Adjusting to continuous change

This coming year promises a good number of changes in my workplace. Most of them will be physical, in the sense that they involve physically moving several research groups and equipment from one floor to another floor in our building. That was decided a while ago, but as always, it takes a while for changes to be effectuated. The physical move will happen in March. Those research groups remaining behind will be sharing lab space with the routine functions and services in my department; those functions and services need more room, so the next major change and adjustment will involve how we share that space, how we discuss our needs amicably and find a solution that works for everyone. The reality however is that there is not nearly enough space for everyone, so some people are bound to be less satisfied than others with the agreed-upon solution.

Even if you decided to never actively adapt and change, to remain 'the same as you always were', you would never achieve that. Nothing stands still; all aspects of life and of work life change and will force themselves upon you. That is the nature of life. We are constantly adjusting to change, and it is best to stay open to change rather than fight it. The way research was done thirty years ago and the way it is done now are quite different. Thirty years ago it seemed as though everything about academic research science was more stable; now it seems more like big business that changes strategy every two to three years in order to maximize profits. When the daily stability of research life disappeared, it was difficult to adjust to that. After all, we were brought up on the idea that research needed stability, constancy, in order to thrive. In the 1990s, it was possible to work on one research project for ten years; you could get funding for one topic, e.g. apoptosis and cancer, and you had the time to experiment and to try new research plans. That is harder, if not impossible, nowadays; scientists change their research directions every three or four years in order to follow the trends of funding. Just in the cancer field alone, molecular genetics and genomics were trendy in the 1990s, as was apoptosis and cell death generally, then in the 2000s came cellular senescence, inflammation and its role in cancer, the search for cures for breast and prostate cancers, and the focus on many new and exciting techniques/technologies like microarray gene expression, RNA interference, knockout mice, and CRISPR. Immunotherapy to treat cancers has dominated research science for the past five or so years. So if you want funding and a career in academic science, you follow the current trends. That is what the younger scientists have learned; some of the older ones still fight against this reality.

It was easier to understand your role in a lab setting years ago--as a technician, PhD student, or postdoc. You knew you could rely on a group leader to guide you, and that group leader was often your mentor if you were a PhD student or postdoc. There were not multiple mentors as there are now. Your PhD years were not micromanaged by universities the way they are now. Thirty years ago the idea that you could be the lone scientist in the lab was encouraged; nowadays it is discouraged in favour of working as a team. If you want to work as an individual rather than in a team, if you want to promote and try out your own ideas, you are considered to be a non-team player, and that is anathema at present. The infrastructure of research science has also changed considerably; we share our workdays with IT personnel, administrators, middle-managers, accountants, among others. They were more behind the scenes thirty years ago. You won't get very far these days without the infrastructure of science. If you need lab consumables, you must deal with administrators and accounting people, because you are no longer allowed to order items on your own. You are no longer allowed to download any computer programs on your own; that is taken care of for you by the IT department, and the power they have to deny or approve specific programs can determine what may or may not get done in a research project.  

Academic science is big business now, with huge grant awards going to a small number of recipients. Those recipients often lead large research groups, e.g. centers of excellence. These large groups collaborate at the national and international levels with other large groups. Small research groups (four or five people) without national and international collaborators are not funded and eventually die away. That is the current strategy. If you don't like big business, you won't enjoy academic research science now. If you're young and you know this, the best thing you can do is to adjust your life accordingly--find another arena in which to use your talents and to shine.