The Niche

Sunday, 11 July 2010 08:41

“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.”
- Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913)

Well, this blog is long overdue. The plus side of that is of course that I can give you a good impression of my first month at the University of California, San Diego. This month started with a depressingly slow beginning due to all the bureaucracy that was involved, but at the same time made me even more enthusiastic about doing research. In the spirit of the world cup 2010:”Ieder nadeel heb zijn voordeel.” (this didn't translate well into English, so I left it in Dutch).

Although most young scientists know others who went abroad to 'do a post-doc', none of these others can really tell you what to expect because every university or institute is different and has its own set of customs and regulations. I am sure that nobody, including me, expected that I would actually not be doing a lot of research in my first month here. Instead, I faced a lot of bureaucracy and filled out a lot of forms, tried to get my name into 'the system', got my email account to work, and collected multiple user names and passwords (some of which were quite complicated and could not be changed for safety reasons). Of course, all of this was required for me to be officially allowed to do anything, such as following several mandatory courses. The best thing to do would have been ignore the rules and find some pipettes anyway. I am still wondering myself why I didn't do that. It must be the new environment that took some getting used to.

The plus side of not doing experiments, is the enormous amount of time I had left to update myself on relevant literature and to go to interesting meetings. Since everyone already knows the burden of keeping up with literature, I won't go into that. This is the same everywhere. However, the discussions during and after the meetings I went to were very motivating. Most of these started as a normal presentations, but what was different from the meetings in the Netherlands was that here at UCSD PIs from different labs and disciplines meet more often during these meetings. And the result was that discussions were held at a higher level than what I was used to. Of course, and this is why I used the quote above, this might be because I expect a higher level of research here (it's one of the reasons I travelled to the other side of the globe) and therefore experience it as such. But still, one can really feel a different atmosphere. As if all the research that is being done has the potential of being published in Nature or Cell. You just want to get up on your chair and shout “What are we waiting for? Let's get it done and get it done now!”

So then, why the mystery title of my blog? Well, because all of the above is due to the environment I am in right now. Something that stem cell scientists will recognize as 'the niche'. Wikipedia defines the niche as “a phrase loosely used in the scientific community to describe the micro-environment in which stem cells are found, which interacts with stem cells to regulate stem cell fate.” And that's exactly what the environment of UCSD is like for me: one the one hand, the bureaucracy was keeping me in check by imposing a set of rules on me that I had to abide by before I could proceed to the next stage. However, as soon as I complied with these rules, my niche was (and is) saying to me:”Now you are free! Go and do whatever you have to do. We have made sure you will have all the necessary resources you'll need, including an unlimited amount of stimulation by your peers. Good luck.”

So that's what I will be doing from now on and I suggest you do the same: don't get depressed by the rules. In the end, it's the science that matters.