by Markus Gershater, Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder of Synthace
Being a biologist is stressful and demanding, and even more so for those working in academia. For this group of scientists - dedicated to extending the boundaries of human knowledge - everything from short-term contracts, long hours, low pay and lack of funding, as well as the uncertain, exploratory nature of science, come to mind. What is seldom mentioned are the multiple hats biologists wear in pursuit of their discoveries, which ultimately detract from their ability to focus on the most important aspect of all – the science.
Understanding biology is already difficult. The product of four billion years of evolution has no obligation to make itself understandable to any of us without considerable effort and focus. It is this complexity that fascinates us, sparking our curiosity in search of answers. But these answers become much harder to discover when the science is forced to take a back seat to the tedious administrative tasks that are embedded in biologists’ day-to-day working lives.
The Many Hats of a Biologist
Biologists aren’t just scientists but designers, planners, analysts, and archivists too. All activities that require a lot of time, energy and focus on tasks that are not focused on expanding scientific knowledge. The Catch 22 is that these tasks are essential to the overall monitoring and success of experiments. The many hats biologists find themselves donning throughout the various stages of their experiments include:
Hat 1: The Designer
Each experiment follows a fundamental cycle: design, plan, run, analyze. Before everything else, design is one of the main activities that biologists find themselves spending their energy on. This is where understanding of the biological system is applied so that experiments can be designed to add to that understanding. But experiments are expensive, time-consuming and arduous. So, as well as a deep knowledge of biology, it’s also essential to understand the principles of optimal experimental design. Only by knowing this and applying it well is it possible to get maximum insight for the least cost and effort.
Hat 2: The Planner
Turning an experiment from a concept on paper into a reality requires a lot of forethought, like working out all the reagents, cells, consumables and equipment needed. This includes checking what’s already in the lab, still in-date, choosing suppliers and analyzing costs and lead times. It’s also essential to work out when it’s feasible to run the experiment, which means planning when to book the equipment and updating expected timelines. And this doesn’t even factor in the need to work out what plate maps need to be used, the stock concentrations, dilution factors, and every single pipetting action required across every sample.
Hat 3: The Scientist (Obviously)
The amount of work that goes into ensuring that the materials are prepared and the plans are in place before setting foot in the lab are vast. Once work in the lab is ready to begin - what follows is hours, days, or even weeks of painstaking pipetting, mixing, centrifugation and all manner of other possible tasks. Many liken the process to a purgatory of mechanical repetition, despite it being the reality of cutting-edge science. Highly demanding, highly skilled, hugely tedious, innumerable highly accurate transfers of tiny amounts of clear colorless liquids — this is where biologists embody stoic, patient, phlegmatic, unflappable jedi-like qualities, putting up with the highly repetitive physical and mental demands of experimentation without making mistakes.
Hat 4: The Analyst
The outcome of all experiments is, of course, data — frequently from different sources, often in different formats, almost always structured in different ways. The next role of the biologist comes in two parts: the first as a data wrangler fighting to bring everything together into a usable format, and the second as an analyst to turn the data into something useable. It’s only at this stage that scientists get to review their results and see if their experiment has worked, or if – as is so often the case – all their efforts have been in vain. Either way, the experiment is done and it’s time to start designing the next one.
Hat 5: The Archivist
Before any more work can be done and the next experiment begun, all of the completed work, and data and metadata that came with it, needs to be recorded in meticulous detail. If not, it would be impossible to replicate the experiment again in the future and the context behind how and why decisions were made in the experiments’ journey would be lost – meaning it would all become worthless. Finally, after all the skills, expertise, patience, and dedication have been brought to bear to carry out the experiment, the biologist then has to become an expert technical writer and record everything they’ve done.
Is This All Too Much?
The real challenge for biologists is not just the biology, but everything else that goes with it. The proof of this is in what we expect from them: experimental design, logistics, planning, management, dexterity, patience, steady hands, attention to detail, data handling, analysis, and record keeping. All without error. Always consistent. All without guarantee of success.
There is an uncomfortable truth here: this is too much. While there are a great many talented biologists at work producing incredible advances in humankind’s understanding, imagine what they might achieve if it wasn’t so hard to do the science in the first place. If the burden weighing on our scientists were lifted by even a fraction, the possibilities would be breathtaking.