About the Author
This post is overdue. And, in fact, my paper as an AGA grant recipient is also quite overdue. I will write about my science and the importance of my findings in the future, but I want to take a risk, and to write a different sort of post. Here, I hope to establish a human baseline, and address a topic that seems a common cause of stress amongst colleagues and friends, but which I’ve rarely seen acknowledged publicly. I want to name, and ridicule, the shame of having trailing projects. As an early career researcher, it is, perhaps, unwise to name my faults in a medium like a scientific blog post…but into the void rush dragons. I haven’t vanquished mine by avoiding them, and I bet you haven’t either. I hope this doesn’t read as an excuse; it’s not meant to be. Instead, I hope you feel just a little less lonely in the work we all sometimes struggle with.
I am talking about that project (or two, or three) languishing on the tip of your brain, dragging down your confidence and gathering figurative dust while you wonder if you’ll ever get it written up. That list of unfinished papers that, at one time, captured some part of your scientific soul, but still you neglect them despite frequent twinges of guilt. Specifically, I am talking about the work that you did, or are doing, despite navigating immense professional or personal instability. My blog post will focus on the long tail of a quarantine-era project, but there are many sources of scientific turbulence that are outside of your immediate control or, lately, seemingly out of control entirely.
My graduate experience was great. I took full advantage of the off-leash approach to graduate student mentorship that was common in my department, and I was thrilled to be in a community so full of curious, thoughtful naturalists. These things together (freedom and curiosity), plus my personal propensity for over-committing to neat ideas, meant that I spent far too much time building research breadth and too little time developing taxon-specific depth, much to my advisor’s chagrin. Ultimately, I got my act together, but not before I dedicated a full two years of work to a project that did not end up as a chapter in my thesis. It’s not that it wasn’t relevant to the chapters I did write or that the science was not good, but it just took too long to figure out the logistics, and then the results justified more work and attention rather than letting it stand as simply a side project. Despite the delays, this project remains the one I’m most interested in continuing with in the future.
By the time AGA awarded me the funding I needed for the sequencing run, I had already collected leaf samples of a montane wildflower, Boechera stricta, from across an elevational and latitudinal gradient in the Rocky Mountains. These leaves had been painstakingly preserved, from collection to extraction, by hiking around a portable liquid nitrogen dewar in the mountains, then stored in a -80 freezer once we (me and the samples) got back home. After the field work, these painstakingly collected leaves just…sat, as I applied to small grants for sequencing. I had other pokers in the fire and continued collecting data on my ‘backup’ study system (now a core part of my research program), but I always prioritized the Boechera project whenever there was a decision to be made. And, finally, AGA funded my application with enough grant money to take a metagenomic approach to quantifying plant virus diversity across an elevational gradient.
Shortly after the grant was awarded, we were all told to leave the lab. We were told that classes and meetings and mentorship and friends should all be accessed through virtual platforms, and that we would return to work in a few weeks. Then a few months. Next semester. Next year. I needn’t go into it; we all lived this. I was lucky to be at an institution that took public health very seriously and responded in a way that protected students and the local community. I supported the lockdown despite its personal and professional consequences. I study viruses, after all, and have a lot of respect for anyone bold enough to fight viral spread during the early days of a pandemic. But it did mean that access to all wet lab spaces was revoked unless granted special permission.
Desperate to finally get my prized samples analyzed, I petitioned for access and was afforded the unlikely opportunity of running my RNA extractions in a lab all to myself. A faculty member who would soon retire let me use her otherwise-empty space, and the building manager sorted out my entrance and exit plans so that there was minimal chance of seeing another human in the hallways. It took me about a month to get through all of the samples, and in that time I didn’t see another person in the building. On the days that I was in the lab, I spent hours pipetting clear liquids into other clear liquids, spinning vials and contemplating the philosophical implications of ‘successful’ viruses. I got super bored, made up a bunch of micro-movement dance routines, spoke to myself in my second language just to practice, and only occasionally spiraled into existential dread at the meaninglessness of my work compared to the weight of a global pandemic. Mostly, though, I just kept humming along. I was, and am, so thankful I could keep working on a project I cared about during that time.
Once I was done with RNA extractions and sample pooling, there was more waiting to do. Shutdowns dragged on, and the sequencing core remained closed for months after I was done, then overwhelmed when they reopened. During this lengthy delay, I was remarkably calm. I think back to it now and wonder if I would still have the grace to be patient, but in the moment it felt like delaying my research was inevitable and, considering the state of the world, not very consequential. This is, perhaps, where my momentum began to flag after the long-awaited grant award. In the in-between, when there was no progress and no feedback, I again had to go back to my other project. By now, I wanted to be done with the degree and was teaching my own class, applying to jobs, and living alone in a slowly-emerging world of pandemic-addled colleagues and uncertain professional futures. I just wanted to get out.
I did eventually get the samples submitted, and the sequencing core returned results as soon as they could. I was in my final semester by then, and decided to reach out for help on the analyses, which built a new collaboration and also reduced the amount of new programming I had to learn in the final months of my degree. Not everything I wanted to do was possible with the data that we got, and the host immunity results are omitted from the report (for now; pending future bioinformatic developments, this may someday be revisited). The full virome across five elevational levels was recovered with sufficient replication to spot a trend. My coauthors on this project, including a virologist who I admire greatly, were pretty excited by the results! It was a success! I should write it up and apply for more funding to do more experimental work!
Here’s where I think it all caught up to me. The stress and avoidance and overwhelm combined into an excuse to delay, which was extended by circumstance after circumstance. I wanted more data, and to learn new phylogenetic methods that might make the existing data more interesting, or maybe a spatial model would help…and so it went. The Boechera virus project landed on my long list of critical tasks, along with my thesis chapters, postdoc applications and then postdoc papers, grant applications, and so on. You know this story. Many of us have experienced this, and most of you seem better than I am at handling everything at the same time. I admit that I feel embarrassed by the long tail on this project that other people have contributed to, but which I have failed to tie off into a timely product.
And, recently, I have realized that I also feel squirmy when I think about the experiences I had surrounding this work. Science is a practice which is not meant to be personal or emotional. Typically I’m pumped about that because it makes things simpler. Obviously that’s not how the science I’ve described here went down, and I think I’ve been struggling with the fallout from the pandemic without acknowledging it. Now, the scientific (and broader) community is reeling again, but for very different reasons. This time, I want to defy the adversarial winds by being unflappable, and getting my work done. Perhaps the nature of the threat makes me feel stubborn rather than patient, or perhaps because my future in academic research is less certain than ever and I feel renewed urgency to finish projects. Either way, I’m starting with this research that has haunted and encouraged me because I genuinely care that the world sees it. I want to release unto the communities eyeballs my results, in all their dubious glory and with clear implications about climate change and virus epidemiology.
It’s coming, but in the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed this slice of humble pie that’s been baking for a few years, but is maybe still too raw? If you found anything in my post relatable, that’s great and I hope it brings a little levity or camaraderie to the existential shame of having too much to do. If not, that’s also great. Regardless, I think most people who read these posts are early career biologists, and I’m a general fan of that crew. We’re doing great, or at least okay, y’all. Keep it up.
