Lab research with a closed lab: "We're doing our best to still use this time productively"
Friedrich Förster is Professor of Cryo-electron microscopy. Now that the labs are closed because of the Coronavirus measures, how does his research group continue its work?
"We shut the lab down this week, except for some essential maintenance on some instruments. Personally, I've been spending most of my time on video calls with my PhD candidates, postdocs and lab staff, to coordinate things and to ensure that we can do something productive in this time. That's my biggest challenge. Everyone suddenly needs to change their plans, so we're all a bit lost, and I'm doing my best to get everyone up on their feet.
"We're relatively lucky that we can do some electron microscopy work remotely. The machine can automatically change samples, so we left it fully loaded, so it can continue for a bit. Still, at some point that will be done as well, and then we'll be focusing more on data analysis and making new plans. I'm trying to see the positive aspects of that. Usually you realise where things went wrong relatively late in the process, so this is a good opportunity to really think about what we're working on. And for example, PhD candidates always have a tendency to accumulate more and more data, leaving them with too little time to thoroughly write things up.
Everyone suddenly needs to change their plans, so we're all a bit lost.
"I think the situation hits hardest for our Master's students who are working on their graduation research. They have limited time, and most of them don't have a lot of useful lab results to analyse yet. And of course we have some foreign students who wanted to go back to their home country. We're still doing the best we can, and I spend a lot of time taking care of our students. For example by shuffling around the order of things: part of their Master's programme is a writing assignment, so they will start on that now.
"We have a relatively good infrastructure for online collaboration, like a computer cluster that we can use remotely, but still we need to make sure that everybody can work at home and that we keep in touch. Just like our teachers who are doing video lectures, we also have to get used to a different way of working on research, and that takes time and energy. I hope it will normalise a bit. Obviously we're all worried about the future, but the bottom line is: science is of course very important, but in the end we have to consider ourselves comparatively lucky that we can deal with a temporary break much better than many other fields of society.”