By Professor Charlotte Stagg, University of Oxford, UK; Twitter: @CJStagg
This has been a year of hard work, and also of learning to enjoy online games nights, of wearing down slippers and of forgetting how to wear high heels, of learning to use Zoom and of forgetting to unmute in meetings.
A year ago, I had just come back from a wonderful visit to see a collaborator in Madrid as the news began to fill with COVID-19.
Like most of us, I remember the feeling of the rug being pulled out from under our feet and the world changing in ways we could hardly keep up with. Labs closed, university buildings locked, schools shut “indefinitely”, and holidays were cancelled.
I certainly never imagined this would be a year of disruption – I remember clearly the anxiety of being told to be at home for 12 weeks and not believing that it would last that long.
But I also would never have imagined just how resilient, caring, flexible and supportive my research group and my colleagues would be. How we would adjust to Zoom, make the best of online conferences, and think creatively about how to ensure success for our students. It makes me proud to be part of a wider environment at a university that supports its staff and students at a difficult time.
In the last year, two of my PhD students have submitted their theses, viva’d and celebrated on Zoom, and then moved on to postdoc positions in top institutions, all in the comfort of their own (or in one case, their parents’) home. I could not be prouder of them.
Our lab has three new members who have barely seen the lab, and barely met me in person. It’s a strange world to be in. But they are getting up and running, adapting research questions to the new reality and cheerfully, determinedly getting on with it. And I am learning, with them, about big data, about online studies, about thinking creatively on how to answer scientific questions.
Getting through this together
Over the past year, I have started rodent research for the first time. While there is never a good time to do this, and it was a daunting task even a year ago – doing this in a pandemic was one of the hardest challenges I have faced. But it has also made me truly grateful for the generosity of my colleagues who have made it possible, and the fantastic resilience of my team in getting the experiments going despite reduced access, difficulties shipping key kit from the EU, and ongoing building works.
I appreciate, more than ever, the teams we build and the absolute centrality of collaborations and collegiality to make our research possible. In tough times, this support has made me value my work all the more and has given me genuine gratitude and pleasure as I commute to my office at the back of the house.
The world has fallen apart for many and I am hugely lucky to have found a job that I enjoy, where I feel valued, and where I am surrounded by people who are determined to make the best of what we have. If we have been given lemons, they have made lemonade.
And for some, we have been given lemons. While the rodent research in Oxford picked up in late summer, our human research – the major thrust of my lab – has been largely paused since March 2020.
With the exception of one (clinical) study, we have collected no new data in the lab for a year. For our students and post-docs, the vast majority of whom are on 3-year funded positions, this is potentially catastrophic. And while some funders have been fast to respond with extensions, others have been slower, or have not extended at all.
In a climate where money is tight, and where the academic career ladder, particularly for those on the fellowship track, is slippery and predicated on excellence each and every year, as a field we run the very real risk of losing a generation of physiologists.
The cloud, and the silver lining
And this pandemic has not been equal. To take but one example, all the evidence – and there is much of it now – suggests that women are publishing less and indeed working less than men during this time, unsurprisingly perhaps as they take up the burden of home-schooling and housework.
While this generalisation obviously misses individual situations – my husband has taken on the vast majority of the home-schooling as his work has dried up – we need to be supporting our students and ECRs in concrete ways.
If we do not proactively address the inequalities that have arisen, and will continue to arise, particularly for those at critical stages of their careers, then we will lose that diversity of talent that makes our work the best it can be.
When I lie awake at night I do not worry about my career, I worry that the truly exceptional group of students and ECRs I work with will not be able to fully realise their potential. And that our field will be the worse for it.
But there is a silver lining to this cloud. In December, a time when we were watching the COVID-19 cases rise inexorably again, and the spectre of the next lockdown was looming large, I was interviewing potential undergraduate medical and biomedical students.
After what had been a difficult year for those interviewing, we spent the week lifted up by a new generation who were captivated by the idea that biomedical sciences could change the world, and wanted to be part of this exciting, life-changing, work.
We can capture this enthusiasm, and the clear demonstration 2020 has given us of the power of science, to inspire a new generation of students to enter the field.
Learning what is important
Lockdown has taught me many things: that I am not a primary school teacher (however lovely my children are), that I am more resilient myself than I ever thought I would be, and how much I value being able to escape into data when the world gets confusing.
If you can’t control the world, the reassurance of being able to control a code is doubly comforting. The things I have missed are not necessarily the things I thought I would.
I miss serendipitous conversations at the kettle that are the source of the next research project.
I miss travelling – I long for a sterile hotel room with a locked door and no-one else in it.
I miss my office, with its heating and with its half-drunk cup of coffee still sitting on my desk: surely the Nobel Prize for the next antibiotic revolution is nearly within my grasp.
But mostly, actually, I have missed having people around with whom to share that “it worked!” moment. The moment when you realise that the crazy idea you had about how the brain works turns out to be true. Right now, the only person to share it with is 8 years old and would rather be reading Enid Blyton.
Cricketers are often asked whether they would have “taken this” score at the end of the day if offered it after losing the toss. For me the answer is an unqualified yes – I am more grateful for the work, and the people I work with, than I have ever been before.
For the field more generally? I am not sure – I fear that unless we act proactively we will be feeling the effects of the pandemic for many years, and that the huge advances we have made to bring diversity and inclusion to the workplace may well be lost.
Let’s hope that the sense of community that had us staying home and trying to play our part in the response to the pandemic can be harnessed to make sure that we don’t leave people behind as we rebuild our labs and our research.