New love affairs
It is grant request season once more. It always feels like an avalanche, being in the winter, and with such a sudden onslaught. It’s gratifying to be asked to be a collaborator on so many, especially as most seem feasible taken individually. Rather like dating in high school – none are yet marriage material, and you want to try lots of different styles if possible, while still maintaining some loyalty to old friends.
Bigger, better visions for the future.
I’ve just finished corresponding with our national representatives to the European Union Framework Programme 7, conveying our lobbying request for a large collaborative scheme with colleagues in England (whom I will be visiting for a mock audit in Newcastle with representatives of a certification provider as of Sunday night), Denmark and Spain. The call for proposals will come out in 2010. One down.
Last night, I spoke with a researcher at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine with whom I’ve worked rather indirectly in the past (“Don’t I refer patients to you for testing for such-and-such a gene?” “No, not me, I’m not a geneticist…”), who wants to apply for a large NIH grant and of course, the deadline from my point of view is the end of next week. But it is a very good opportunity to do the kind of service work I also like to do. I am always concerned my scientific contributions may be transitory in interest, whereas a biological resource is potentially a tangible aide to hundreds of other researchers. This would make a whammy of one from primary materials to which only above mentioned English colleagues and we have regular, regulated and qualified access, namely, the human embryo.
Ongoing is a proposal with an Italian future collaborator working at a different site from me in Paris, in conjunction with partners he has assembled from Italy and Germany. This one only requires some flights of scientific imagination, which is the most amusing part of writing a grant request, of course.
Starting a new paper is also a little like a new relationship – all these ideas, and a whole virgin discussion section to expound on them! Of course, there are real relationships involved, with the other co-authors, and all kinds of human interactions are represented therein. I have a draft underway (in which I am subordinate) and my further contributions are overdue because of a lack of motivation, as well as a paper with my student which is currently in the form of a vague Powerpoint of 3/4 of the results and waiting for my kick-start. So of course I am unfaithful and follow up ideas for papers that are at an even more embryonic stage of development. Not the best use of time. And I write blog posts, too!
I’ve also promised two files – amendments to our authorizations to use radioactivity in the unit, and to use the human embryonic materials. They’re both started, and neither finished, but both must be. Without an imperative deadline, they keep getting pushed off. It will be a relief when they are finished, but these obligations are less like love affairs than like dealing with your lover’s hitherto unsuspected illegitimate children from a previous relationship. Common decency requires you to treat them with dignity but you can’t wait to terminate the interaction and feel morally smug for having undergone the ordeal.
And last but not least, is maintaining my image as a female scientific Phryné. To aid in such exercises of seduction, I am preparing slides for the quadrennial national evaluation of our research group at the end of the month, and for a talk next Wednesday at the Société de Biologie. Following orators whose recent work would be known to the editors hanging around this site, should be quite a challenge, not to mention arriving at the end of the month with all the above tasks completed, the cell lines resuscitated from the liquid nitrogen store on the other side of the country, and other such housekeeping which otherwise saps time from my preferred womanly activities.
Now Bob might have an inkling what I’m plotting with my other woman science blogger girlfriends…
I thought this post would be a hotbed for witty comments, but there are none! And this isn’t one either! My wit is tired. (I liked the illegitimate children analogy, though, but just saying that like this sounds very strange.)
I suppose we’re all in the same boat at this time of year. Let there be (more) light, and we’ll see everyone’s wit come out of hibernation again. Even Stephen Fry has been apparently unproductive lately, which is saying something.
I plead overwork. I’m trying to figure out what I need to and—more to the point— can get done in the 6 weeks I have left at the MMB. And Jenny asked me to be Assistant Editor for OpenLab 2008.
Foolishly, I agreed.
That was right on topic, Richard, as the undertheme for this post is (as it is on a regular basis) biting off more than you can chew.
Apparently, Stephen Fry is in Sydney now (says his Twitter). So you guys are unbelievably on topic and coherent.
I am doing okay with my new schedule, although I’m not sleeping well. At all. I’m still going to bed after 1 AM, but have to be at work at 9, so just really exhausted. And tonight I need to do a final load of laundry and vacuuming to get rid of a moth infestation AND I need to pack, and take the 4 AM night bus to the airport to go to North Carolina, and I don’t see when I can possibly sleep between now and Monday… Oh well.
Eva, sleep is optional. If you ever have kids, you will have proven it beyond the shadow of a doubt.
We played musical beds last night – I ended up in my son’s bed..
Have fun in NC, Eva (and everyone else), with or without sleep!!
There once was a fellow named Grant …
Nope. The muse has fled.
well, you seem to have more to do than I … but my lab bench is keeping me busy. And the writing part does take a silly strange time, at least for me.
I wish you good luck with the slides for the evaluation meeting! I am sure you’ll do splendid. And that the grants will almost write themselves…. (one got to hope, right?)
Gulp. Yes, science is the art of hope. I’ve got that part down pretty good. You’re not alone in the writing camp; check out Stephen’s latest plaint.
Heather, I tagged you…
Still drowning under the workload, here, but I hope to have my head above water sometime next week. Meanwhile, many thanks to Steffi, though I don’t think I am an example to follow by any stretch of the imagination. I’ll work on finding seven bloggers who are an inspiration to me – but sometime in the next fortnight!
No one should be the substitute of anyone. But this attitude could not be accepted by everyone. One of my friends just told me that his girlfriend just tried to reform him into others. She could not reform him from the gene part, but the appearance. She asked him to cut his hair short, to wear the punk clothes and even bought him a silver rubber wristbands. All these things make my friend looks like a hippy or something like that—— in one word, it is not his style. In fact, he is a lawyer and he is famous for his carefulness. At first he just considered his mate’s action as one expression of her love and accepted them with pleasure. But later on, when he looked at himself in the mirror, he found that he was totally another person, a totally stranger. And how could his girlfriend loved him if he is absolutely not himself?
After the inspection, he knew that his girlfriend was just trying to make him look like her ex-boyfriend. It is unfair. In my opinion, you could never force others to meet your standard in love. He is who he is, and if you love him, you should love everything he has but not to try to change him. If you do not even try to see his advantages, how could you know him? Each individual leaf on the tree is different, so how could the people be the same? When you just try to reform somebody, no matter who he or she is, you will certainly hurt them. Though Simon is popular in the American Idol, I think we should be Paula when we get along with others. And we should know that everyone is the unique in this world. So, please stop finding the substitute. It is unfair and it is hurt.