The fear of knowing and the fear of not knowing

We went Ely today and saw a rental property that didn't suck too much so I guess I've seen where I'll be spending my next few months,  employed or otherwise.

Meanwhile,  the GI problems are back with a vengeance and I have some invasive tests to look forward to on Monday.   It might be IBS,  but it might be cancer.   I never thought I'd be this frightened but all I can think about right now is that I might die before I even get a new job.

We found we could but we never asked if we should...

In April 1912, a cable laying ship out of Halifax,  Nova Scotia called the Mackay Bennett was hired by the White Star Line to recover the floating corpses of those who had died during the sinking of RMS Titanic.   They took enough provisions to process about 70 bodies but when they reached the site of the tragedy they found hundreds.

They were forced then to choose whose body would be recovered  and whose would not,  ultimately deciding to return the bodies of third class passengers to the sea.   There was one exception,  the body of an unidentified third class little boy was brought back.   When nobody claimed the body from the makeshift morgue in Halifax,  the hard bitten crew of the ship paid for a decent burial and the "unknown child"  lay in Halifax cemetery for almost a century.

Then,  a fame-hungry scientist and amateur "Titanic expert" from Lakeheath,  Ontario named Ryan Parr persuaded the authorities to allow exhumation of the child's body for DNA testing.   The results were not entirely conclusive but the child was tentatively  identified.  The thing is,  nobody really benefitted from this desecration,  with the possible exception of Professor Parr. 

Instead,  the simple beauty of the generous act by the crew of the Mackay Bennett was nullified by one man's thirst for fame and a scientific community who failed to ask itself whether it really should do this.  

I'm a scientist working in an archaeology  group and I was ashamed when I learned of the exhumation.   It sullied all scientists with its grubby tabloid intrusion.  The ancient DNA studying community is chock full of these grave-robbers,  justifying their dubious Burke and Hare skullduggery in the name of science and human advancement.  Shame on you Ryan Parr.  Shame on all of you.

Just when you thought it was safe...

Well,  having returned from Cambridgeshire,  having agreed that living in some parts of Ely would work and even having located some friends for the kids,  the peckerheads at Pfizer announce a buy out bid for AZ.  Awesome,  it will have upset quite a few applecarts I reckon.

So the hard deadline for a decision in June has gone out of the window and all bets are off.   Thanks for that.

Problem A: M.  Soriot  et al. have fattened AZ up to the point where it's a huge takeover target,  particularly for sharks like Pfizer who have 70bn. in the UK and need to spend it here to avoid a giant tax bill.   It's win win for them since AZ have almost no significant liabilities and heavily consolidated stock so only a few voting dominoes need to defect to make this happen.

Problem B:   I've been applying for jobs like crazy in Cambridge whereas now it looks like I might have to find funding to remain at Manchester in the next ten months or so which is a hell of a hill to climb.   I have some sketchy research ideas but these days you need to get preliminary data and the researcher with spare capacity to allow this is in no apparent rush to get started and my potential collaborator has gone missing.  The alternative is to go through redeployment again.  Big fun.

Option c involves an oven bag and a nitrogen cylinder,  and it's getting harder to keep THAT door closed.

Pain, sleep and bad bad dreams

Drug dependence is very odd.  It creeps up on you and before you know it you are addicted to multiple prescription medications without even realising that it's happening.

In my case I'm struggling with Valium, Venlafaxine and Tramadol, mainly, although I have to admit that Kalms have become a problem for me too.  If you look up Kalms, they contain Valerian root extract which is supposed to be non-addicting but if that were true, I wouldn't need a handful each night just to conk out, would I?  Valerian extract is also associated with cardiac arrythmias, which might explain the palpitations, dizziness, racing heart beat and fainting.

Added to the nightly Quetiapine dosing, they are turning me into a zombie.  I also have terrible, frightening dreams and I feel sick and dizzy and sedated almost all the time.

I can't rule out the possibility that taking dozens of Kalms tablets is related to self harm, but I think it would definitely be described as para-suicidal behaviour.

It's been very stressful lately.  Paying out for would dressings has effectively landed me in the poor-house, not that it took much of a shove when you compare my take-home salary with my liabilities.   I've started really hurting myself again.  There's a couple of pretty bad wounds that I "service" every day, by which I mean I deepen them or make them more severe.  This is extremely painful but gives me some relief from my inner fears and pains but in the long run are like white flags of surrender.

As the "fact-finding trip" to Cambridge draws closer and closer I find myself getting more and more divergent in my behaviour.  I care less and less about things going on around me, I just find myself wishing I was alone so I could fuck myself up some more.

I'm dreading the trip the most because it might be the point at which the kids get invested in the whole relocation thing and that would leave me alone in opposition and fear.

Is it wrong of me to hope that
a. I die before the move (working on it)
and/or
b. the children hate it there so much that my wife actually listens to us and kicks AZ to the kerb?

If we do have to move this summer it's going to be a hell of a mountain to climb to get the house and garden sorted.  the loft alone could take days and many trips to the tip, and as for the garden, the badgers seem to have gone but it still looks like Vimy Ridge with shrubs out there.  Better get the big spade out then.  The leaking, rotten garden shed should be a particular laugh as its chock full of stuff that used to be in the garage (now the kids play room).  several room need re-decorationg and i have to do my least favourite ever job, re-grouting the bathroom.  Ugh.

Fear, Loathing and Intellectual Property Hijacking in Academia

As a researcher in academia, likely as not you work for a Principal Investigator (PI), who also mages several other researchers, and your contract will typically be fixed at 1-3 years, after which you need to generate more grant income from an awarding body or charity, or you need to leave and find another job.

With very few exceptions, taking the latter road is taken to mean that your PI is allowed to airbrush your efforts out of the history of the group's work.  This manifest itself most commonly in scientific papers published after you have left the group which revolve, partly or wholly, around research work you did, but which do not credit you as a co-author.

"So what?" I hear you cry.

Publication of research articles, particularly in leading Journals, is the number one metric by which the work performance is assessed in academia, the other main ones being grant income generated and the "h index", a statistic which ranks you according to how many papers you publish, what the "impact factor" of the journals are in which you publish and the number of other papers which have cited your work.

To see your work published by former PI's and colleagues without attribution or acknowledgement of your contribution amounts to theft of Intellectual Property (IP), but it has been widely accepted as the norm, but one which presents the wronged party with a dilemma.  If one were to challenge the papers either at the institution level or by contacting the journal's editor in chief to point out that one had not been given due credit for the work described in a paper, the very best outcome is that the paper gets withdrawn, a shameful exercise in which nobody wins, a classic example of a lose-lose situation.  On the other hand, the longer the unethical practise of mis-attribution goes unreported, the more widespread and acceptable it seems to become.  In the era of "open science", the public are assured that the research process is transparent and above reproach, whereas in actual fact the mechanisms of obfuscation have merely become more sophisticated.

Another common conceit in academia, this time in palaeo-biology, is the way in which "cartels" of scientific researchers might all subconsciously collude to ignore a known weakness in a widely used scientific technique because it would undermine the credibility of everyone's published work.

A good example of this is the way archaeological samples of mitochondrial DNA are grouped into categories called haplogroups (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup) based on a limited number of DNA mutations, in which the mutations present or absent define the group, all based on a DNA sequence called the Cambridge Reference Sequence (CRS).

This type of classification ignores the bulk of the DNA sequence data and can thus be very misleading, but it is very widely used in palaeo-biology to track the migration of humans out of their ice-age refugia to recolonise the European continent, and also to trace the highly controversial diffusion of Neolithic farming cultures from the fertile crescent.  Everyone in the field knows that using haplogroups loses or ignores so much information that it isn't nearly as powerful as comparing the entire DNA sequences from different individuals, but ancient DNA is usually quite heavily degraded and the number of specimens is very low (ranging typically from one to about fifty).  The use of haplogroups purports to obviate these limitations, but it is generally ignored that this comes at a cost in fidelity and results that often mislead or muddy the picture at least as much as they illuminate.

Science is rotten to the core, driven as much by politics (PI's going after professorships), money and the way it always flows to "fashionable" or "sexy" big-science, blue sky topics, as it is by the high-minded ideals the scientists would like the public to think they have.

Cambridge ... Back on again and right soon

Well, after a winter of doubt and hope, AstraZeneca appear to have succeeded in financially incentivising my spouse into a pro-Cambridge position once again, and next week we're dragging the kids to Cambridgeshire to scout it out, particularly around Ely which seems on paper to be an OK location although it's just a small town with lots of tourists visiting the cathedral, lots of floodplain houses and absolutely nothing else for miles in any direction.

Having grown accustomed to having varying sizes of big town on my doorstep in addition to Marple (which Ely approximates) and pretty good public transport to those places, it's going to be a dull and isolated life and I've got a horrible feeling that we're going to be seeing WAY too much of my wife's workmates as they'll be the only people we know for a hundred miles.

Another down side is that rather than the regular trips to see her family that, while painful and awkward, last a few hours at worst, they'll be regularly descending on us for entire weekends instead.  This is going to be one of the hardest things for me to accept, given the precipitate way we were forced to flee my Sister-in-Law's house when my son was a baby after being given temporary shelter there while some cowboy builders fucked up out house.  We slightly outstayed our welcome and were forced to return to an unheated shell in the dead of winter with a 9-month old baby after an acrimonious incident.

Another downside is that Cambridgeshire is geographically closer to my Parents, although it probably takes about as long to get from Ely to there as the roads are unbelievably shit caravan and tractor-ridden country roads.

We're also investigating Royston, although the frankly staggering house prices in Ely will seem like small change if we have to buy something very small here.  The only thing it has in its favour is that it is feasible to commute to and from London from here whereas Ely is much harder.  I might need to be open to jobs in the capital in order to get a job at all. Travelling on the tube again...woohoo.  I'd rather die.  Seriously, smother me in my sleep.

Despite my brief interlude of peace when I started on Quetiapine tablets, my self harm is now getting worse again as this trip gets closer, and I'm getting more and more disconnected and suicidal again as I can't envision myself moving to this Godforsaken corner of nowhere.  Apart from anything else I've just about bankrupted myself paying for dressings for the wounds, so maybe something more permanent is now called for.  Like a spot of track-surfing.

I won't pretend I ever settled down in the North West and the job I'm in is boring me to death and stressing me out in equal measure because I just don't know what I'm doing.  But at least I'm on a waiting list for therapy here, which I will have to go back to square one with in Cambs.  We'll also be taking the kids away from their friends and their lives.  My daughter is very happy at School and at her Dance School, with a large circle of friends.  My son is just starting to break through to where he needs to be academically and also has a decent group of friends, some of whom aren't utter little pricks, and we centre our annual timetable around the local Cricket Club, where he goes to winter nets, spring training and summer games, plus we've Lancashire Cricket Club a short(ish) train and tram ride away and many summer tournaments which are glorious.  It makes me choke down a lump in my throat when I think of the future he has here, a place that makes him happy, and that this move will steal from him.

I feel like we're betraying our kids and our principles because a certain AZ executive of Greek extraction doesn't know when to shut the fuck up and stop kissing board-of-directors arse.  Yes AZ will theoretically be better placed for research interfacing with clinical collaborators at Addenbrookes but I used to work at Northwick Park for the MRC and I know exactly how much interfacing actually goes on: fuck all, it was a expensive failure that got moved to Hammersmith only to fail again.  Plus they could have just relocated into Manchester and been right next to the Christie Hospital and the new CRUK National Cancer Research Centre for less money and without ruining the lives of the many thousands of people who are being swept along in this torrent of shit because their spouses work for the mighty Arse-traZeneca.