Life in a Nobel Lab

By Chris Woolston

If you think you felt nervous at your last talk, imagine the sparrows that must have been fluttering in Atanas Kaykov's stomach when he gave a presentation in front of Paul Nurse. Yes, that Paul Nurse: president of Rockefeller University, knight, and winner of a share of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Nurse evidently liked what he heard, because he immediately offered Kaykov a postdoctoral position. Those fluttering sparrows are gone, but Kaykov still feels the pressure. When your adviser owns a medal with Alfred Nobel's likeness on it, your work had better be good.

Many postdocs end up working in obscure labs under the supervision of Dr. Going Nowhere. They may feel like they missed out on the fast track to success, but would they really have been better off in a high-powered lab?

No matter who your adviser is, Kaykov says, "there's always a risk" when you take a postdoctoral position. A young Ph.D. without drive could get bogged down in anyone's lab, and a postdoc with big ideas could use just about any lab as a stepping stone.

Working in the lab of a famous scholar has some obvious perks. You'll never lack for resources, and, if all goes well, you can get a killer letter of recommendation. But there can be plenty of downsides. If you don't get along with your adviser you might wind up with a killer letter of recommendation of a different sort.

In addition, big-time labs can attract big-time competition, and it's not always easy to stand out when you're surrounded by a crowd of other highly ambitious postdocs and graduate students. There's also some possibility that a Nobel-worthy mentor will be aloof, arrogant, and generally unavailable. Dr. Going Nowhere may not be attending any awards ceremonies in Stockholm, but at least he has regular office hours.

For Kaykov and two other researchers -- Harvey Reall and Peter Engels -- the ups and downs of life in a Nobel lab have been mostly up. Maybe they've been lucky in the adviser lottery. Or maybe they had enough talent to shine in any light. Either way, their postdoc gambles seem to be paying off.

Call Him "Sir"

Many visitors to Paul Nurse's lab end up victims of a simple but effective joke. "We tell them to be sure to call him 'Sir,'" Kaykov says. (As a knight, that's Nurse's official title.)

In reality, that knight goes by his first name. "He's friendly and not at all arrogant," Kaykov says. "I could say things to him that I'd never say to anyone else." And even though Nurse has a university to run, he still manages to see each of his postdocs at least twice a week. "He doesn't have hours to spend, so you have to get to the point," Kaykov says.

Nurse isn't the only Nobel winner who's generous with his time. Eric A. Cornell, winner of a share of the physics prize in 2001, "was a constant source of insights and good ideas," says Peter Engels, a former postdoc of Cornell's at JILA, an institute jointly run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder. "He demonstrated a personal interest in getting the most out of every experiment," says Engels, now an assistant professor of physics at Washington State University.

Everyone in the lab had big ambitions, but the working atmosphere was far from cutthroat, Engels says. Life in Cornell's lab meant long hours that often stretched into late nights and weekends -- after all, those Bose-Einstein condensates weren't going to probe insulating surfaces on their own. But as Engels see it, he could have ended up working just as hard at a lab that wasn't at the leading edge of science.

"You may think that working in a Nobel Prize-winning lab puts a heavy burden on you in the form of high expectations," he says. "But in reality, all ambitious scientists dream of pushing their research forward as far as possible, so high expectations are not an extra load."

From Stephen Hawking to David Gross

Harvey Reall knows a few things about facing up to high expectations. As a master's student at the University of Cambridge, in England, he was one of the few people handpicked to work with Stephen Hawking. The two of them would talk about general relativity and string theory for hours every day. (At first, the conversations moved very slowly as Reall would wait for Hawking to "type" sentences into his voice synthesizer. Once they got used to each to other, the process sped up.)

Working with the well-known mathematician and cosmologist was a big thrill, but it didn't guarantee Reall a top position in the postdoctoral realm, especially the American part of the world. "Stephen is very influential in the U.K., but there's 10 people of equal stature in the U.S.," Reall says. After getting his Ph.D., Reall ended up working as a postdoc for three years at Queen Mary, University of London.

Reall eventually did find a postdoc position in the United States -- at the University of California at Santa Barbara's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, run by David J. Gross, a co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004.

Reall never had the illusion that he would enjoy as much one-on-one time with Gross as he had with Hawking. For one thing, studying black holes in five dimensions is a largely solitary pursuit. But even if he had expected to work closely with Gross or any of the other faculty members, the numbers weren't in his favor. "There are three times as many postdocs as permanent faculty members," he says.

When he finished his postdoc, Reall didn't even ask Gross for a letter of recommendation. "He didn't know my work," says Reall, who recently joined a research group in England.

Kaykov, Engels, and Reall all agree that simply working in a Nobel-level lab isn't enough to jump-start anyone's career. As Kaykov puts it, "That's important for about one minute" when meeting with prospective employers. "After that, it's just you."