The Split

I'm home for Christmas. Every time I come back I realize how much I like my house, and in general, how much I miss it here. It's always sunny (even if it's freezing cold), I've got my stuff (not really, but I don't think I'll ever feel as much at home as I do at my parents' house in Ávila), I've got my family and my dog and I've got my home friends.

It's a funny thing about home friends. They are the people I was friends with in school. I'm not sure I'd be friends with many of them if we were to meet now, but I am friends with them. They're people I grew up with, had my first fights with, had my first drinks with. They were there for so many firsts, and they know me really well. Or they did, the more I live away from them the more we seem like strangers, at least for the first few hours. Then something clicks and it's back to when we were fifteen or sixteen years old.

All of my home friends stayed in Spain to study for their degrees. Most of them stayed within a 3 hour radius from my home town (car distance). Most of them can come back home for the weekend, or for a birthday, or if they miss home. In that, I'm the odd one out. I'm the only one they don't see for months at a time, the one that's out of the loop, the one who was a friend, but who it's harder to remain friends with, because, let's be honest, it's hard to keep friendships through Facebook. There's good will and you try, but it's not the same. 

Sometimes I think I should come back. Just come back and go back to studying close to home and having my home friends and building a life and a network of friends based on constancy. Then I realize I could never do this. I got bored and I'd get bored again. Maybe not in a year, but in a couple of years. I'd become bored of seeing the same people with the same narrow minds. Because as much as I love my home friends they're not readers, they're not (in general) ambitious, they don't like to travel. I love them, because I grew up with them, because I've taken care of them and they've taken care of me. Because they're interesting people, because I could talk to them for hours. When I was sixteen. Now it's just awkward.

We all grow up, and change, and we move. That we're not who we were when we were teenagers. I like being a grown-up, and to a certain extent I like my grown-up life. Do I miss living at home and doing the same thing every weekend and having a sort of predictable life? Yes. No doubt. Would I go back to it? Yes, in a second. Would I stay? No way. I'd probably get bored in a couple of years and leave. 

Now I know this. I know that my friends are people I can talk to for hours, and love hanging out with, and who'll help me out. I hope we'll be friends for years to come, but I also know that this might change, and that that's not necessarily a bad thing. In a sense it makes me more free. I know that in a couple of years' time we might all be in different countries around the world, and as much as I don't like this now, I know it will happen, and we'll survive it. And maybe friendships will fade, or become just getting along, but most of the friends I have now will probably be happy to have a drink with me if I'm int their neighbourhood. And it will be awkward for the first few hours, but then we'll be around twenty again and it won't matter.

The Guilty Pleasures

I can describe myself. It probably wouldn't be a very accurate description, sure, but I can do it. The description would change depending on my mood, the books I'm reading, what I've been doing the hours prior to the description, how I'm feeling about myself... Some things would remain more or less constant, I guess. The fact that I'm terribly shy. That I like to giggle. That my favourite book (books?) is  Harry Potter. That my favourite movie is Reservoir Dogs. Some things change. Sometimes I'd describe myself as responsible, sometimes as irresponsible, sometimes I'd say I'm judgemental, sometimes I don't give a shit. Sometimes I'm brave, sometimes I'm a coward. At times, I believe that as long as someone's reasonably honest I'm OK with most things they'll do, then other times the most trifling thing upsets me.

These are all things that would be included in one or another description of me by myself. However, there are things I'd never include. It's things I won't admit to anyone, or maybe to just a few very close friends. They include things like the fact that I love watching rom-coms (not just once in a while, I watch at least one or two every single week...), that I listen to Bruno Mars songs, that I like reading books by Lauren Weisberg. Of course, right now I'm censoring myself. My real guilty pleasures I wouldn't admit to so openly, but I think you get my drift. They're the kind of things that you enjoy doing but don't really tell anyone about. The things that will put a smile on your face, but you feel that they shouldn't.

As I get older, these guilty pleasures become less and less private. People who know me minimally well will definitely know about many of them. This is probably because I care a lot less than I did about what people think, probably because as I get older I get more and more comfortable in my own skin. Does this lack of privacy make them less guilty? No. I still don't like myself for indulging in them, though of course they provide a break from the seriousness of only liking the "right" things. I mean, I would be a much more boring person if I hadn't read "The Devil Wears Prada" more than once, I'm sure.

A friend once mentioned that guilty pleasures are what make you you. They are a group of things that you enjoy a lot, although one by one these things are considered mediocre or even bad by general consensus. I don't agree. I find, also, that as I get older my guilty pleasures become not only less and less private, but also simply less and less. I haven't opened the Cosmopolitan web in years, and I don't pay to go watch a rom-com in the cinema anymore (unless it's by Woody Allen, but then, is it considered a rom-com?). Maybe guilty pleasures are an adolescent thing, that wears off as you grow older...

A few years ago I wrote about guilty pleasures somewhere else. I started by saying that I would confess to mine, and continued by making a list. I read that list recently. None of the guilty pleasures I admitted to back then are private anymore. A few of them I've written about above. Others I don't do anymore. A few more are still things I do, but now quite publicly. Today, I started to think about my current guilty pleasures, thought about publishing them again. But no. Guilty pleasures are, as a matter of fact, the things I don't talk about.

Electroporation, Kaede and chickens

Today I'm procrastinating. I'm supposed to be preparing my lab meeting presentation (I have to present what I've been doing in the past term to the rest of the people in my lab in a week's time, and I'm really not looking forward to it), but instead I've been reading discussions in uni forums and being generally lazy. Now I've told myself I have to stop, but since I still don't want to work properly, I thought I might as well do it on the blog.

I study Biochemistry with a Year in Industry/Research at Imperial College, and this year I'm doing my year in Research. Since September, I've been working in James Briscoe's lab in the NIMR. The lab's main focus is the development of the vertebrate neural tube, specifically, the patterning of the ventral area of the neural tube. We study the signaling mechanisms by which each region of the neural tube develops into different types of cells. One of the main proteins involved is my favourite protein: Sonic Hedgehog protein. I discovered it by accident during my first year at Imperial. I was flicking through the index of Alberts, looking for something or other during revision for my first year exams, when I came across an entry called Sonic Hedgehog protein. I thought this was quite funny, so I decided to check out what it was. I didn't understand a thing and soon dropped it and went back to revision (or so I tell myself). During our second year we studied the signaling pathway triggered by Sonic Hedgehog protein in Molecular Cell Biology II, and this is when I actually became interested in it seriously. 

I'm going to try to explain a bit about the Sonic Hedgehog (Shh) pathway in the neural tube and a bit of what I'm trying to do in the lab in this placement year. First, let's start with a bit of anatomy and nomenclature. An embryo has three axis: the anterior-posterior axis, which goes from the head (anterior) to the tail (posterior); the dorso-ventral axis, which goes from the back (dorsal) to the stomach/chest (ventral); and the lateral or left-right axis (pretty self explanatory, I would I assume). I will generally refer to the dorso-ventral axis, since this is the direction in which Shh effects are most obvious. Shh is produced initially in the notochord (see figure below), which is ventral to the neural tube. From there, it reaches the cells in what is known as the floorplate of the neural tube, the most ventral region of the neural tube. These cells then start to produce Shh too. The rest of the cells in the neural tube don't produce Shh, so a concentration gradient of Shh is established, with higher concentrations on the ventral area of the neural tube, and lower concentrations in the dorsal side. Shh doesn't seem to have an effect on cells that are dorsal to the midline of the neural tube.

The Shh pathway is quite complex, but I can simplify it to essentially four proteins: Shh, the signaling protein; Patched (Ptc), the receptor protein, to which Shh binds; Smoothened (Smo), the first effector protein; and Gli, the final effector protein.

In the absence of Shh, Ptc inhibits Smo. Gli is part of a multiprotein complex that targets it for cleavage in the proteasome, giving place to a smaller protein, GliR, which diffuses into the cell nucleus and binds DNA, stopping the expression of genes. In the presence of Shh, Shh binds Ptc, so Ptc can't inhibit Smo. Smo acts to disassemble the complex that targets Gli for cleavage into GliR, so Gli is processed in a different way and gives place to GliA. GliA also diffuses into the nucleus, but instead of stopping gene expression, it promotes it. Generalizing, the presence of Shh leads to the expression of a set of genes. Different concentrations of Shh lead to different genes being activated due to the different concentrations of GliA or GliR produced (although the proportion of GliA to GliR doesn't seem to be as important as the different binding strength of each version of Gli). This is all further complicated by the fact that there are 3 Gli proteins, and by the fact that we don't fully understand how the Shh gradient is established.

Now that I've established a bit of anatomy and the basics of the Shh pathway I can continue and explain what I'm trying to do. Currently, a lot is understood about the gene regulation involved in the Shh pathway, most of the genes activated by Shh are known and some of the regulatory networks that link these genes are understood (the genes activated and repressed by Shh go on to repress and activate other genes, and each other, which leads to networks like the one described here), but not much is known about cell growth and behaviour in response to the Shh gradient, so that's what I'm trying to study.

It started off with me learning how to electroporate DNA into chick embryo neural tubes. Electroporation is a fairly tricky technique to master, but it's entirely doable with practice (if I can do it, anyone can, trust me). Basically, you incubate eggs for as long as you need (in my case it's usually 45 hours) and once they're incubated you make a hole in the shell to take out some of the albumen (egg white for the layman) out of the eggs. Once this is done, you take a pair of scissors and cut off a piece of the shell.

Once you have the egg open you can put it under the microscope and find the embryo. A very thin needle made from a glass capillary and a mouth pipette are needed at this point. The needle fits into the mouth pipette and you now have a system to suck liquid into the needle and then blow it into anywhere you stick the needle into. You suck DNA into the needle, and then stick it into the chick embryo's neural tube, which (to the trained eye) is pretty visible. Then you blow the DNA in. Once this is done, you apply electrodes to both sides of the neural tube and apply a charge so that the negatively charged DNA moves to the positive electrode and the cells on that side of the neural tube take up the DNA. At this point, you cover the hole on the egg with either transparent tape or parafilm and let it grow for a few hours until the cells that took up the DNA are expressing the protein coded in that DNA.

I started my experiments off by electroporating H2BGFP DNA into the cells. H2BGFP is a protein that is a fusion of the histone protein H2B (histones are proteins that bind DNA and keep it organised) and green fluorescent protein. This protein localises to the nucleus of the cell, so that if you electroporate the neural tube cells with it, their nuclei (approximately in the centre of the cell) will emit green fluorescence. Once the embryos had fluorescent neural tubes, I cultured them so they would grow on plates, and then I took them to the multiphoton microscope. A multiphoton microscope uses two low-energy photons to excite fluorophores. Usually, to excite a fluorophore you need to illuminate it with photons of shorter wavelength (higher energy) than the fluorescence emission you are trying to produce, but multiphoton fluorescence allows two long wavelength (low energy) photons to arrive at the sample at the same time, having the same effect as one shorter wavelength photon. Multiphoton microscopy allows imaging of sections of a sample (if you had a column, with a confocal microscope or a multiphoton microscope you could image different planes of that column), and because the photons used have relatively low energy, they won't damage samples as much as normal fluorescence microscopy would. This makes multiphoton microscopy especially good for in vivo imaging. This allowed me to make movies of the cells electroporated with H2BGFP, which, once processed, will hopefully allow me to track the cells in the neural tube and see how they behave as the neural tube grows. As time wore on, however, we realized that the culture method needed to make these movies didn't guarantee high survival of embryos, and it also produced a lot of drift (the embryo drifted outside the microscope's field of view while we were making the movies, which usually lasted a whole night), so we decided to change the experiments. Instead of using H2BGFP, we started to use Kaede protein. Now, I said before that Sonic Hedgehog protein is my favourite protein. Kaede is a close second. The name means "maple tree" in Japanese, and this i s why: Kaede emits green fluorescence, much like GFP, but unlike GFP when it is illuminated with UV light this fluorescence shifts from green to red. This change in fluorescence is called photoconversion. This property makes it a good protein to track cell behaviour, because if you manage to only photoconvert a small number of cells from green to red you can image a few hours later and see where these red cells are. The main problem with Kaede is that as long as the embryo is alive (and we want it to be alive so we can image the growth) it produces green Kaede protein, and the red Kaede protein is degraded, so if enough time has gone by, it will completely disappear and the marked cells will be lost.

At the moment, I electroporate Kaede, photoconvert a region of the neural tube to red using UV light, and take images right after photoconversion and 8 to 18 hours later. The images look quite good at the moment, and I'm happy with what I'm obtaining, but I'm not making movies at the moment. In any case, I should get back to my presentation...

On books

I am currently reading (finishing!) a book called "The Golden Notebook" by Doris Lessing. Having read the preface to the 1972 edition of the book (the book was first published in 1962) I have tried to read it purely as a novel. Not as a political statement, or a feminist manifiesto or a treaty on mental disease. I have found that for me (and this for me is very important, for apparently this book is about a different subject for each person who reads it) this book is about thinking and writing, and how what we think is not what we write. Writing about one's life is difficult. Not because you can't make a record of what you do, what you say, who you meet, but because that record is necessarily incomplete.

I have kept a diary since I was about eight years old. It is not  a continuous diary, for I have never been able to be constant about what I write, but I write in it once every year, or every two years. My favourite thing about the diary is the object itself, the notebook I write it in. I still find it as beautiful as when I first bought it. It is a design of sheep flying around a light bulb, and it has something about counting sheep on it. It's blue, which is what probably attracted me to it in the first place. When I read back on this diary, I am always shocked that I recognize myself perfectly but that I rarely think "That's me". Even recent entries aren't me, and I don't even think that they were me when I wrote them. It is partly because I mostly write in the diary when I'm feeling sad or sorry for myself, or when I have an idea. Writing like this makes the diary very moany and one-sided. Another thing is that I jot things down of the real world, but not of the dream world, which makes it hard to remember what the dreams I mention in the pages were about. Not that I'm a dreamer. I rarely remember my dreams, and when I do it is mostly due to who is in them rather than to the strangeness of the dream. Once every few months, however, I have a dream from which I wake with a terrible sense of irreality. It's a terrifying feeling. The world is unfamiliar. People are unfamiliar. I feel like everyone is a stranger. It is a heightened sense of individuality, and I mistrust everyone. It's horrible, waking up knowing that no one, not my parents, not my best friends, not even my dog knows who I am, they're different from me. Why would they understand me at all? When they talk to me on these days I feel like they're trying to trick me, to lure me into a sense of familiarity that shouldn't be there: they're different from me, how can they ever understand me? But at the same time, I remember that just the day before I felt about them that they were close to me, that they knew me and understood me, that, in a way, they were home to me, and I miss the feeling and I want to be that person again. These days are horrible. They're doubled. The feeling slowly wears off, but doesn't go away completely until the next day. I hadn't recognized this feeling anywhere else until I read "The Golden Notebook".

The book is wonderfully written, but I would not recommend it. It is a painful book to read. It is hard. The main character is, if not incapable of happiness, at least very incapacitated for it. It is difficult for me to read a long book without any joy in it. My first experience of this was reading George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. This book depressed me so much I decided never to read a book by the same author again. Now I'm reading a different book, not as depressing because what happens in it isn't as terrible, but still a book that's taking an emotional toll on me. Why do I read these books, knowing that they're hard for me, that, as much as I enjoy reading them (perversely enough), they don't make me happy? I guess it's because they teach me. About feelings. About different types of feelings. But I prefer joyful books. And if I were ever a writer I would like to think I write joyful books. Midnight Children is a joyful book. It's not a happy book, never, but it's joyful. The characters take life by the storm. They live, and they live big, and I suspect they don't know any other way. This kind of book makes me happy.

Long ago, someone said to me (and I've heard it repeated infinite times since) that reading is a joy until you are almost finishing a book, and then you slow down, you want to savour it, you wish you'd read it more slowly. I know now this is not exactly true. This is true of joyful books. With books which aren't joyful, I read constantly, at a speed that will let me take the book in without breaking me down but fast enough that I know the book will finish. I enjoy the book, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't finish a book that I didn't like, but I also realize that part of me hates it. This doesn't happen with joyful books. Joyful books make me want to read on, at all time, until about ten pages are left. And then I stop. Read slowly. Go back. Try not to finish. But of course I finish. I like nothing better than a complete story. And it gives me the chance to start a new one.

On the origins of sitting

Sitting down. I wonder. Did prehistoric humans sit down? When did "sitting down" become a thing? And by "sitting down", I don't mean sitting cross legged (or in any other position) on the floor, I mean sitting down on a chair. So I guess the question is really to do with the origins of chairs then? When was the first chair devised? But then, no, people could sit down before chairs, on rocks or tree stumps of the appropriate size. So one assumes that sitting down must be an intrinsically human characteristic. Sitting down must first have occurred when the first human sat down, both things (sitting down and being human) being inextricably linked. Some may argue that this isn't necessarily true, and of course they'd be right. But why would humans spend 2, 3, 700, 8000 years not sitting down and then decide to sit? It's not an elegant explanation, that sitting down appeared after human beings. No: sitting down must have originated at the same time human beings did. Which of course leads me to the subject of this blog post: the origins of (not sitting) writing.

I am not going to be as naïve as to suggest that writing has existed as long as human beings have. Even today (though it's becoming more and more rare) one can encounter human groups who have their own language but no writing system. No, writing did not originate at the same time as human beings did. However, I challenge anthropologists to find, amongst these groups of illiterate humans, a group where none of the members, upon being asked to explain how to get to a certain landmark, will crouch to the ground and draw a map on the earth. Philosophers (and linguists, of course) will argue that this is not writing, and they would be (theoretically) correct. Language, especially writing, is made of symbols, figures for which we have chosen either a meaning or a sound arbitrarily. Symbols don't hold a direct relationship with what they represent, they represent what they represent because we (humans) have arbitrarily decided that they should. A map is not composed of symbols, philosophers will argue, a map is composed of signals, it is a direct representation of the world. And for the most part I agree, there is a direct relationship between what is being drawn and what is being represented. However, at one point, this illiterate man who is drawing the map for me looks at me and says to me (of course I speak his language, this whole experience would make absolutely no sense if I didn't): "Here is the big fireplace", drawing a circle with an X inside, "and here, just beyond it is the muddy ford that becomes a river in the wet season", he says, drawing a few lines. These are symbols. They are not signs anymore. We have agreed on what these symbols mean, and no one else, unless we told them the code, would automatically infer what they mean. So is this writing? I don't know. I don't like to say yes, for writing is more complex than that. Writing is being able to explain something as fully with symbols as we would be able to speaking, but then, speaking is already symbolic. Which means that writing is simply a code over a code, a representation of a representation of the world. However, I don't like to say no, for this man and I, having agreed that a circle with a cross means a fire and that a few lines mean a ford, can now use this to communicate when we cannot talk to each other, the whole purpose of writing.

I personally like writing. I do it every day, and if others didn't write I wouldn't be able to read. Yes, to me writing is a great tool. However, when thinking about the origins of writing I need to think of the utility of writing. I believe, though I may of course be wrong, that writing did not first originate to please the sensitive souls who wanted to express their innermost thoughts but not tell everyone around them. No, writing originated, as most human things have, because it was practical. I can see several advantages to writing as opposed to speaking: being able to relay a message without it being corrupted by an intermediary, being able to have a record of an agreement, being able to recall something without spending the time to committing it to memory (although this works both ways, I find that people I know who have difficulty reading and writing have prodigious memories, and I suspect this is due to them using them on occasions when I would just write things down)... I don't see any of these advantages being needed in a small hunter gatherer group. You wouldn't need to relay messages through intermediaries, agreements between members of the group would be so necessary to survival of the group as a whole that they would be generally known and respected, and since small groups would usually remain together, there would be enough time for knowledge to be passed on, more than enough time to help someone commit to memory what they needed to know.

So what is the origin of writing? I see two possibilities: an increase in population and travelling. Probably both. I wouldn't be surprised if (when we are able to time travel, of course) the first records of writing are maps. Instructions for scouts or travelers first appearing when horse riding became more widespread and people started moving in larger radiuses. The other option is that, once groups started becoming bigger, probably after the Neolithic revolution, writing became necessary because agreements weren't kept as readily, since in bigger groups, there is less interdependence for survival, and small untrustworthy acts wouldn't be punished as severely as they might in a small group. In this situation, records would be needed to ensure that deals and agreements and laws were upheld. Then, of course, there is the possibility that both happened at the same time.

I personally find the first option more attractive, it being an active example of communication, arising from a need to help other people, rather than from a need to make sure that people are true to their promises, but I suspect that most linguists and historians will disagree with them.

Now, what really interests me about this whole discussion isn't the appearance of writing. What I really spend hours wondering is when writing started to be more than a tool and started being a reflection of thoughts and a vehicle for stories. Was it someone deciding to collect the oral stories? Someone deciding to record a story-tellers collection because they were leaving soon and there wasn't time to commit the stories to memory? Somehow I don't think so. I like to think that writing a story is different to telling a story. For one thing, when one tells a story, one needs an audience. This makes told stories less personal, less dark than some written ones. Writing is more of a reflective process. It is closer to thinking in that what you write does not have to be released to an audience. Many of us keep notebooks or diaries that no one reads, except (on occasion) ourselves. Writing is a way of recording our thoughts, of recording ourselves. It strikes me every time I read my notebooks, there is more there reflecting how much I have changed than I can remember.

Always waiting...

I write this while getting back home on the tube after work. Since starting my job in September I spend approximately three hours on the tube every weekday. Most days, this doesn't bother me. I listen to music, catch up on reading (currently The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing, not my favourite book but I have to admit it's fantastically written), catch up on work reading (this is an entirely different thing from reading as anyone who studies or works in a science related field can tell you) or write. I do some of my best writing in the tube, probably because it opens me up to different types of people that I might not see otherwise during my average day. Sometimes, however, I find myself reading Metro, tapping my foot annoyed at the content, or doing nothing at all. It's these moments that I start thinking, and I get worried.

Life is short, or so they say, and I like to think that I'm taking advantage of my time, but the truth is that I spend countless hours just sitting, doing nothing much. Procrastinating. It's one thing to procrastinate from work (during exam time I've been known to produce 20000 words of fiction in one day, just to avoid revising), but it's a completely different thing to procrastinate from life. Of course, sometimes you need a break, I completely get that. Five minutes to see what friends have been up to on Facebook, or skimming through Metro in the morning, especially if you've had little sleep and concentrating on anything more complex than footballers' love lives seems impossible. The problem is the amount of time I spend sitting on my desk refreshing Facebook even though I know there's going to be nothing new since I last refreshed it five seconds ago, or reading Metro cover to cover. Or just the time that I spend sitting on the tube staring blankly out of the window. It's depressing. Especially when I think of the amount of time I already spend on useful but "non-constructive" tasks, such as changing clothes, putting shoes on (I hate the amount of time I spend putting shoes on and off, I were there were an all purpose shoe), paying the bills, checking my internet allowance... Small things that I worry about but that all in all don't have an impact on my happiness. Wouldn't this time be better spent hanging out with friends, or listening to music, or playing?

I try to minimise wasted time commuting by reading, listening to music, and lately, writing. It's more productive than sitting on the tube staring blankly at the person in front of you. Yet so many people seem to sit for hours in the tube staring blankly at each other. I wonder if they just never think of the amount of time they're wasting? Or have they just come to the conclusion I refuse to think about: that it doesn't matter what we do in the tube, or at work, or in our lives, because we're all mortals, and death is the same for all of us? I hope they haven't. It would make the world a darker place. And it follows that if life and what you do with it doesn't matter, then why live at all? No, I'd rather not think about it. I may privately believe that life has no point, but come on! It can be so much fun, it has to be worth making the most of it.

Working in science

It's Sunday morning. What was a beautiful day a few hours ago, when I first opened the blinds, has turned into the usual grayish London day, and I've just realized I've been procrastinating for a few hours. So why not start the blog? At least that way I won't feel so guilty about not processing the images for my lab meeting in two weeks time (two weeks!).

I have to do a presentation on the work I am doing at my lab in the NIMR. I am a sandwich student there, and (as a scientist) it's an amazing place to work. Demanding, sure, but people are there for the science, they know what they're talking about and they are happy to explain even quite complex stuff.

I've learnt more in the past couple of months than in some modules at Imperial College, but that's the whole point of doing a year in research. You see what it's like to work in a real lab, you see what it's like to do research in the real world (as opposed to undergraduate labs, which are just a matter of following a protocol and are not at all creative).

My first conclusion after working for two months in a real lab is this: as much as I enjoy my job at times, I prefer my life as an undergraduate student. I like the flexible hours (the option of staying in bed when you really should be in lectures disappears the moment you have a job), the long holidays, the slight unawareness of the world of taxes. More than anything, I like the student atmosphere. PhD students and postdocs are people who have decided to dedicate their career to science, but sadly they are also people who are not fascinated by the idea of science anymore. I'm not saying they don't like science, and I'm not saying they are not at times fascinated by it, if they weren't they wouldn't be where they are, but they lack the absolute incredulity of undergrad students when they first understand something, or when they first hear of a technique that does exactly what they'd been thinking about. There are rarely conversations about the possibilities of something or other when you are working in research. These turn into more calm discussions, because by the time people go into research they are jaded. They have realized it is very unlikely that what they will do will make a big difference, that they probably will spend their whole lives working and producing huge amounts of data, but that, most likely, their work will not be recognized. They are still passionate about what they do, and, especially when they are explaining something, there is a glimmer of the undergraduate hunger for science as a whole, but generally, they are specialists in one area, and they don't think that much of it. It's a pity, but I guess it's difficult to maintain a high level of passion for something over ten years, especially when you're doing it every day. Especially when you realize it's a lot slower and a lot harder than you thought it was when you were sitting in your lecture theatre, daydreaming about organizing a house party on Saturday when really you should be listening to that explanation of transcriptional initiation mechanisms.

I guess what I'm saying here is that working is similar for everyone. Scientists are lucky in that once in while they get a result and it's perfect and it lights up what they have been trying to do for weeks, or months, or even years. But most days, it's grind of the mill, just like for everyone else. The difference is, these people who now don't seem that passionate about what they're doing are the exact same ones who could spend hours thinking about a subject back when they were undergraduates, the same ones who were awed by the simplicity of certain reasonings or proofs once they understood them. They went into science for that, and, even if it's just once every few weeks, or every few months, or every few years, they can have that feeling back, for a day or for a few days or for a month. For these people, that's more than enough.