The Work-Life Tightrope

A while back I wrote on the practical implications of an 80h working week. Here’s an alternative stab at a work-life balance: The first 2 hours in the morning, you’re preparing: getting your son fed, watered, and dressed to go to nursery with his mum. Then work, 9 hours or so from leaving the house to getting home – hours which typically fill with teaching and admin commitments which are more pressing, which chime their deadlines more urgently, than the research you’re actually paid to do.

Then 3 hours of cooking tea for grown-ups, putting the boy to bed, and eating. If you’re a sleeper (all 3 of us are) then you can add in 8 hours right there. Leaving 2 late evening hours, which you know should be dedicated to more work (and which often are) but which also are your only real time to relax, put your feet up, chat, dig out the Frasier box-set, whatever floats your boat.

And all that for 5 days a week. Weekends are needed for other things – for seeing friends and family; for taming the garden, fixing the house; for getting some exercise, some air; perhaps watching some birds, or some rugby.

So factoring in your (mercifully short) commute, that’s approximately 40 hours + scraps to dedicate to work. The very idea of a 70-80 hour week is simply not compatible with such a regime, but, like many others, you accept this. You accept that you will always be surrounded (and inevitably overtaken) by colleagues more willing and able than you are to make the requisite sacrifices. You accept the fact that you are effectively working part-time – despite exceeding your contracted hours, and receiving none of the compensations and considerations due to the part-time worker – and you accept this because the balance you’ve found seems to work just about OK.

The balance may be OK, but it’s precarious: because then you miss a couple of days through sickness. Nothing serious, just a bug badass enough to incapacitate you as an intellectual being. And because of those two days, you’re fucked for a month. At least. The careful order in which Stuff Needs to Happen has been disrupted; deadlines have piled upon unopened emails upon cancelled meetings upon unread papers. The time you’d set aside for writing, and for actually doing science, has been eaten up by stuff you expected to have under control.

This is the work-life tightrope. And once you teeter, you can never regain that perfect posture. You can speed up, and hope you reach firm ground before something fails – although the assumption that there is firm ground out there is a dangerous one. You can stop, fall, count on a safety net not too far below. Or you can muddle on with some semblance of control, knowing all the time that the slightest additional vibration may be the killer one.

Note: All of the above is – literally – the product of a fevered imagination. I accept no responsibility for its content.

Zoology exams, 1860s style

I’ve recently been struggling to write something on the (in my view) false dichotomy between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ science. It’s not coming together as easily as I’d hoped, but it has led me to some interesting reading. Specifically, I’ve managed to get hold of a copy of Pluto’s Republic, a collection of the writings of Sir Peter Medawar, biologist, Nobel laureate and brilliant author. So, in lieu of the intended piece (which will follow, eventually), I thought I’d just pass on this gem. In a footnote to the essay Two Conceptions of Science, which was Medawar’s Henry Tizard Memorial Lecture from August 1965, he provides “…one (by no means the longest) of eight [zoology examination] questions set by Professor Grant [of UCL] in Comparative Anatomy in February 1860”:

By what special structures are bats enabled to fly through the air? and how do the galeopitheci, the pteromys, the petaurus, and petauristae support themselves in that light element? Compare the structure of the wing of the bat with that of the bird, and with that of the extinct pterodactyl: and explain the structures by which the cobra expands its neck, and the saurian dragon flies through the atmosphere. By what structures to serpents spring from the ground, and fishes and cephalopods leap on deck from the waters? and how do flying-fishes support themselves in the air? Explain the origin, the nature, the mode of construction, and the uses of the fibrous parachutes of arachnidans and larvae, and the cocoons which envelop the young; and describe the skeletal elements which support, and the muscles which move the meoptera and the metaptera of insects. Describe the structure, the attachments, and the principal varieties of form of the legs of insects; and compare them with the hollow articulated limbs of nereides, and the tubular feet of lumbrici. How are the muscles disposed which move the solid setae of stylaria, the cutaneous investment of ascaris, the tubular peduncle of pentalasmis, the wheels of rotifera, the feet of asterias, the mantle of medusae, and the tubular tentacles of acinae? How do entozoa effect the migrations necessary to their development and metamorphoses? how do the fixes polypifera and porifera distribute their pregeny over the ocean? and lastly, how do the microscopic indestructible protozoa spread from lake to lake over the globe?

(I particularly like the ‘and lastly…’, which seems to me to encompass pretty much every question in ecology!)

Predictably Medawar, one of the great science communicators, uses this humerous aside as a launchpad to make a serious point:

…biology before Darwin was almost all facts… The answers [to the exam questions] call for nothing more than a voluble pouring forth of factual information. Certainly there is an epoch in the growth of a science during which facts accumulate faster than theories can accommodate them, but biology is over the hump… and physics is far enough advanced for an eminent physicist to have assured me, with the air of one not wishing to be overheard, that science itself was drawing to a close…

Certainly I would hope that we’re more theory-oriented now. But I can’t help thinking that having such a bank of facts to draw on – not having outsourced such knowledge to online providers, I guess – would still serve the 21st Century scientist well.

Talent in Sport and Science

Back in September, I tackled my greatest challenge since first sitting in a kayak a couple of years ago: the River Washburn in North Yorkshire. OK, I realise it’s probably pretty tame for a hardcore paddler, but for a relative novice like me its grade 2/3 water was sufficient to get the adrenaline flowing freely. There were moments, as I bombed along at unfeasible speeds, when I found myself thinking ‘Hey, I can do this! And it’s fun!!’ But for the most part, thinking was the last thing on my mind, and I was simply reacting to whatever happened (usually a few seconds too late…)
The big weir at Washburn. My descent (about 1.55 in) was not one of those thoughtful moments.

This got me reflecting on one of my major regrets: I’ve never been very good at sport. No false modesty here: the emphasis in the previous sentence is on the very. I’ve always been pretty good – I was just about a county standard cricketer as a teenager, and played reasonable club rugby well into my 20s. Basically, anything that involves balls and/or running, I’ll probably do ok, and certainly won’t embarrass myself. But I played sport at a high enough level to play with and against some guys who were really good, and the difference was striking. And what they had, clichéd though it may be, was time.

A handful of times on the rugby field, on receiving the ball I sensed not the 29 big guys in close proximity, but the space in between them. I had the time to assess the options, and take the right one. Although I haven’t played for over 10 years now, I can still remember each of those near mystical occasions. I imagine that’s how sport is all the time for the really talented. Rather than my usual instant kick/pass/run without any concept that options may even exist.

Which set me musing about the role of talent in science. Clearly, some degree of aptitude is necessary to have any success. But is science like sport where if you’re me – an able and enthusiastic trier – your achievements will always be limited by lack of that special talent?

This is interesting because I’ve often sold science to students as the way to a really creative career through hard work and application, rather than sheer talent. How many good arts graduates, I ask them, have as much creative freedom as I get in my job? To make it in the creative arts, as in sport, you need to stand out from the crowd. In science, you can do well as part of the crowd (talent-wise), as long as you put in the hours.

So, I leave you with my putative taxonomy of scientists, based on position on the talent / work ethic axes. (Incidentally, I stand by my view that the ability to work hard is no less of a ‘talent’ than any other ability, so I’m using ‘talent’ here as a shorthand for ‘scientific aptitude’, and ‘work ethic’ as shorthand for ‘ability to work hard’.) I know where I’d place myself. But I also suspect that most of us probably overrate our talent, and underrate our work ethic. (And if any of my senior managers should read this, the top left cell is obviously a joke.)