A Letter to My Former Basic Research Self

[Editor’s preamble: In this week’s article, Trish Roche — former Research Assistant turned Knowledge Broker with the George & Fay Yee Centre for Healthcare Innovation’s Knowledge Translation platform — offers a glimpse into the path less travelled that led her to KT and CHI].

The first post I penned for this blog was about the gaps in health research, or as CIHR prefers, “death valleys.” It was a passionate [and I dare say therapeutic] take on the state of basic research funding. But I’ll be the first to admit its bias and that it belonged more in an op/ed column than it did among the archives of KnowledgeNudge. So we pulled it before it was ever published.

But I still feel there’s a story there that I need to tell, so I’m going to approach the issue of death valleys from a different angle — by writing a letter to my former self. Back to when I was a Masters student in a molecular pathophysiology lab, where my days involved cutting and pasting pieces of DNA in bacterial cells, and treating Petri dishes of heart cells with different drugs. If you’re an outsider to that world, I hope my letter offers you some insight. If instead you’re knee-deep in it, I hope to provide a little inspiration to help push you outside your comfort zone. But first, some background.

When I started my Masters I was very eager and hopeful that my work would make a difference — that I would discover a new way to treat cardiac fibrosis by manipulating the heart cells I was isolating — that I could maybe even invent a new drug.

But progress was slow. So slow, in fact, that most of the time it felt like I was going backwards. I began to worry that the work I was doing not only wasn’t going to lead to a novel drug discovery, but in fact it wasn’t going to lead to anything useful at all.

I started to become interested in the gaps (those death valleys, though at the time I didn’t know they were called that) between basic and clinical research, as well as between clinical research and healthcare practice/policy. The more I read about knowledge transfer (bridging the first gap) and knowledge translation (bridging the second gap), the more I felt like a fish out of water — trying to do basic research, when really what I wanted to be doing was making research more useful.

There’s a saying floating around social media that we have tons of information but are lacking in wisdom. Finding ways to share information between scientists, clinicians, decision makers, and the public became my new career goal. And a posting for a research assistant position with the Knowledge Translation platform at CHI offered me the, er, platform I needed. Serendipitously (or perhaps subconsciously) I had carved my own path to a place that would allow me to use my strengths to make a difference in research.

But now that I’m here, ironically, I find myself resisting the very activity for which I’m advocating — stepping outside my comfort zone.

The idea of broadcasting yourself beyond your familiar network of researchers and clinicians. Embracing one of a broad array of KT tools to amplify your message so you can reach and impact more audiences. In essence, more cowbell!

*Big breath*

Dear Lab Rat Trish,

Your work isn’t futile — keep putting in that effort. It might take 17 years, but someday the things you’ve discovered (yes, even those changes in protein levels in a specific cell-type in response to a very specific drug at that specific temperature) could very well be the basis for a major discovery that changes the way patients are treated.

But don’t just stay in the lab and hope. Take the knowledge you’ve amassed from the lab, your understanding of how basic research works, and challenge yourself to take the next step. Learn more about knowledge transfer and translation. Embark on your quest to help basic researchers share their insights with the public and policy makers.

Do what you can (even in a small way) to promote knowledge transfer and translation. Bring it to the forefront of your fellow basic researchers’ minds. Make it less scary and more accessible for them. Show them there’s value in it.

It won’t be easy. Change is hard. But you can make a difference much sooner than you think.

Apply for that job at CHI. You won’t regret it.

About the author

Trish Roche is a Knowledge Broker with @CHImbca, passionate about moving basic science beyond the bench.