Adjusting to life at the desk vs. life at the bench

I hoped to avoid what seems like the inevitable downward trend in posting rate for blogs like these, but nevertheless, it has been over a month since my last post. As I previously mentioned, I also have a blog on SciLogs, but I hoped to save this site as a more personal and perhaps experimental forum for science writing. If anything it would at least let me re-hone my active voice after years of “The solution was stirred for 10 minutes before calcium chloride was added.”

However, my perfectionist qualities tend to get in the way. If I don’t have anything interesting to say –and can’t say it using the perfect language – why contribute to the ever increasing internet content? One idiosyncratic anxiety of mine is the seemingly endless amount of content and content-producers on the internet versus the amount and desire for content by content consumers. If a Science story has already been covered by major news sources, and the likes of Carl Zimmer, what possibly could I have to contribute?

So how about an update on my career transition?

Something I didn’t expect when I left the bench was a re-ignition in my interest, and dare I say, passion for science. No longer is it work since I haven’t had a single paying science writing gig; I get to pursue science questions that interest me. With the competition for both publication and grants, I always felt I should be reading more about potential techniques or papers in my field – reading about science was a means to an end. Therefore I couldn’t help but perceive any time spent on science outside my field as inversely related to my productivity and chance for success. I am sure this isn’t the case for scientists who truly love what they do. In retrospect, it is just one more reason why research was not the career for me.

However, I lately have less time to pursue these interests – hence the gap in posting – as I am a month into a science policy fellowship with a nonprofit science advocacy organization in D.C. Coming into politics with little knowledge, I have enjoyed the demystification process immensely. I am forced to trade in the academic and scientific jargon of “noncanonical”, “ubiquitous”, and “aliquot” for the language of the beltway:  “taps”, “stopgaps”, and “markups”. I get to look for scientifically inaccurate statements from politicians. This election cycle appears to be especially ripe with Mike Huckabee’s “proof” of life at conception in the form of the “DNA schedule”, which scientists all over the internet have lambasted as both incorrect and a very weird phrase better suited for “a band, an app, or maybe an erectile dysfunction drug."

While it has been an adjustment to have fixed schedule and sit at a computer all day, I appreciate that there is a large creative component, such as writing material for the website, coming up with messaging for worthy issues like stem cell research or comparative effectiveness research, and digging through all that content on the website to find tangible examples backed with solid numbers on how science has improved the lives of American citizens…and why the world will end if we don’t increase NIH’s budget.