…we’ve come to an end of 2023, and what a year it has been!
One of my favorite things to do at the end of each year, especially in the week between Christmas and New Years is to look through the January pages of my lab notebook from that year.
I’ve been doing this subconsciously for years and while I’ve told myself the reasons were different each year. It is mostly to access the feeling of excitement, hope and “new beginnings” felt at the top of each year. One good thing about this exercise is that it relieves you from measuring yourself against traditional metrics of academic success.. such as published papers, acquired funding from grants and fellowships, citations, conference talks/presentations, invited talks, etc. Instead, it gives you a way to time-travel and access your unique creative process and measure the level of maturity of intellect that you nurture through the year from curiosity to bench.
One of the things I am most grateful for is the privilege to be an immunologist. I am not sure exactly when it all started for me, but this 18+ year journey of being an immunologist happened so organically and was never quite formalized. I remember the early days of being a technician at Sloan and just wondering what flow cytometry was all about. The ability to visualize specific markers on a cell seemed crazy and cool. Looking at cancer cells under the scope and seeing how they changed shape from a circular cell to a dendritic adhered cell on a tissue culture flask plastic.. it felt like magic. As I wrap up a couple of manuscripts for my postdoc and get ready to submit, I know it will be the end of the “training" phase of my academic career.
This week, I look back to all the late evenings of 2023, when I spend hours just staring at a piece of recent data on my second monitor. With the music in the background, view of east river outside my window.. sometimes the sanguine sunset, and sometimes the incandescent moon to join the party. Sometimes a cup of coffee and a piece of dark chocolate. But, almost ALWAYS, a version of..
“could it be?”
”shouldn’t it be?”
”Maybe it means…”
”that makes no sense! does it?”
”what was different this time?”
”I gotta repeat this!”
…and my personal favorite,
”THIS is f’ing awesome! I knew it!!!”
all of these little likely-nothings have made for some incredible and fundamental discoveries that I have (personally) made about basic lung immunology this year. As I give finishing touches to my manuscripts, I'm energized by these memories. Whether or not it will be published sooner or later will not change the level of satisfaction of figuring out some gaps. I know that it seems infantile to even articulate this, as most of us weather the highs and lows of bench science on a daily basis. But, no matter how many rejections and failures of academia we endure.. the half-life of those handful of successes in our career carry us through the decades and feed to our myopia.
So, as I wrap-up this annual reflection.. I raise my glass to all the incredible failures that are coming my way in 2024, with a promise to teach me ways to do a better, important and the most fantastic science.
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