Marathon Running: a story of emotional burnout

I’d been rather blithely telling people that my 26th year seemed like an ideal time to train for my first marathon. It was around one year ago near my birthday and New Years that I had broken down in what might have been my first mid-life crisis, and decided that there was much I needed to accomplish at 26 to feel that I was ‘on track’ with my ‘life plan.’ But having burned through many of those accomplishments, and with my 27th birthday now behind me*, I’m feeling less urgency, and more reflection.

My blitheness about running a marathon was rooted in some human biology. At Berkeley, a vertebrate zoologist once remarked to me that he felt our ability to run long distances was tied to our ancestor’s approach to hunting prey on the plains. He said that our bodies were in fact designed to run down antelope-like creatures who sprinted short distances, and would eventually yield to our endurable bipedalism. This fact was something that stuck with me, and I often repeated my interpretation to others by informing them that most of us, with a little training, could run a marathon. A remarkable if not somewhat naïve thought.

With that confidence behind me, I felt that on top of the many other tasks, goals, and necessary hurdles I had placed on myself this past year that it would be an ideal time to ‘put a marathon’ on the calendar. I say this with a certain level of self-ridicule because I have now come to realize how delusional I can really be at times. Those other tasks, mind you, included starting a company, getting a new puppy, starting a new relationship, and preparing for the largest exam of my life (my PhD program’s qualifying exam).

And so, six or seven months ago I debated with a close friend who frequently ran marathons which race might be ideal to run near the end of the year or early 2016. We settled on the Phoenix Rock n’ Roll Marathon on January 17th, the day after his 27th birthday. The course was flat and fast, and we reasoned that the weather in Phoenix in January would be optimal for running. I began my training three or four months in advance during a mild and amenable fall season in Seattle. Running has been a part of my life since I was a teenager.  I was already capable of easily running six miles on the weekends.  My plan was to slowly up my mileage each week until I hit the expected 20 mile workout about a month before the race. This would be easy, or so I thought.

But I don’t want to tell you about how easy it was. And I don’t want you to think that I just tackled training for a marathon on top of all those other things with ease, because I did not. And if you recently had a conversation with me and I told you, rather blithely, that things were going well, it would be a lie. Because at this point, I’m not even all that sure my body will be capable of finishing the race tomorrow. You see, I hadn’t expected what it might feel like to run and run and run until your body started to shut down. I hadn’t prepared for the short daylight hours available to me in the Seattle winter. I slogged through at least four half marathons during my training. At least two of these were in the cold rain. I ran them alone. I had no running partners, and no personal goals. I didn’t feel like I was getting in better shape. I felt like I was slowly but surely wearing myself down, both physically and emotionally. After most of my long runs, my body was wrecked. I’d be cold for hours afterwards. I couldn’t find enough clothes in the house to put on, and not enough heat. There wasn’t enough energy left to put food in my mouth. My stomach and digestive system would be in turmoil for hours or days afterwards. I would barely have the energy to take the puppy out, and my boyfriend or roommate often had to step in to help as I floundered on the couch in an incapacitated state.

Those were just some of my training struggles. The day I went for my 20 miler — I started out far too late in the day. It was already colder than it should have been. I managed to put a water bottle out at the halfway point, but by the time I hit 10 miles the sun had set. Flocks of crows gathered in the trees for the night. It got colder, and darker. At 13.5 miles I started cramping and hobbling, having to switch between walking and running. Something felt wrong, but ‘I can push through it.’ I thought. I couldn’t. At 15 miles I called an uber to come pick me up and take me the rest of the way to my car. I huddled in the dark, wrapping my arms around myself to warm up. My legs were in pain. Something felt really wrong with my knee. It was just a run I thought — how much damage could I really do?

After that failed 20 miler, I threw in two weeks of solid traveling shortly before the race. Traveling did not facilitate training, at least not with my lack of dedication. Concerned family and friends asked what kind of schedule I was on, and I cowardly tried to brush off their questions and tell myself I had done ok without a strict schedule.

Back in Seattle, I went for what I thought would be an easy-peasy six miler. Just to get back into the swing of things after my travels. Three miles in, my knee was in so much pain I had to walk the rest of the way home around Lake Union. During that walk home, I chastised myself: for my naïve impulse to take on so much, for my failure to get my body in good enough shape ahead of the race. For how terrible I had felt these past few months, trying to go and go and go and ending up losing much of my drive, passion, and motivation. Burnout arrived for me in a very insidious way, over days that turned to weeks and then months. It didn’t happen as a result of one thing, but from millions of tiny things that sucked away my extra energy, my fuel. It wasn't just the marathon training that I felt I was failing at - but also my struggles at graduate school, at doing research, and at striking a balance in my life.  By the end of 2015 I felt deeply jaded and cynical. Burnout meant losing the leftover energy in the day to day, to have empathy for the people I love, but also to have empathy for myself.

A few people close to me remarked on my ability to handle ‘all of this’ with ‘so much grace.’ But what have I done with grace? I thought to myself. Is grace not complaining about how debilitating this time period has been? Is grace not voicing how inadequate I’ve felt at not really doing anything well? Is grace distancing yourself from others because you’re afraid to admit that you bit off more than you could chew? I hadn’t heard that definition of grace before. Here I was hobbling three miles back to my house — on the verge of tears because my race was two weeks away and I could barely run without a searing pain spreading from my right knee. Here I was, not even able to cry really because my level of emotional burnout from the past year of my life had reached such a low. Here I was, realizing, that perhaps training for a marathon was not something that anyone could just pick up and do. And certainly not someone spread quite so thin as myself.

That walk left me with some time to think. In contrast to a 2015 filled with so many ‘goals’ and ‘resolutions’, I decided that I didn’t want any more of that this year. This year I want to do a few things really well. This year, less is more. This year, I will be more deliberate — because getting all that stuff done last year did not feel good. It did not feel good at all.

But back to marathon training. I’ve spent the past two weeks taking care of myself and listening to my body. I did a few things I should have done a long time ago. I went back to bikram yoga, a practice which I love and which makes me feel like my best self in my body. I bought new shoes, which already feel worlds better than my old ones. I saw a physical therapist for the first time in years, and she helped me worry through the knee problems and the tightness (and thankfully assured me that I could probably still run the race with a little more self care). I went on a few little runs. I stopped drinking alcohol and ate clean. I did everything in my power, over the past two weeks, to make sure that tomorrow I can be my best self. That was really important to me.

I might not be able to complete the marathon tomorrow. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if my body just said no at some point, and if I listened and said ‘ok, we can stop.’ I guess I feel a little like one of those inspirational posters, you know, “It’s about the journey, not the finish line.” I’m not here because I have to finish the marathon — even though I really, really want to. I’m here because I set a goal for myself a year ago. I’m here because I’ve spent months training by myself — and despite all the other shit and all the other hurdles, I was the person that got myself out of bed and put in the miles. I’m satisfied because it’s taken me awhile to realize that, when you’re out there on the road pushing yourself past physical points you weren’t sure existed, there is no one to compare yourself to. Deciding to run a marathon was something I wanted for myself. It wasn’t about comparing my training schedule to anyone else. It was about putting in the long runs when I felt like it. Even if I can’t finish tomorrow, I know there will be another race. It might be in a different place. It might be a better day for me. And that’s ok.

[20 days later]

It’s been almost a month now since I ran and successfully completed my first marathon. My athletic and extremely disciplined friend who I ran with completed his in just 3 hours and 8 minutes, whereas I finished in about five hours. To put that into perspective, you could watch the movie Elf three times during my race and I still wouldn’t have finished. If you ask me how it was or felt, I will honestly tell you that it was intense and extremely painful. But what I realized during the race was that everyone around me was also in pain. We were all openly complaining, as we pushed our bodies past limits that do exist. Our muscles were either cramping, in pain, or just plain numb from hours of exercise. Near the finish line, some of us walked. Some of us hobbled. Some of us jogged in a curious way indicative of hours of endured activity.

In fact, the only times when I felt like I could see past the pain was when I meditated on the things in my life that brought me happiness. I meditated on the people that I cared the most about. I meditated on the future that I looked forward to, and reflected on the past with gratitude. I realized that I should probably spend less time training for marathons, and more time caring for the things that I love. Holding those images in my mind, the miles peeled away until I was ten, then six, then four and then two miles from the finish. Then I just repeated the alphabet over and over until I found myself crossing that holy line. 26.2 miles.

I had fantasies that running all those miles would feel something like a journey — a wild west pioneer expedition, where my feet led the way across some new land, free of cars or wheels. It did not feel like that. It was sheer insanity, in my humble opinion. And I think many people around me felt the same way.

So why do we do it? What was the point?

I suppose, as humans, we have these strange urgencies to set bars for ourselves. Especially physically, to push ourselves further. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I think the question to think about is, how do these goals serve us? I did feel mentally stronger as a result of training and running a marathon. I understood that I could mentally push my body very very far. To know that you can do something if you set your mind to it is a very powerful thing. But physically and emotionally, I did not feel better. I didn’t feel like I got in better shape during the training. And that mental strength came at a deeper cost to my emotional fuel tank of energy.

So this year folks — less is more.   Let my marathon be a lesson to you.   Be deliberate with what you take on in your life.   And keep your fuel tank full.

*this post was originally written in January/February 2016

Gene Therapy and SMA treatment

We often talk about personalized medicine here at ISB.  It’s become a bit of a buzzword in the research world, and buzzwords often lead to a healthy amount of criticism.  Mike Joyner, the author behind a well-shared NYT editorial “’Moonshot’ Medicine Will Let Us Down” recently joined us for a day of conversation and gave a talk summarizing his views which I might loosely paraphrase as:

1.      We shouldn’t be so focused on genetics

2.     Gene targets haven’t done much as far as therapeutics

3.     Most of the community isn’t really equipped to understand genetic risk

Lunch with Mike got me thinking…thinking that I didn’t really agree.  Because I knew from my experience that gene therapies were in fact panning out in small but miraculous ways, and those stories should be shared and lifted up.  So I want to offer up what I believe stands as a great example of gene-targeted therapeutics. 

Ionis Pharmaceuticals was founded in 1989 with the goal of commercializing a type of gene therapy called antisense oligos (ASOs).  ASOs are small 12-25 nucleotide oligos.  They are chemically modified and designed to target and bind specific mRNA targets (the gene transcript).  Because mRNA must be single stranded to be translated into protein, the binding interaction effectively diminishes protein levels.  These drugs can be applied to genetic diseases where a bad copy of the gene makes a mutated protein; if you can stop making mutant protein, you can fix the problem.

Antisense therapies have been developed by Ionis and others to treat a variety of diseases.  You can check out the Ionis pipeline here.

Recently, Ionis’ drug nusinersen, designed to treat Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) in pediatric and adult patients, was approved by the FDA.  Now called Spinraza, in targets the SMN2 gene.  This drug was discovered in a collaboration between an academic research lab at Cold Spring Harbor (Adrian Krainer) and Ionis.  I want to emphasize the collaboration because this wasn't just something that happened within a biotech or within industry.  It required academic researchers as well.

A family I am acquainted with has two adorable little boys, Harper and Hendrix, who are both affected by SMA.  Type II SMA begins to affect children between 6 to 18 months old.  Typically babies born with SMA – about 1 in 10,000 – appear normal and achieve all the beginning developmental milestones, such as learning to roll over or sit up.  But before their second birthday, these babies start to regress and have trouble with basic movements including swallowing.  Proximal muscles and lung muscles are often the first to be affected.  Parents live in fear of a respiratory illness or infection, which often results in long visits in the ICU for their children.

Harper and Hendrix rely on wheelchairs for mobility.  But luckily for these two little boys and so many other families, there is hope.  In a clinical trial for Spinraza that led to its approval, 40 percent of children on the drug re-achieved the ability to sit, crawl and walk.  They were doing things parents never thought they would see their children do again.

The Ramos family has been traveling to Seattle every couple of weeks to give Harper and Hendrix infusions of Spinraza.  It is not an easy treatment to receive, as it must be infused into the spinal fluid.  On Facebook, their parents share videos of the boys grabbing objects for the first time and holding hands for the first time since their symptoms began.  It is, quite simply, a miracle treatment and makes me so happy to see their progress, but also to believe in science and research again and the difference it can make.  

Harper and Hendrix at Seattle Children's for Spinraza treatment

From their mom, “Do you believe in miracles…watch this.  These boys haven’t been able to roll over since they were 18 months old.  Look at their smiles and determination!  Through hard work and love their treatments are working.”

Harper and Hendrix with their older brother at Seattle Children's hospital.

A special thank you to the Ramos family for allowing me to share their story.

Banana Stand Problems

Most of my weekday mornings I bike or walk to my lab, nestled amongst blank-faced corporate buildings that represent the Amazon campus in South Lake Union, Seattle.  Across the street from my building is the Amazon courtyard - a space with a raised middle area for bands or events and a wider area below where Pikes Place has a pop up farmer's market on Thursdays.  But on any other day you'll spot a bright yellow canopy marked "COMMUNITY BANANA STAND" hanging over an almost too-cutesie wagon filled with boxes of bananas, tended to by Amazon 'banistas' playing music from an Amazon Echo.  The bananas are free for the taking, presumably for any 'community' member (not just Amazon employees).  And somehow this highlight marker of an anomaly amongst the bland offices of one of the biggest and most profitable tech companies in America has come to represent many of the contradictory feelings I have towards technology and its effect on our American cities.

For a long time I sang the praises of tech.  I was constantly cheered by the widening inter-connectedness that came from the internet, from social media, from Facebook.  So many aspects of our lives are greatly improved by the supercomputers in our pockets.  For instance, on a daily basis, I check my OneBusAway app to find out when my bus is arriving.  I get on Facebook to chat with my family, friends, see what they are up to.  I get tidbits of news and have conversations with people around the world on Twitter.  I call an uber to go out somewhere for a drink.  While I'm in the Uber, I go onto ClassPass to sign up for a workout class tomorrow morning.  If I'm sick, I order delivery from my phone and it arrives at my door.  If I need more garbage bags, I go to Amazon Prime and order that while I'm waiting for my lunch to warm up.  Meanwhile, I go on living my life.  Or so it seems.

All of these things are mostly well and good.  But tech - and it's massive success in cities like San Francisco and Seattle - also seems to come with some bad.  And I think that 'bad' happens on a day-to-day micro level but also on a city-scale macro level.  The micro level happens in the form of our daily attention and energy getting diverted (sometimes hundreds or thousands of times a day) into meaningless pastimes like looking at instagram.  The macro level happens in the form of the pricing out of the diversity in these cities and the uniformity that occurs as a result.  A city's very personality, it's culture, it's community voice can afterall not be substituted for Amazon's bottom line.  

When I first moved to Seattle to the quiet and quaint neighborhood of Eastlake along Lake Union, I was cheered by the sense of community I felt.  The shop clerk at Pete's Market knows me.  I know all the baristas at Voxx Coffee.  We see the same faces (dogs and people) at the field over by the school across from Louisa's where we run our dogs.  There are a lot of single family homes here, old craftsman style houses built in the early 1900's.  I would walk to work along the lake and see all this construction, all these buildings going up around me.  Dozens of cranes along the skyline that were being dubbed the new 'birds of seattle'.  "What a time to be here" I thought...all this growth.  But lately as I've watched the buildings go up floor by floor, the windows put in place, the concrete smoothed and the plants planted outside, and I've realized with some horror that all the buildings look the same.  Boring, plain, dark greys and blues.  Despite the opportunity to create a beautiful building...these builders and architects had all chosen the same plan.  Was this a reflection of the culture in Seattle, I wondered?  But then I looked at neighborhoods like Capitol Hill with their whimsical features.  I thought about the old BauHaus coffee shop and thought no...this couldn't entirely be a reflection of the culture here.  We have so much more artistic voice than that!

This year it will finally be time for me to move out of Eastlake.   I'll be priced out, in a way.  They will tear down this adorable old 1904 craftsman with the chipping blue paint and the giant spruce tree outside and build 27 'high-efficiency' apodments with no parking.  I imagine that Amazon employees who work in South Lake Union will be willing to pay the $800 or more per month for their little 300 square feet unit that's close to work.  And I want you to know that I know I've had it good - I've had it great.  I've been very lucky.  And I also know that things are even worse in the rental market in San Francisco these days.

I think what I'm trying to get at is that while Amazon making money and creating thousands of jobs is wonderful -- and while all those people devote their lives to try to make the 'customer's life easier'-- our cities are changing.  And I wonder if Jeff Bezos or Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg are taking the time to think about how their behemoths are impacting the communities around their office buildings.  If the grad students, and the teachers, and the nurses are having to move further outside of the city and all that remains here in the heart is this homogenous population of software engineers - what does that look like?  What does that mean for Seattle or San Francisco?

Because already, I walk around South Lake Union on a weekend and the streets are dead.  I know so many engineers live there in those big beautiful high rises - are they inside?  Do they go somewhere else to hang out?

Because so many young people these days seem to spend so much time on their phones (myself included).  The addictive power of these devices I think is being overlooked and we aren't trying to understand that enough - to get ahead of it.  What kind of creative and productive outlets are our communities losing to PokemonGo?  Why do I feel the need to constantly delete apps off my phone that are sucking away my focus from my work or paying attention to those that I love?  

That banana stand just sits there like this shimmering mirage of a sense of community but I don't think I'm buying it.  To me it just feels like a bandaid on a broken leg.  Tech holds all this power, all this promise, all this wealth.  I just wish, collectively speaking, tech could be a little bit more intentional with the humanization aspect.  I wish they would be a little bit more intentional with their impact on our communities and on our lives.  

Symposium Roundup

Wisdom of the Crowds: data collected by Bill Newsome's monkey study provides input, single cell data, and output to help map neurons utilized in a decision making task.  Notes from David Krakauer talk, ISB.  JRP.

"What is life?  It is an evolved machine powering growth and replication using metabolic free energy...  What are the fundamental trends underlying the evolution of biological systems?" - David Krakauer, Santa Fe Institute

One of the great benefits of grad student life is the scientific immersion you get through talks and symposiums organized by your institute or university.  Often you don't even need to leave the building to hear about research happening across the country.  This week in particular was rich in immersion.  On Monday and Tuesday the Institute for Systems Biology held their annual symposium* (this year's theme was Emerging Technologies).  Wednesday was the Department of Genome Sciences (at UW) symposium, and lastly Friday was the Molecular & Cellular Biology (my department) Symposium held at Fred Hutch.  In sum, there was a ton of opportunity this week to see some great speakers spanning several different fields.  

I wanted to share some of what I learned and absorbed.  

David Krakauer studies fundamental trends of adaptive phenomena which range from the evolution of computers to the evolution of life.  I saw David speak a few years back during my first week of graduate school.  At the time, his view of evolutionary biology was so different from my narrow-minded world of functional genomics that I found it pretty inaccessible.  Apparently a few years of systems biology and exposure to the likes of Sui Huang and Stu Kauffman has done some good because this time around I found David's ideas much easier to understand.  I like David's talks not just for the power of the content.  He's an engaging speaker, with slide organization and beautification straight out of an Edward Tufte textbook.  He captivated the audience at the start with some impressive drone footage he recently took of the Santa Fe Institute where he is based.  After that he dives into a critique of the scientific system as a whole and its reversion to complexity.  David makes his point by showing a slide with the publication titles from the recent issue of Nature and Science.  In almost every case, the title states something simplistic and linear "Gene X does Y."  But is this really a great representation of the world around us?  Of biology?  If science is a human invention, then perhaps it has been disabled by our own human-ness.  We didn't evolve to accept high dimensionality.  I think part of the problem here is the story telling we have to do in our publications.  I don't think anybody doing systems biology comes out of looking at something and says, "yep that's it - we got one hit, one target, one gene."  No, the nature of systems biology is that you reveal the complexity of what you are studying through many layers.  But that can get lost in translation I think.  

"There are measurements that detect, and there are models that explain.  What I mean is, the strength of my opinion has nothing to do with how right it is." - David Krakauer

The 3 Fold Way: thinking about complexity using dynamics, information theory/optimization, and computation.  Notes from David Krakauer talk, ISB.  JRP.  

Atul Butte spoke the first day of the ISB symposium.  Atul is an MD who hails from UCSF (recently recruited away from Stanford).  Atul is another engaging speaker; he brings props like microarray chips and makes analogies like "this is the match.com for drugs."  His science is compelling in that his students access publicly available data through resources like GEO and analyze all these datasets generated by other groups and from that analysis produce greater understanding of diseases or find better uses for drugs developed years ago that were otherwise 'sitting on a shelf.'  His first slide lists his Conflicts of Interests (which is filled with text) but he draws our attention to the lower right corner and points out that these are the conflicts of interest that he is most proud of because they are all companies that were started by his graduate students.  In fact, more than half of his students have started companies - and his lab dogma is that if you want to change the world you can't just keep writing papers about it.

Atul ends on a powerful note by showing us the health road maps they are building for the 14 million patients in the UC Health system.  These health maps are analogous to Google Maps, except if you could see the cars driving on the roads.  Instead of buildings and locations, the maps show symptoms and progression of disease and track the movement of individual patients through bins (represented as large circles) such as 'alcohol dependency' to 'cirrhosis of the liver' to small little squares for death.  In the interactive version of one of these maps he shows little lines move across the map for hundreds of thousands of patients moving through hospitals and doctors appointments; their electronic medical record pinpointing their trajectory to mortality.  For a data nerd, it is inspiring.  For a human being, it is horrifying.   

Google Maps for Patient Health Records.  Talk by Atul Butte at ISB Symposium.  Notes by JRP.

Lastly I'll mention that Nels Elde (University of Utah) gave a fantastic talk focusing on the 'generosity' of selfish elements.  The concept in a nutshell is this - viruses invade hosts, integrate genetic material into their genomes (selfish elements) and the hosts then use that genetic material for their own benefit (hidden generosity).  If you'd like to learn more about his views on evolution, he runs a cool podcast called TWiEVO: This week in evolution. 

On the backdrop of this powerful week of talks I was left with the great impression that some incredibly smart people have designed some beautiful studies to reveal amazing things about personalized medicine, neuroscience, and evolution.  Biology - and life in general - is complex enough that it's taken an unbelievable amount of work to get this far.  

Horizontal Gene Transfer, generosity of selfish genes.  Notes from Eugene Koonin and Nels Elde talks at the MCB Symposium.  JRP.

* In ancient Greece, the symposium was a drinking party. [Wikipedia]

Welcome to Scientific Wellness

I have a new mantra that I’ve been repeating to myself these days, and that is that my health will not come at the cost of my career.  It is often a morning reminder, when I’m struggling to start my workout around 6:30 AM.  I’ll be the first to admit that my success at maintaining my overall health in the face of the pressing challenges of graduate school, research, team projects, coursework, and teaching – has been mediocre at best.  My weekly goals typically include three thirty minute workouts, as much walking as possible (often to and from work, plus an afternoon bout), hydration throughout the day, and a ‘mostly’ vegan diet.  Additionally I attempt to keep a strict sleep schedule, in which I go to bed at approximately the same time every night and wake up at the same time every morning.  When this regimen is operating smoothly (ie, when my travel schedule permits, or the stress is not overbearing) I am able to wake without an alarm clock and avoid the hindrance of past bouts with insomnia.

One thing my weekly structure and health mantra is lacking is data.  Despite the smartphone, fitbits, and various attempts of my own at quantified self – I have struggled with the lack of data that I can gather on my self, on my own body.  Physician appointments are largely focused on acute tasks that have little to do with my overall well-being.  The lack of any kind of systemic overview of my health by a physician is cushioned by our broken healthcare system and the fact that most blood tests that do not have a direct impact on a symptom I am dealing with must go through some preauthorization from my insurance or else I am paying out of pocket.  But what if it didn’t have to be so difficult.  What if I, as a consumer of health services, could buy the kind of data and systemic overview that I’m currently lacking? 

The reality is, we have all been affected in some deeply personal way by health decline.  We have relatives and family members and friends (or ourselves) that have been diagnosed with cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or ALS.  We have watched the quality and richness of their lives degrade with the progression of disease.  The things they used to love doing are no longer feasible.  But what if we had a better way of capturing what general wellness or health really means, and capturing the early warning signs of disease – so that a person can maintain that health for as long as possible.  This is the hope with Lee Hood and Nathan Price’s longitudinal health study, a dream formed and discussed and brought to reality over the last few years.  Today they will announce the launch of Arivale, a company that will bring that dream to a greater audience, and I think the timing is absolutely right.

While we don’t yet know all the specifics, a future customer of Arivale can expect to collect a portfolio of health metrics on themselves like never before.  This is 23andMe on steroids, with whole genome sequencing, microbiome sampling, and a biochemical geneticist’s dossier of blood work. And if that wasn’t enough you receive a personalized coaching call once a month about actionable items revealed from your data.  The specifics of this ‘product’ if you will were tested and proven on 100 pioneers, many who have spoken publicly of the experience.  Within the Hood Lab group many of us are itching to sign up.  But I expect that future consumers will not just be scientifically-minded.  I think we are coming into a new age of health, where it seems much more reasonable to invest in yourself.  I’m thrilled by the digital health, personalized medicine, and ‘patient will see you now’ movements that are happening.  It is such an exciting time. 

I look forward to hearing the reactions about the new company – and I expect there will be positives and negatives.  In the end however, I remain optimistic, and I look forward to the day when I can invest in my personal health as a customer of Arivale’s.  To feel empowered – to be even more self-aware about how my diet, exercise, and sleep maintenance are helping me thrive and live a productive and happy life – is something I very much look forward to.  Perhaps in the future, beyond those acute occurrences when we must rely on our physicians, we will be able to rely even more happily on ourselves for maintaining health and wellness.

On teaching an undergraduate genetics course.

This Thursday morning I will be proctoring a two hour long exam covering the last few weeks of material in the senior-level undergraduate genetics course I’ve been TAing for this past quarter.

I’ll watch as my fifty students struggle through the same test questions I struggled through when I took the exam yesterday.  I’ve ushered them through the last ten weeks of “quiz sections” and “activities” – hoping to impart some reasonable method for approaching these problems, despite the nagging feeling that I should be telling them “none of this is important, except in the context of the exam we are about to give you.”

I don’t mean to sound negative.  This quarter has been eye-opening for me in more ways than one, and for that I am thankful.  I’m also thankful that my fifty undergraduates are so positive and intelligent.  It has been a pleasure to be around them these last ten weeks. 

TAships are a traditional requirement of science department graduate students around the country.  Different departments and programs place different demands on their grad students – often seeing these TAships as a kind of “exchange” for the money they put into funding students before they officially joined a mentor’s lab (at which point the mentor takes over funding).  In other programs, the TAship is an accepted lesson in preparing one for teaching or professorship later on.  TAs can sometimes receive payment for their service on top of a stipend, which when you’re living off of a $30,000 stipend per year, an extra $8-10 grand can go a long way. 

In my case, we are expected to TA two quarters, as “payment” for our rotations.  Therefore I receive no extra funding as a result, despite being on an NSF fellowship.  I am in no way disparaging my program, university, or the system in place – I am simply laying out the way things are for a PhD student in my department.   Your TA quarters are often some of the most dreaded and demanding quarters of graduate school.  I started it off ten weeks ago with this philosophy in mind: “I’m not going to think about it, I’m just going to do it…one foot in front of the other, eight hours at a time.”  And trust me, that philosophy helps.  But here is why TAing is so hard in PhD programs.  Imagine, you are a second or third year graduate student.  You’re coming up on your general exam, your first committee meeting – maybe, like me – you’re trying to write your first paper or manuscript.  You’ve established yourself in your lab after a years worth of classes and lab rotations.  You’re finally, finally starting to get into the swing of things.  And suddenly, you are expected to teach a course for ten weeks or a semester.

Teaching is hard for graduate students because, lets face it – we all harbor that perfectionist streak in us.  We all want to be excellent at pretty much everything we do.  I speak for at least the majority of my colleagues in saying that within our field, it hurts our ego and our personality to know that we’ve given less than our best.  When we step into that classroom – we want to have a perfect grasp on the material.  We want to perfectly explain every question and every problem our students are having.  We want to perfectly guide them through this class, and hopefully have them come out on the other end with a greater appreciation for the thing we love the most – science!  But now, we’ve already gotten into the swing of things in our lab…maybe we can finally do western blots.  Maybe we’re finally coding in R.  Maybe we’re involved in team projects and our PI’s have deadlines and expectations and grants.  We want to keep doing all of those things perfectly too.

The inherent problem and resulting dread of TAing is that we as grad students want to keep doing everything really well, and that’s a lot of pressure we and others put on ourselves.

I’ll be honest though – I have loved teaching my students.  Thinking and talking through the best way to explain science has really furthered my understanding of these genetic concepts we covered this quarter.  But, I still feel like I’ve failed them a little bit.  I didn’t have a say in the design of the course or the material really, but I felt like I didn’t get to really relate to them what is happening in the field of genetics today.  I felt like I didn’t give them enough material that was really relevant genetics.  I would have loved to see them have their minds opened to the amazing pace and publications that have come out in this past year alone.  A lot of the material we covered in the course felt more like “historical genetics” as one friend put it.  That seems really accurate.  No one I work with calculates chi-square on paper.  Most scientists who aren’t ordering primers every day might have to look up the correct sense and antisense oligos to use.  We have incredible software resources that help us calculate statistics that are far better than what researchers without computers once had to rely on. 

I’m not saying a little old school math isn’t valuable, because in the end I think it is.  I think these basic approaches and lessons are wonderful in that they are simplistic, they are things we can test on, they are methods that are meant to build confidence and understanding and an approach to genetics.  I just feel frustrated when my smart and wonderful students point out to me that certain parts of this approach don’t make sense, and my only response is “I know, and I’m sorry.” 

In the words of a very accomplished genetics scientist, “Even I had to look up the definition of a “non-parental gamete”. I thought it must mean “the postman did it”. What a stupid term. As far as I am concerned, every gamete is from a parent.”

I don’t want to end this on a negative note because I loved my senior-level genetics class that I took at UC Berkeley in 2008, which I accidentally enrolled in as a sophomore.  I loved that class, that class gave me hope – I loved the professors that taught it, one of which went on to be a very important mentor to me.  It had almost the same curriculum as the class I’ve been TAing here.  And it helped remind me why I loved science, even if it wasn’t the most relevant material.  The professors sprinkled in enough modern science to reveal that there would be more behind the curtain. 

I was taking my second quarter of prerequisite organic chemistry at the time, and I honestly was ready to give up on my dream of a career in science.  I felt like a failure that year – probably for the first time in my life (or maybe ever).  Those pre-requisite classes, the pre-med students, the exams, the feeling when you got a grade back that was below the class median…the intense pressure and focus on the “curve” and GPA.  I was so unhappy and truly saddened that this was what a career in science was demanding from me.  Gone was the wonder, curiosity, and creativity I was allowed in my high school science courses.  In high school I felt so sure and motivated and thrilled to one day work on real projects and in a real lab.  But that basic genetics course pulled me out of some hole that I had dug myself in.  I reached out to the professor who taught the class, inquiring about an internship in his lab.  And since then I haven’t looked back. 

So, if my students ever read this, I want them to know.  I didn’t ace that genetics class.  But I love what I do.  And it’s not about the test or knowing exactly how to calculate a chi-square (except it will be this Thursday, and I want you all to calculate it perfectly!)  Science is so much more than that, and so much more exciting and thrilling in the real, relevant world we live in today.  I just hope the exams, the pre-reqs, and the curve don’t discourage any of our extremely bright and qualified geneticists of the future. 

Four quotes for 2014 / a year in review.

This past year has been a whirlwind for me.  I mean sure, we all have that complaint, "how is it already freakin December?" But this was next-level whirlwind.  I'm talking, time was moving at some kind of grad-student, cerebral day-to-day learning this, getting up to speed on that, has my head been in some kind of hole all week because suddenly it's-Friday-again whirlwind.  

For this reason, I thought I might reflect on 2014 in four simple quotes.  

1.    "Instead of saying “I don’t have time” try saying “it’s not a priority,” and see how that feels. Often, that’s a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don’t want to. But other things are harder. Try it: “I’m not going to edit your résumé, sweetie, because it’s not a priority.” “I don’t go to the doctor because my health is not a priority.” If these phrases don’t sit well, that’s the point. Changing our language reminds us that time is a choice. If we don’t like how we’re spending an hour, we can choose differently."  - LAURA VANDERKAM

My number one quote for 2014 – this article from the Wall Street Journal struck such a chord with me.  It was one of those pieces that sits so well – suddenly someone has given description to something you’ve felt for a long time.  Time is such an interesting concept in our society, our culture, and our lives.  Reading this reminded me, I have the ability and the choice to say something isn’t a priority.  I’ve been making an effort since reading this to be better in my communications with friends, coworkers and even myself as to how/when/ and why my time is spent. 

2.    "Even if the foremost authority in the world can’t explain some remarkable biological phenomenon, this doesn’t mean that it is inexplicable. Plenty of mysteries have lasted for centuries and finally yielded to explanation."  -  RICHARD DAWKINS

This quote really rings true in the context of the disease I spend most of my graduate studies trying to understand: Huntington’s disease.  We identified the single gene, the root cause of this devastating disease, over thirty years ago – and yet, there is still no cure or real treatment for it today.  We still don’t even have a clear sense of what the normal huntingtin protein is doing in the cell – what its real purpose is.  The good news is, I think we are inching closer.  Dawkins gives me hope.

3.    "Near as anyone can tell, evolution is not guided by a mind or a plan. It just is. Our perceptions of whether evolution is being generous or malevolent are based entirely on whether we think that we are the ones coming out on top."  -  BILL NYE

I love this quote from Bill Nye.  He’s taking the ego out of the scientific agenda.  We all need to hear this sometimes, right?  Biology – evolution – it has patterns, yes, but it just is.  What’s important is that we recognize science as a system for mapping out things that might in reality be happenstance. 

4.    “Beyoncé doesn’t just sit at the table. She builds a better one.”  - SHERYL SANDBERG

 I threw this one in here because, in all reality – this is the quote of 2014 for me. Beyoncé, diva / superstar that she is – amazes me with the drive / creative output and influence that she wields.  The ultimate Beyoncé high for me this year was when she sampled from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s incomparable TED talk on feminism in her song Flawless.  Music can be such a powerful vehicle in our culture.  I wish I had grown up listening to songs like this because it has such an important message, and a really relevant one for women in science, tech etc.  I’ve put my career first over and over again because that’s what I want for myself, and yet you hear those little whispers – societal standards.  It's like this dark undercurrent I can't quite put my finger on.  Why do I feel intimidated about wearing heels to work, or why do I sometimes contemplate downplaying my femininity?  This year I really started to acknowledge some of these little nuances and behavior changes I was making to somehow fit standards that in the end, are outdated and unnecessary.

The point is – I want to be building a better table, not just sitting at one! 

Looking forward to a fantastic 2015!

Cheers.