First post in a while

I’ve been in my new job for three months now. It is going pretty well, I think, making progress and settling in. I’m also enjoying the work and it is good to be at the bench again, making use of those now-not-quite-so-rusty synthetic skills. So all is good (I even get to play the occasional lunch time soccer game here), but it does mean I have a little less time for Other Things. A couple of things have suffered and this blog is one of them. (My wife will tell you the house tidiness is another).

I started the blog after I got laid off and now I am working again, it is natural that there should be less time to post. Combined with the issue of exactly what to talk about, the poor thing has languished since the euphoria of landing faded.

Well, I am going to try and update a little more often than once every 3 months. Hopefully with something to interest people. I did figure this blog to be ‘job-related’, so will keep the posts on the subject of chemistry, the pharmaceutical industry and the like. The job market should be a topic of interest for a while too, as we often talk about the things we don’t have too many of. I did wonder about turning the blog into a sort of diary of my work day, but I think that is a non-starter, as I will be forever debating about whether I should talk about something I am doing in lab out in a place where anybody might read it.

One of the other things that lagged with my re-remployment is my twitter account. I logged into it yesterday for the first time in … well, let’s say I was looking at it as often as I was blogging. I am going to start checking in there too, with a greater amount of my non-work side allowed out onto the social network. So maybe I will see you over there too.

My Job Search Odyssey

I have been meaning to give a short run-down of my experience in the job market this past few months.

The first couple of months after I got laid off were difficult to say the least. I was not really ready (read: not at all ready) for the new job market and suddenly, there I was, in the middle of the worst economic downturn in a good while, in the fray, trying to fight the good fight. There were no postings for anything in my area in a similar vein. Looking to advance my career wasn’t realistic; it was more about which direction would I end up going. As much as I love doing chemistry in the lab, I had to entertain the idea that I would be doing something else entirely.

Fortunately, even as I was keeping my options open, things seem to beginning to turn around. I got calls from recruiters, but more importantly, I got calls from employers, looking at me more closely. One of the positions was definitely an advance on my career too, so that was encouraging. The other I will talk more about in a moment.

There followed a lull after that flurry of excitement. I looked at some other positions, though each would require some transitioning to a new area for me. Realistically, with the current market, the employers are probably finding plenty of candidates with the profile they are looking for already complete. Transitioning into a new area right now will require some luck and some creative networking.

As it turned out, trying to advance was difficult too. I never got to interview for that position: I lost out to someone with more recent experience in the therapeutic area (I had some, but it was from my graduate school days, so not exactly state of the art). That was disappointing, but not that surprising really.

So then, there was a bit more excitement again. I had THREE separate calls from recruiters, all asking me about the same job. All seemed eager to have me on their team. That was encouraging. More importantly, I made it to a milestone for my job search: scheduling a phone interview with the hiring manager.

That phone call came along. I was, I admit, a little nervous about it. It had been a while since I was in the hot spot. But in a sense, I had been preparing for it for several months now, getting together my values and value, ready to present myself as the dedicated and knowledgeable chemist, eager to get back in the lab and get to work, all while learning something new. And as it happened, the phone call went very well and I was invited to come on-site to RTI to talk in more detail.

It had been drilled into me to be well-prepared for an interview when it came and I was not going to be caught out. I reviewed the difficult question lists, watched YouTube videos on interviewing, looked over my own career history so I would be familiar with the work and that I would have a ready answer for any question.

It turned out that I did not really need such thorough preparation. The interviews I had were all quite pleasant, as much about informing me about the position as it was about finding out about my hidden depths. It felt for the most part like a conversation between colleagues, no set agenda, no long and probing interrogation, just a comfortable chat about life in chemistry. In some ways the lack of structure caught me out a little and I thought later that I had not sold my own strengths as well as I could have done. But the feeling afterwards was mostly positive, no awkward moments or long silences. So I was optimistic, though I was not quite sure. They did not give me any real indication at the end of the day, just that they would let me know in a few days.

I made sure I thanked everyone afterwards. I thought it might be decided quickly so I sent them by email (even though everyone told me hand written notes are key). I thought of sending additional hand written ones, but waffled on it for a while (was it over-kill?) and then got busy with other things. By the end of the week, I hadn’t heard anything, so I got in contact with my HR contact. She told me she expected to hear by the end of the day or Monday. Then, literally 30 minutes later, she calls back and offers me the position! So that was settled – I had found my new job.

Looking back, the key things that got me this position were:

1. The support and advice of my networking group and outplacement consultants. They got me ready to meet the challenge when it came.

2. I found the job posted on CareerBuilder, but I am not at all confident I would have gotten the job if I had just applied and sat back and waited. I found the name and made myself known to the recruiter with a personal connection, letting her know that I had applied and was interested. That put me in her mind as she was assembling her list of candidates. Of course it helped that I met all the requirements of the position, but I am sure I was not the only one.

3. Inevitably, a network contact. You never can be sure who it is going to be. The fellow in this case had worked at RTI but I did not know it. You never know when someone will call up someone you know to ask about you. You want them to say nice things. So be nice to your colleagues and network contacts, offer to help them out, be ready to follow through with that.

I’m going to end this ramble now: lunch time is over, got to get back to work.

Learning from UCLA

This week’s Chemical & Engineering News has an amazing article on the recent tragic death of Sheharbano (Sheri) Sangji, a research assistant in the lab of Professor Patrick Harran at UCLA. If you have not read it, I highly recommend that you do.

This incident in particular has brought academic labs under the spotlight with regard to their attitude to safe practices in the lab. Many of my colleagues have war stories from their times in academia, talking about procedures that would not be tolerated in an industrial setting. Occasionally people talk about how it was because we were young and inexperienced and sometimes it is about how much money that there is to spend on safety, but generally I think most feel it is about getting results from their graduate students in a short time frame. It is in the interest of both student and professor that the work being done produces papers. The result: long hours and lax safety practices.

In some ways, though, it is a surprise that Sheri’s accident involved t-butyl lithium (tBuLi), which is a highly pyrophoric material (meaning it spontaneously catches fire in the air). When handling such a known danger as this, most people would take extra precaution, treating it with the proverbial kid gloves. This was (as far as we can tell from the investigation done by C&E News) only the second time she had used this material – certainly not a case of overly familiarity.

My personal theory is that Sheri treated the larger scale reaction as she had her previous experiment. She figured that she could just use a syringe to deliver the t-BuLi to the reaction, as she had done before. OK, it would take several aliquots, but that would not be a problem. It would save her having to use a cannula and pressure to push the reagent into another flask. I expect the first aliquot went relatively smoothly, but when she went to do that again, the syringe plunger became more difficult to pull out, then it gave suddenly and pulled all the way out.

This is often an issue when scaling up a reaction. What works on with only a small amount suddenly does not work with a much larger amount. The slightly warm reaction on 10 mL scale becomes a spontaneous reflux on 100 mL scale. The reaction suddenly doesn’t stir so well. Or, as in this case, the volume of reagents overwhelms the way that you have to deliver it.

I think I am personally so interested in this story because it is, to coin a phrase, happening where I live, that is in the laboratory, doing reactions and using potentially dangerous reagents. I can almost imagine the thought processes of the young chemist, as she tries to deal with the unfolding situation. You do not make good decisions when you are trying to improvize, you jury-rig and make do. Only by looking at the procedure before entering the lab and thinking “what is the best way to do this?” and “what can go wrong?” and “what will I do if it does?” can chemistry be safely be done, without needless loss of young lives.

Job Search Update – I Found One!

It has been a while since I gave any update on how my own job search has been going. So here is the short version:

I found a job and start next week.

The slightly longer version:

I interviewed for a position at RTI International last week. I thought the interview went well, but you are never quite sure and who knows who else is being interviewed. But anyway, after a few anxious days of almost patient waiting, I talked to my recruiter contact. She told me that a decision was pending. She called back not 30 minutes later and offered me the position. I was delighted to accept.

The position is a one year contract initially. The funding comes from a grant and this one is expected to extend that period to two years. Beyond that, further grant funding will be required, either from applications submitted by my boss or myself. In any case, I was given the opportunity to make this a long term relationship, which I hope will work out very well for all concerned.

I’m going to be enjoying my week off (a true week off!), though I plan to blog about my transition before I start work next week. And I hope to continue the blog beyond that, though I expect my new role will shape how it evolves.

Hopes and Setbacks in Alzheimers

The degeneration of patients with Alzheimer’s Disease is a tragic progression, robbing those that love them of the very essence of the personality they knew. And to this day there is no effective treatment for the disease, with a handful of drugs in use to slow down the progression. But there is no halting it – not yet.

One of the major difficulties is one of early diagnosis: by the time people realize there is a problem, the disease is already quite advanced. It is all too easy to overlook little lapses of memory and much more desirable to believe they are nothing important. Most of the time, they really are nothing – until they are not.

Some research from Duke University has given some optimism that there may be a more reliable way to predict whether someone is likely to suffer from the disease. Dr. Allen Roses had previously discovered that patients with a gene called ApoE4 that have an unusually large chance of developing Alzheimer’s, although no one had yet been able to find an effective treatment that capitalizes on this finding. Furthermore, it did not explain why patients with the more common ApoE3 gene also developed the disease. His more recent finding looks at a gene associated with the ApoE gene called TOMM40 and that there were characteristics of that gene that tallied with the progression of Alzheimer’s. The group at Duke is cautioning that this is a preliminary finding that needs to be duplicated in other laboratories. But if it is true then it will be an exciting and fruitful area of research.

This good news was welcome because another highly anticipated study gave only bad news. Glaxo’s diabetes drug Avandia failed to show any effectiveness in a clinical study. The loss of a potential $300 million for Glaxo was in itself bad news for them, but it is a setback for the theory that Alzheimer’s is a form of diabetes in the brain. This theory has had several successful studies outside of the clinic, but the Avandia study was the first to put it to the test with patients, where it was hoped that it would be able to regulate blood sugar levels in the brain, just as it does in the blood of diabetic patients. However, though the study was safe, it did not show the desired effect, adding only a few points to the cognitive scores and most effective in patients that did not carry the ApoE4 gene that is so strongly linked to the disease.

Clearly, it is not the end of this approach. There are many subtle reasons that Avandia might not have succeeded, from insufficient drug crossing the blood-brain barrier to a difference in the way that sugar is regulated in the brain. (Avandia works differently to many diabetes treatments by helping the insulin in the body to work more efficiently). It is unfortunate that it did not show at least some effect to give the other related compounds hope though, at a time that companies will be weighing the risk and benefit of funding expensive clinical studies.

At least some compounds will continue to be studied. One example comes from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, who have studied the cognitive effect of a diabetic treatment called NIC5-15. The company manufacturing the compound, Humanetics, sponsored the study and there is an interview with their CEO here.

It is clear there is still a difficult road ahead for companies hoping to treat this terrible affliction, but the growing need for an effective treatment is a excellent stimulant to innovation and that the research is now getting at the heart of the problem has to be seen as an encouraging sign.

Update: In the Pipeline blogged on this subject, looking at the failure to show efficacy by a number of compounds.

New Cancer Treatments

It has been a little while since I did anything on this blog but add links into my job search pages, but a couple of articles caught my eye this week. One makes use of insulin growth factor (IGF) with a chemotherapy agent attached to it, as a Trojan Horse to target the cancer cells. The other uses minicells generated from mutant bacteria, which then deliver a payload of a chemotherapy agent to the site in question via an antibody.

The insulin therapy, reported in the Star-Tribune, talks about a company called IGF Oncology, which has a great story and a promising therapy. It is not quite clear from the article exactly how it works, but it appears to be targeting the IGF receptor (I found this blog on that subject), which can help a cancer cell survive attack from chemotherapy. While the initial results from their study are encouraging, the potential for side effects is still there, as normal cells also have the IGF receptor. Raising the money needed for a further (much more expensive) study will be challenging.

The minicells, reported in the New York Times, are another approach which seems to be more advanced in its path toward validation. The bacterial minicells are loaded with something that will attack the cancer cells or interfere with multidrug resistance. They are also coated with antibodies, allowing them to reach the cancer cells selectively. When presented with a bacterial infection, the cancer cells respond by attacking and destroying the minicell, which releases its payload at the site of the cancer.

This is a very neat idea and results in animals (mice, dogs and monkeys) have been spectacular – more than 20 dogs with advanced brain cancer were treated and all of them responded with some in remission. Given how difficult it is to treat brain cancer, this is impressive.

A lot of cancer therapies have been harsh. The patient is dying, so the fact that the drug is hurting the patient slightly less than the cancer is seen as an improvement. Though there is a long way to go yet, with these or other treatments, a goal of more selective and less destructive therapies is definitely a worthwhile target.

Negotiation

Once you have a job offer in hand, what do you do next?

How to Evaluate a Job Offer weighing the offer plus:
Salary Negotiation looking at salary (talks about media salary, but for the most part the advice is valuable).

Social Media In the Job Search

One of the biggest changes in the way jobs are found these days is in the area of social media. The rise of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have changed how we communicate with each other.

Job Seekers Find New Rules Of Recruitment NPR article on rise of new media

The best and the worst in social media for job seekers be aware of what you put up on the web – it can both help and hinder your job chances.

10 Part Series: Can LinkedIn Work For You? central piece of a 10 part series of posts on making use of LinkedIn

The Trouble With LinkedIn: Bigger is not better giant LinkedIn networks aren’t necessarily better – quality over quantity.

Make Social Networks Work for You reviews the virtues of different social networks and also has some general advice for making use of them.

Simple Ways to Improve Your LinkedIn Profile 3 excellent tips to make your LinkedIn profile better and to help you stand out.

Social networking key to a successful job search social network sites are almost mandatory for a successful job search nowadays.

How David Murray found a new job via Twitter putting Twitter to use as a job seeking aid (though it needs the people you want to talk to to be on Twitter)

Networking

A lot of things have changed in the world, but one that hasn’t is that the people you know can help you find that next opportunity. In fact, the vast majority of positions are filled via networking.

Job Search and Career Networking Tips lots of good general advice. Networking is about helping each other.

What Does ‘Networking’ Really Mean? good article explaining how to network and what it means to network.

The Trouble With LinkedIn: Bigger is not better talks about LinkedIn specifically, but the bottom line is that it is quality not quantity in your network.

Resume Dos and Don’ts

Plenty of articles about resumes.

15 Deadly But Often-Made Resume Blunders to Avoid nice list of things to avoid. Nothing extraordinary but all might happen if we are not diligent.

Little Things That Make a Big Job Search Difference

Resume Writing Guide the basics – leads to a lot of other advice from Alison Doyle.

How to write a resume – Work History (part 2) writing achievement statements on your resume

Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Your Resume practical and realistic advice about the presenting of a resume.

Funny resume bloopers written for smiles really, but it does show that checking your work for errors is more than a spell check.