My Big Picture
Being a scientist – the long working hours, the loneliness in the lab, the frustration of stuff not working, and the all too often doubts as to whether the results I am painfully churning out even makes a difference to anyone. It is all too easy to lose yourself in your work (and this applies to all careers) and forget the bigger picture of what you are doing in the first place. Those who are good would remove themselves from the nitty-gritty details of everyday work regularly and look at the big picture. Why am I doing this in the first place? This is a simple task, but all too often overlooked.
So what is my “big picture”? I work on the heart, the big muscle pump that keeps chugging away whatever you are doing. I am trying to find out what iron does to it. Trivial it may seem but iron overload is a big problem in medicine. There’s acute iron poisoning, and there’s more genetic based causes, anaemic diseases and haemochromatosis. All these conditions lead to an increased level of iron in the body and at worst, it is fatal, most likely of cardiac complications. Treatments are available to control the symptoms but very little is known about how iron messes with the heart. This is where my work comes in – to decipher the mechanisms of iron-induced cardiomyopathies (cardio = heart; myo = muscle; pathies = diseases).
So is this work going to make a difference to anyone? I’d like to think so. It’s not going to lead to a miracle cure, or a Nobel Prize for my supervisor or myself, but it may be an inspiration for other scientists to open up new avenues of research into the problem which may (I said “may”) lead to a miracle cure. At the very least, this work is going to get me a PhD degree which will lead to a career, and ultimately pay the bills, and pay for a half decent lifestyle. Afterall, the realism of things is that there is life outside of work.
This is what I do. Something I am quite passionate about, because it’s my PhD thesis, so it’s my life and soul (or at least it is supposed to be).
