Timelines and exit strategies...for graduate school.

Now that I'm in my fifth year of grad school, more and more people are talking about my exit strategy and whether I have a timeline. Most of the people are well-intentioned, (though some are malicious) but what they need to understand is I cannot set a timeline, because then the experiments win! Every day I struggle with these experiments, struggling to get the cells to express the proteins I want and to supress the ones I don't. It's a very detailed process, central to the cell's way of life, and is a very complicated process. It's a very cellular process. I have to maintain the cells in sterile culture, continually guarding against foreign bacterial and fungal contaminants. Moreover, there is a natural tendency within my cells to differentiate and lose the characteristics that make them usable. Only a strict regime of feeding them everyday and providing them with their every need can prevent an insurgency of differentiated cells.

I can't underscore enough that the research effort is multi-factorial, and not well understood by say- those who served in the thermodynamics research of the 60s. Bioresearch is not another plastics boom. Bioresearch is more personal and specific, and harder to wage. And besides this isn't just about changing genes in my cells, it's about changing genes in all cells. This is part of the global war on bad genes. I'm really fighting the bad DNA in these cells so that someday we can fight the bad DNA in our cells. This research is vital for our defense, and also my thesis defense. If I give up and graduate, then the bad DNA wins. If I give the cells a timeline, then they won't have incentive to fix their DNA, because they know I'll be gone in a few months. That's why it's important to not have a timeline. Furthermore, my adversaries who suggest I need one are being unscientific.

(Oh graduation...how I long for you. Speaking of timelines, I have another 2 hour procedure before I can go home. Hasta.)