SEB Bulletin July 2006 - Ratbag
Dr Workhard sat back in his chair and marvelled at the pleasing variety of tasks that filled the day of an academic. The freedom to choose how one spent one’s day was, he felt, one of the great advantages of life in a university. The pay may not be good but there couldn’t be many jobs where one was allowed such a relatively unstructured day with only the need to teach providing any requirement to be somewhere on time. Today, for instance, had been filled with a large variety of tasks, some pleasant some less so, but all rewarding in their own way. He reflected on three of them.
His day had started with a lecture on bioethics. Even the thought of that made him smile because it had come about after a student with an Estuary accent had asked some weeks ago when they were going to get some lectures on “efficks”. Workhard had mis-heard him and had replied that he was sure “Affies” were covered in Dr Minnie Picksel’s module on “Methods in Functional Genomics”. The student had replied, in an uncharacteristically erudite way, that he didn’t mean microarrays but “the system of moral values that underpins how biological research is conducted and its consequences for society at large”. Workhard was so surprised by this reply that he had volunteered to put together a series of lectures on the topic. Today’s had been on GM crops which was not something Workhard knew much about. Nonetheless he felt he had done a good job and now knew a lot more about pollen transfer, agronomic traits, and the vexed question of GM contamination of organic farms than he had done a week ago. How many other jobs could be so mind-expanding?
At lunchtime he had gone to a seminar given by Dan Brighteyes, a promising final-year graduate student. Workhard felt it was important that he attended these talks in his role as Head of Department thereby setting a good example to his colleagues and showing that he had a broad range of scientific interests.
Coincidentally the talk was also on GM plants but was concerned with studies of gene delivery, integration and expression. Although Workhard’s preparation for his ethics lecture had introduced him to some of the background he could not follow beyond the 5-minute introduction and soon found his thoughts drifting onto other things. By the end he knew no more than when he had walked into the room. Still how often could one just sit and ponder without being interrupted? As long as one looked attentive nobody minded. Even seminars completely outside one’s expertise seemingly had their advantages.
Finally, his afternoon had been taken up chairing a meeting of the Department’s Resources Committee at which they had been deciding on requests for capital equipment. Workhard had not been looking forward to this because they had just £75,000 to spend and the total requests exceeded £300,000. Despite his attempts to dampen expectations, his colleagues always felt their needs and case were so compelling that they would be guaranteed support. He had no idea how they were going to decide between the items on the list which ranged between a joint request from Drs Soks and Sandells of the ecology group for £650 to replace a broken pH meter and a bid from the Paws and Claws Institute for £50,000 towards equipment for evo-devo studies of keratin. He sometimes felt they should simply make decisions by drawing the bids from a bucket. In the end, they had argued for two hours about the scientific merits and strategic advantage of each request and had finally agreed on a list that was sufficiently politically balanced to ensure civil war would not break out. Workhard left the meeting feeling drained but with the pleasure of knowing that in his own small way he had done something that would help some of his colleagues move their research forward and was looking forward to the smiles and thanks from those who had been successful.
Now he was reflecting that if one simply sought the positive in every task, no matter how small, this was a very rewarding job. Then he checked his pigeon-hole and found the 500 exam scripts that he had been asked to mark by the end of the week and wondered why he was so prone to self-delusion.
