‘Whether you go the hard or easy way, you can end up in the same place’

Adrian Liston is professor of pathology and head of the division of immunology at the University of Cambridge. He is also part of a team at the university that has produced a series of ‘becoming a scientist’ outreach resources. 

His new book, The Professor, The Pipette, and the Path Not Taken: Choose your Science Career, co-written with his colleague Professor James Dooley, takes the form of a choose-your-own-adventure book, where readers make choices that change the path they take through the book. 

Readers may find themselves working in cutting-edge research, developing spin-out companies, becoming a professor or leaving science altogether. The hundreds of paths through the book lead to a range of alternative endings. (Not all of them happy: one sees you dying in a DIY biohacking experiment, while another reads simply: “You become an accountant. The end.”)

Liston spoke to The Biologist about why he chose to write such a book. 

In my pastoral role at St Catherine’s College in Cambridge I have hundreds of conversations with PhD students and postdocs about their anxieties, hopes and fears. What I really notice is that the level of anxiety is disproportionate to the actual outcomes I see. I see all of these anxious students and then I see how successful they become later on – often incredibly successful in different ways from what they and I expected.

My mission is to highlight that going into science, especially biomedical science, is going to be a good career option. There’s going to be twists and turns. Jobs will change. Science is always changing. But it’s a good career move for people who want to have mobility. 

My career has followed a very conventional pathway, but my co-author, James, took a very different track. He dropped out of school as a foster kid, ran away from home and lived on the streets for a while. His first degree was a PhD from my lab. He started in science by washing glassware for a lab and asking if there was anything extra he could do. Yet now we’re both professors in Cambridge running the lab together. It’s a very real example of how the fast track and the slow track, with all its detours, can take you to the same place. 

My co-author James dropped out of school, ran away from home and lived on the streets for a while. Yet now we’re both professors in Cambridge running the lab together

There are nearly 300 pathways you can take through the book. The idea is that it should be engaging enough that people are curious about reading a second or third pathway. And whether you go the hard or easy way, you can end up in the same place. 

A lot of students who are starting PhDs are in academia partly because they don’t know what other jobs are available. Many realise during their PhD that it’s different from how they thought it would be, but they tend to have a very narrow idea of what the alternatives are – in biomedicine people think it’s either academia or big pharma. However, there are plenty of other jobs around, such as patient advocacy, science journalism, public sector policy, biotech and regulation… success looks different to different people.

Lying about results is pretty much the only pathway in the book that’s a real career killer. People don’t like failing, especially high-achieving students who think they should be able to get everything right. Being wrong is a part of science and that’s a really hard concept for students to get. Often there’s a point in your career when there is an option to cheat, and the book is meant to be funny enough that you’re curious to read what would happen if you’d gone in that direction.

One of the great powers of science is that we don’t judge people on their failures because failure is built into science. Most experiments you do as a scientist will fail. What we judge people on are those rare successes. You can have a roundabout career and still end up in a positive place.

My story’s not finished yet. I haven’t found moving to Cambridge easy, so I’m deciding whether to stay or go back to Belgium or Australia. I still have my last chapter to decide. James is starting a spin-off company and asking himself whether he should stick with the idea. It’s fun to imagine where things could go.

Adrian Liston is professor of pathology and head of the division of immunology at the University of Cambridge. His book, The Professor, the Pipette, and the Path Not Taken: Choose Your Science Career, written with James Dooley, is available in bookshops and on Kindle devices.

This article was first published in the print issue of The Biologist, the RSB's award-winning membership magazine. Subscribe by becoming a member today.