A Matter of Health
Organizing passion
By Ruth SoRelle, M.P.H.
Passion is critical to successful science.
It justifies the long hours, the grant writing, the pain-staking work and the disappointments. It drives the work and the workers.
What is less well recognized is that organization must be an equal partner to passion in any laboratory. A successful scientific laboratory involves many people, many projects and at the top, a scientist who can also teach and organize. Without those critical components, no scientific laboratory can survive.
Graduate students
Consider what must go into organizing a laboratory. First, there are the graduate students. Each of them has a project. Completing that project is critical to the student's degree. In the end, the scientist in charge is responsible for giving that student or helping the student acquire the tools – intellectual and technological – needed to complete the project. Then, that student must receive guidance in how to record the findings and write them in a form that can be published and/or presented in a scientific forum. When the student receives a doctorate, often the scientist who leads the laboratory must mentor that person in how to continue his or her scientific career. Where should that student do post-doctoral work? What institution would be the best match for the student's talents? Multiply those tasks and many more by four, five or even more graduate students.
Post-docs
Most laboratories also have post-doctoral students. They have completed their doctorates but they need more experience and mentoring before they can seek their own grants and begin their own laboratory. A good post-doctoral student can provide laboratory leadership but that person still requires the mentoring critical to success. What kinds of projects should that student pursue? How does the student pursue that kind of work? How does the post-doc mentor graduate and other students in the laboratory? Where should he or she go when post-doctoral projects come to an end?
The person at the top
Answering those questions is often the task of the scientist who is leading the laboratory. At the same time, that person is traveling the world, making presentations about his or her research. He or she is a member of study sections that judge grants for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation or one of the many philanthropic groups that fund science in research institutions. At the same, he or she is writing grants to fund the research going on in the laboratory at home and helping students write their grants at the same time.
Most of them hold weekly meetings with the members of their labs, discussing where the science is, how projects are going and what comes next. They direct experiments, brainstorm how projects should be structured and keep on top of the scientific literature in the field. They take responsibility for what goes on in their laboratories and for the success or failure of their students.
Only a person with discipline and a mind for organization could accomplish so much. Yet, many of them do just that and take on more.
Why? Well, there's that passion.
