A typical day as a neuroscientist

In my lab I have scientists with first degrees in biochemistry, medicine, neuroscience, physics, physiology, sports science and zoology. As a PhD student or a post-doctoral fellow, a typical Monday might involve planning the experiments for the rest of the week, discussing them with your supervisor or post-doctoral researchers in the research group, going to a seminar, reading the latest papers in your subject area (to keep up with what competing labs are doing) and doing various chores that seem to be needed to keep the lab going (ordering supplies, answering e-mail). Other days in the week might be occupied with doing the experiments, analysing the results from them, deciding whether more work is needed or whether enough has been done for a publication figure on that particular subject, and writing up the work for publication.

By the time you come to run your own lab, much more time is spent nurturing the general productivity of the lab than on doing experiments yourself. This means coming up with ideas for new projects and writing grant applications to fund the experiments and the salaries of the researchers who will carry them out. A successful lab might have to raise about £2 million every five years to support 10 researchers. You also have to allocate projects to different lab members in such a way that they each have an exciting set of experiments that they feel belong to them. Sometimes you have to carry out difficult pilot experiments yourself, at the start of a project, to see if it is worth persuading a PhD student or post-doc to work on them. You will also be involved with writing the final versions of papers, and dealing with the comments of referees when the papers are reviewed for publication. In addition time is spent on teaching and university administration (although the more research grants you have, the more this can be avoided, if you choose), refereeing papers and grants (a great way to keep up with the newest developments in the field) and giving talks at conferences.

Finally, the lab head inevitably has to deal with all the apparently trivial problems and routine chores of daily life in the lab, such as determining why there is water pouring out of the lab dishwasher onto the floor, writing references for current and former lab members who are applying for new jobs, keeping a check on lab finances to make sure that grant income matches expenditure, and (of course) buying champagne to celebrate the latest cool experimental result!

Rewards of being a neuroscientist

It is always great when you make a prediction of how a key experiment will turn out; you do the experiment and........it actually does what you expect. Even more exciting (and perplexing), however, is when an experiment gives a result that is utterly unexpected! You can then spend hours thinking out the implications of the new data (after, of course, worrying about the mistakes you may have made in doing the experiment), fantasizing about impressing everyone in the field with your soon-to-be-classic paper in a high profile journal, and wondering generally about what new areas of investigation the new result may open up.

As a recent example, a new PhD student in my lab was carrying out a routine experiment investigating how a type of glial cell responded to neurotransmitters. On applying a chemical that, according to current dogma, should not affect the cell, she found it produced a calcium influx across the cell membrane that could account for how these cells get damaged in several neurological diseases. After (much) more work, the result was a paper in Nature, an article about her work on the front page of a national newspaper in her home country, and (perhaps more importantly) her Mum finally believing she was doing something important!

On a more day-to-day basis, the enjoyment of the work comes from solving the intellectual puzzles inherent in the research, seeing how previously apparently unrelated facts can be fitted together into a story about how the system works (something my son characterizes as fiddling around with cells under a microscope for half the day and then thinking ‘Hmmm, I wonder what that means’), and presenting your work to colleagues in the lab or at international conferences and getting their comments on it.

A major feature of life as a neuroscientist is the ability to control your own working life. When you start a PhD in neuroscience you will generally have no idea how people generate ideas for experiments, and you will be heavily dependent on your supervisor. This soon changes however, until, by the end of the PhD, you will probably have ideas for more useful experiments than you can find time to do, and it will be up to you to decide which are the most promising. Similarly, you will decide what hours you work and when you take holidays. Of course a complete life of leisure may not benefit your neuroscience career, but the flexibility to choose when you do different parts of the work is a major advantage over many other careers.

See further information about the neuroscience programme at University College London.
Most UK universities run neuroscience courses and links to many of these can be found on the British Neuroscience Association website.