for minimum wage. Ten hours a week all to myself while my son attended
pandemic-friendly kindergarten at the little Montessori school down the
street? Sign me up.
After a few months of cleaning out bleach buckets and learning the
difference between fluorochromes and phosphatidylserine, the research
technician who sat next to me suddenly up and quit. The lab was busy,
and they needed a body, now. I raised my hand again. A few bucks an hour
more, and suddenly I was running those PCR assays and pipetting the DNA
fragments into agarose gels, searching for leukemia patients whose
single nucleotide polymorphisms on a specific sequence of chromosome 19
marked them eligible for an immunotherapy clinical trial that could save
their lives. I realized I’d inherited my carpenter grandfather’s knack
for working with my hands when I picked up a multichannel pipette to
load the whole gel in one fell swoop. The post-docs in the lab gasped,
but I never missed those tiny wells. I came home grinning every day.
Something I was doing, right now, could change the life of a person with
a devastating diagnosis. It beat management consulting hands down.
Then I opened my eyes a little wider and discovered that immunology
suffers from the same problems as the rest of humanity.
Funding is perpetually too tight. Great research ideas go untested for
lack of money. Good mentors are hard to find. Bullying is as prevalent
as it is in the corporate world. In short, immunologists, I discovered
that you’re just like everyone else. Even if what you’re doing at work
is curing cancer.
And I’m still here.
When the days get hard, I sigh. “I’m just three billion base pairs
trying to get through the day,” I tell myself, or anyone around who’s
likely to get the joke. When the time is right, I speak up. My secret
superpower is that while I’m helping you do your research, I’m also able
to count on other sources of income, because I’m older than most of your
other technicians and frugal, and I still work freelance as a marketing
consultant because, let’s be honest, your hourly rate does not pay my
mortgage. I don’t have anything to lose.
And yet I don’t always know how to help change this system for the
better. When I see young techs working late into the night because
they’re afraid their lab’s principal investigator won’t give them a
strong grad school recommendation if they complain, I want to say
something to their mentors (that would be you). But I know you came up
through this system, too, and oh, how academic systems are loathe to
change. I could not have afforded to do this work thirty years ago,
because my father was dead and my mother was still raising two more
young children at home, so I was limited by my own earning power. I want
you to champion your lab staff so that all of us can live on these
salaries. We don’t always have the power to make systemic changes, but
you do.
Here’s what I do when I’m down on the system: I keep showing up. I try
to be the best colleague I can be. And when I need to do it, I make
changes, even when they seem like risks. After two years, I changed
labs. My first lab wasn’t well positioned to welcome a second-career
scientist. I never had a mentor or much of a relationship with the
principal investigator. The priority in that lab was on finding cancer
cures now , and to that PI’s everlasting credit, she focused on
the problem like no one else I’ve ever seen. Her work has saved many
lives. But new scientists need mentors and training, and I’m thankful
for the kind co-workers who took it upon themselves to teach me how to
compensate a 19-color immunophenotyping flow cytometry panel. They
helped me build my bench skills like bits of stardust coming together to
form a new heavenly body. There was a successful flow panel here, a PCR
problem solved there. I gathered the tendrils of knowledge together over
many months, knitting them into something that looked like competency.
The switch to my new lab has been well worth it. My new PI wears her
commitment to a vibrant, diverse scientific community on her sleeve. She
talks to us daily about our work and our challenges, offering support
and a commitment to our varied career paths. We are from all over, speak
multiple languages, celebrate our wins together. Many of us are
first-generation scientists. I am fortunate to have found a home in
science in this warm and welcoming place.
There’s more to this story. Thirty years after giving up on myself, this
year I will finally complete my postbaccalaureate B.S. degree in
biochemistry at the University of Washington. I started last year as a
transfer student. My physical chemistry professor took me aside last
winter. Just curious , he said. I haven’t seen you here
before, and this is a pretty advanced class. I explained it all to him:
I started at community college, finished premed courses, got a job in
immunology on a lark, and I still want to finish this degree. He nodded.Unfinished business, he said. I smiled. He understood. (And I
passed his class.)
This is what I want to tell you: When the second-career scientist comes
calling in your lab, open the door. We want to be there. We may have a
different set of responsibilities and might need more understanding than
the young folks we work alongside who aren’t rushing home to pick up a
kid from school or shuttle them to baseball practice, but we can do the
job. Mentor us the same way you mentor the students who found you when
they were college interns at age 18. Take us seriously, and you’ll find
that we take ourselves seriously as well. We all need each other. And
this most fascinating and challenging of fields needs us all, because
there are still so many mysteries to unravel. Let’s get to work on them,
together.