I read this very interesting article in Forbes, and saw many take always and good advice.
So I decided to share it, combined with my own experience.
Try to get your weekends back: A tale of stem cells and their intensity
Author :
Fabian Zanella
I read this very interesting article in Forbes, and saw many take always and good advice.
So I decided to share it, combined with my own experience.
Your postdoc period should be the most intense and productive time of your scientific career. I have heard this phrase many times in the past, and repeated it to myself as well. So, when it gets entrenched inside one’s skull, together with a tendency of very high expectations from PI’s, postdocs work very hard.
I have seen labs that operate like sweat shops. People are in before 8am and many are still in the lab past 9pm. I personally enjoy working hard for good results, so many times I have been one of those lost souls at inappropriate times in the lab.
During the last years of my PhD, human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) were developed, and there was a wave of excitement coming from them that caught my attention. So, when I was looking for my postdoc lab, I aimed my searches specifically at labs that either had, or were about to start a stem cell program. I finally chose the latter option, joining a lab in which a human stem cell-based project of cardiac disease modeling was being discussed.
I come from a background of large-scale cell biology, development of cell-based assays and screens. So, I thought that I had a good idea of what I was getting into. I thought to myself: “I work hard, I am good at cell work. I got this.”
Well, I was wrong. As I learned more from collaborators who taught me the basics of stem cell work I realized how delicate and tricky these cells can be, so many things were so different from even the most demanding conventional, “non-stem” cell culture.
Starting with simple things, the media. I was used to changing media for my non-stem cells every other day, unless a specific experiment required otherwise. For stem cells, which rely heavily on fibroblast growth factor (FGF) to maintain their pluripotency, the media has to be changed every day, because FGF is not stable at the usual 37° C cell culture temperature. And that is it.
So, from the moment my collaborators gave me my first iPS cells to work with, my ball and chain were on, I had to come to the lab every day while those cells were running. Yes, that included weekends and holidays, non-stop.
Back then, I was working alone in this project, so I would spend months in a row without experiencing the feeling of a full day away from the lab.
The propagation and maintenance of those cells was also very different. Everything required planning in advance, as those cells needed to be plated on matrigel. So, no more opening a sleeve of plates, and just throwing the cells onto bare plastic.
Plates now had to be previously coated with matrigel (with all the intricacies of thawing the matrigel on ice in advance, diluting it, and adding to the culture surfaces quickly), and they had to be left for 30 minutes to allow for the matrigel to polimerize. Oh, and no trypsin detachment also! Back then, I would propagate those cells manually, cleaning off differentiating and non-stem looking cells, cutting the best looking colonies in squares with a needle and pipetting those little squares to the new plates. So a 6cm plate of cells could easily take me 30 min to be passaged.
Then came the time in which I wanted to reprogram somatic cells and generate my own iPS lines. That was even more intense! Regardless of the method used for reprogramming, when the first iPS colonies started to be formed I had to be precise and consistent, isolating, propagating, testing and banking many clones at the same time.
And that’s when it started to lose its glow. As exciting as my project is, when I was spending nearly all the hours of the day just caring for cells it started to feel dull, I was beginning to miss the point.
Gladly, all the blood and sweat that I had put in yielded a small grant, from which we could hire a technician. What a change! After I trained our tech, we agreed to take shifts for the weekends and suddenly, I got every other weekend off! After a few non-lab weekends I started noticing the spark that brought me to this project again. It’s amazing how some distance sometimes lets you see things clearer. And a fresh mind is much more creative and capable.
So, do what you can to break-free from the lab from time to time. You will feel much better and might very well have a fresh-minded insight on how to get that data that has been haunting you for the past few months.
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