The ivory tower

Most of my working life I have had the same job title: researcher. Research to most people conjures up images of people in scruffy white labcoats or stuffy book-filled attics. And these cliche images exist for a reason. For five years I worked in a lab, fiddling with pipets and coloured solutions, although in all fairness I only ever wore a labcoat to keep me from shivering in the 'cold room'. My work was far divorced from a tangible reality. The lab was a playground where we did not often consider the outside world.

My job title may still be the same but my new job has hurled me out of the confines of the ivory tower and smack-bang into the real world. What a brave new world it is! It is a world of meetings, focus groups and consultation events. I have spent the last two days in hospitals talking to people on the receiving end of all that we brew up in our scientific pressure cooker: the patients. Sat on hospital beds talking to patients with a dozen tubes running in and out of their bodies. Listened to tales of woe from people who suffered medical errors or hospital bugs.

It is inspiring and illuminating to deal with the people on the ground. In the ivory tower you can loose sight of the purpose of what you are doing. Words become increasingly complex and bogged down in jargon. When you go back to the patient you find you no longer speak the same language. We even need to have our documents and questions 'Plain English-ed' before we can take them out. In chemistry the jargon is so outlandish that you don't expect people outside of the field to understand phrases like isotope labeled medium or beta-mercaptoethanol. In management and social studies it is more subtle. That makes the risks only bigger though. You think you talk like a normal person and instead you find you may as well have been talking Greek, which in some cases might even have been more helpful.

Welcome to the real world!