Five-Year Harvest

Yesterday I found out that a discovery I made five years ago, which was pursued by others and written up into a paper, will be published in a forthcoming issue of Science magazine.

When I was in graduate school, I was repeatedly warned that nothing would work for three to four years. It didn't. In spite of great exertion, optimism, and persistence on my part, nothing worked. My experiments did not yield any interesting results. Or any uninteresting results.

It is extremely difficult to be in a situation where persistence doesn't pay, where intelligence doesn't matter, where it may take years to find out that your work has been fruitless. I did not deal very well with this lack of certainty; I was not willing to be patient and persistent and wait for things to work out. I developed a seething resentment for research; I attributed to it a personality—and I was really really angry with "science," just as if it were a person.

I needed out. I almost quit, but I didn't. Lack of gumption, perhaps. I stuck it out and got a PhD with the minimum amount of experimental "results" my committee would tolerate.

But some interesting things happened in the few months before I left the lab. My experiments started to work; everything I touched suddenly yielded novel and promising results. What's more, I stopped hating "science": things seemed quite sweet, actually. Protocols I'd hated to do became fun; routine activities seemed fresh; the very act of going to lab stopped filling me with dread. I was curious, and I felt a poignant fondness for "science," like a charming old adversary I was going to miss.

I was counselled to wait before I decided to leave science altogether— to see how the paper I was writing would be received, to take a break and look at the future with fresh eyes. There was no way I was listening to that. I had made up my mind; clearly I only enjoyed science because I knew I was leaving. Having felt so burned for so many years, having yearned to be free from the continuous not knowing, my mind was made up.

I left, and I never looked back. It took months before I could even bear to think about biology. To this day I can act very oddly if people nearby are discussing science in a manner I find overly glib.

And now, this paper. I am listed as an author, because I made the discovery. I looked through the scope; I knew it was a fabulous result; and I walked away from it because I was overcome with aversion. Five years (and many hours of labor on someone else's part)later, that discover greets the world as a Science paper. It enters the body of human knowledge. It may even help alleviate suffering.

My friends, the people who slogged along beside me, sometimes enduring years of abject despair, are all getting jobs, doing well, having success as scientists. I had imagined that I would never have a chance at success, that I might as well leave because nothing I did would ever amount to anything. But there is, in fact, no reason I could not have succeeded. Except that I couldn't stand to stay in the game. There's no way I could have followed up on those results, not without going to live in a monastery first.

But how many more incredible opportunities will I abandon? How many more promising futures will I be too overwhelmed to pursue? At what point will I just do something long enough to enjoy the fruit of all my efforts?