Julie Gould 00:09
Hello, and welcome to Working Scientist, a Nature Careers podcast. I’m Julie Gould. This is the fifth episode of a series called The last few miles: planning for the late stage career in science.
What we’ve learned so far in this series is that a lot of the later stages of an academic career is preparing for that next transition, going from employed to retired. And one aspect of this latest stage of an academic career that is specific to scientists in academia, (not all, I know, but some), is that those who head up and manage a lab need to prepare for what happens to the lab when they retire.
And this preparation won’t be the same for everyone, as everybody’s lab has different things in it. So in this episode, I’m going to share a few examples of how people have handed over their lab and what, if any, preparation they’ve done towards this.
In Argentina, and particularly in the physics community, labs are handed over to someone specific, someone that has been part of a lab already and has been trained up to take on the reins.
So part of preparing for retirement from an Argentinian physics lab is, as we heard María Teresa Dova, a physics professor at the University of La Plata, in Argentina, say in the first episode of this series, is to make sure you’ve got your legacy ready to hand over.
María Teresa Dova 01:32
I always try to train my younger researchers to do all the things I’m doing. I always said this, my legacy, but, What about my legacy? Nobody will continue that, you know. So it’s important to to be sure that there will be a continuation, as most continuation.
Julie Gould 01:55
María Teresa told me that in the case where a lab only has one PI [principal investigator], and that PI leaves suddenly due to forced retirement, whatever the reason, then the laboratory merges with another one.
But in general, she told me there isn’t a single PI in a lab. She told me over email that they have, and I quote, “a fairly horizontal organization where we, PIs, train others to ensure continuity. Additionally, labs often rejuvenate with new lines of research.”
Carlos Garcia Canal, professor emeritus at the University of La Plata, in Argentina, handed over his physics laboratory a few years before he retired. And he did this because he felt it was important to give the younger generations a chance to take the lead whilst he was still around to help.
Carlos Garcia Canal 02:39
I have confidence that the younger people in my group were able to go ahead with the projects. With the responsibility and with the bureaucracy that, you know, with scientific projects have some bureaucracy behind.
And so I was certain that they can go ahead with that. And I was ready to help them as soon as they need me, you know that that’s clear.
Julie Gould 03:12
This actually worked out well for Carlos too, because now 15 years later, he is still involved in doing research in this lab. And he continues to help where he can.
Carlos Garcia Canal 03:22
They thought that perhaps maintaining me in activity was useful for them to go ahead with their own careers. Because I have a lot of relationships with people abroad.
I have many contacts in Spain, in the United States and France, in Germany, etc. So for them, it’s also useful to have some people that connect them with abroad, with other institutions of research, for example, with CERN, etc.
Julie Gould 04:03
Vincent Seutin, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Liège in Belgium, told me that in Belgium, the equipment that has been purchased by a researcher whilst working at a university becomes the property of that university, which means that the retiring academic has no say on how his or her succession will be organized.
Vincent Seutin 04:24
It will be handed to somebody else. I still don’t know exactly who.
But since, you know, I’m on a platform of what is called the jigger neuroscience. So we’re doing molecular and cellular neuroscience research. There is a wish, by many of my colleagues to have the electrophysiology platform still running for a number of projects.
Yeah, so it won’t be broken down. Especially you know, since Belgium is not very, very good at funding research. And we have in electrophysiology, we have what we call setups. And these, these are rather expensive machines, and it would be a disaster to get rid of them.
Julie Gould 05:16
In the United States of America, it’s different again. When a PI retires from lab research, the lab and sometimes the particular direction of research that that lab has taken, gets shut down, and the space gets handed over to someone else.
Roberto Kolter, a professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School in the USA, managed this when he retired and closed his lab in the latter half of 2018. And it took five years of planning.
Roberto Kolter 05:42
In going emeritus in the American system, your lab basically closes and that line of research closes, and then the department may be given the position again, or not. Some departments don’t continue.
And compared to Europe, where there’s a tendency to keep the lab open and have it replaced, but the theme remains more or less, that doesn’t really happen. So the United States doesn’t have that. So it’s not unusual for someone who retires that that line of investigation at that institution ends.
Julie Gould 06:13
That meant that his lab was not going to be handed to a postdoc or a successor that Roberto had chosen. It was out of his control.
But this wasn’t the only reason why Roberto decided to retire and close his lab.
Roberto Kolter 06:25
I saw philosophically that the system is not that sustainable, if we stay forever, training people forever. So the constant of the numbers.
And I was glad to see other people thinking along the same way, that one wants to make room for the younger people to carry on with the active research, getting the grant monies, et cetera.
Julie Gould 06:51
So let’s talk about some of the processes that go on sort of behind the scenes when it comes to closing down a lab.
So you already said that you planned it well in advance. So at the time we spoke, you said you had, when it was when it came to renewing grant funding, you had to think about it five years in advance.
So if you were speaking to an early or mid-career researcher, and they were asking you like, “Okay, how do I go about closing my lab? How do I do this if I want to retire?”
Can you talk them through some of the sort of, the how to steps on how to do this?
Roberto Kolter 07:24
Yes yes. I think for me, the key point and the one that I would recommend, is that a huge factor of what research is about is training individuals. To me that was what made the work so much fun.
It’s not so much, I mean, yes, of course we’re excited about the science and the questions we were asking, but also the people were training, so that’s the first priority.
You want to make sure that nobody, if at all possible, nobody gets left hanging, because the lab disappeared, right. And so that means that the process of funds should be enough funds available.
But that those funds decline in a way that is not a what we call a cliff, you don’t go along, and then all of a sudden, there’s a dead end, and there’s a cliff and everybody falls off the cliff. Rather, it’s a soft landing, right?
So you might, I might have had a lab of 15 people and I knew that I had to stop recruiting new people, accepting new people to my lab, already five years before I closed, because, you know, they’re going to take three or so years to do their postdoctoral training.
So that was very important. Advance planning in shrinking down or downsizing the lab to be in in accordance to decreasing funding, because as I told you, before, the grants go in five-year periods, I had several NIH grants, so I had to stop renewing them and concomitant with that stopping of the renewal, not get any more people. And already the last couple of people that I accepted, were very clearly you bring your own funds, but you must know that two years after entrance, there will be no more lab.
So that even at the level of the last people that accepted. They needed now to know there was an end date.
And even with an advanced planning, I had a couple of people who, you know, had to wait six months after the lab closed and, but that really is key, the advance planning in terms of the people that you are training.
You cannot, you cannot hide it from the people and all of a sudden say, “Well, you know, in my mind, I’ve been thinking about this, but I didn’t want to tell you guys because I don’t want to surprise you. And now I’m going to surprise you. I’m gone.” Right? That’s just horrible.
So that’s a huge, huge part. Advanced planning. Seven years in advance I was beginning to think about it, five years in advance I was already taking active steps towards it.
Julie Gould 10:02
Okay, so what about when it comes to writing papers and writing up the results? Because I imagine during those five years before you retired you were still, you know, doing research that needed writing up and publishing.
Did it come to a stage where you, you know, last day was the last paper you handed in? Or was it like you had to, do you still do some writing and publishing after?
Roberto Kolter 10:21
It’s a fascinating question, and of course, it progresses down. As fewer people were in the lab, fewer papers came out. So the writing continued, but of course, it went down in amount.
What ramped up, of course, was my involvement with the blog, which I enjoy writing and so as I was reducing in writing scientific papers, let’s say research papers, I was increasing in number of opinion papers that I was writing, and papers that, that had the blogging, and papers that had to do with perspectives and reviews, etc.
So that has continued, although also it’s like, say, I don’t write 15 papers a year anymore.
Julie Gould 11:05
Okay. Understood.
And then what about all the equipment in the lab? What happens to that?
Do you sell it off bit by bit? Do you give it to the university? Do you donate it to somebody else? Like what happens to all of that?
Roberto Kolter 11:19
Yeah, that is interesting. And it’s an important point in terms of the infrastructure of a lab, and it depends from lab to lab.
But the United States system is that the equipment belongs to the university, and then it depends on the university’s decision what to do with it.
So, so big pieces of equipment, many of them, you know, I had had for 25, 30 years. So they probably, they were probably junked, you know, rusty water bath, things like that.
Some of the other things, were already in a common core. For example, one huge piece of equipment that is very useful across the disciplines are minus-80 freezers so of course, I had to deal with that. And those immediately get taken over by others, because there’s a need. So there’s some pieces of equipment that are immediately taken up by others.
In other cases, something I’m sure that Harvard ended up throwing out because it was just the way it is. One thing that is interesting is, it is not equipment, but a resource – is that my lab had the collection of the years of over 10,000 bacterial strains, which is a great resource.
And that actually, you know, provided some logistic problems. How do you manage strains that, you know, there are issues about material transfers, etc? And so we managed to work it out.
So the strain collection is still around, and people can still get strains from the all of the publications and the collection that we’ve made. So I think that’s a really important resource, and we need to have a good way to continue it, because eventually people stop asking for them but that takes several decades.
And if people know that it’s still around, even when I was working, I was getting requests for stuff that I had made when I was in graduate school. So that’s important, that that not be lost.
Julie Gould 13:20
And those resources do they belong to you, or do they belong to the university?
Roberto Kolter 13:25
They belong to the university, but the university doesn’t want to deal with them. You know, the management, so I had to go through the process of transferring them.
Julie Gould 13:33
Constanze Bonifer, an emeritus professor of haematology at the University of Birmingham in the UK, and an honorary professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, retired from academia and closed her lab at Birmingham University at the end of 2023.
Like Vincent Seutin told us about the situation in Belgium, the same is true in the UK. Any equipment bought by the group belongs to the university. So it’s not up to the retiring PI what happens with it. But in Constanze’s case, some of the materials and equipment went to her staff.
Constanze Bonifer 14:05
And also staff who left and set up their own shop. They took whatever they needed.
We had a lot of samples from leukaemia patients. And that was handed over to – that’s not hazardous it is just – this was the ethics was transferred to somebody else, to a member of staff who was carrying on some of the project together with a clinician in Birmingham, and this project was also taken over.
So it was all done by the book basically. We had freezers and freezers full of DNA fragments and plasmids and, and restriction enzymes all bought from companies.
And some people sort of reused some of these materials and we distributed whatever anybody wanted and some staff took it with them. And they set up, which helps them to set up their own lab. And they could take some equipment with them if they wanted to.
Our institute’s director was very generous in that respect.
Julie Gould 15:13
But Constanze says that another thing that retiring professors need to consider when closing a laboratory is what to do with their data.
Constanze Bonifer 15:20
We generated a lot of data as well, which are all archived. The lab books are archived, and they have to be archived for about 10 years, or 20 years almost in some cases.
All the published, the data from published papers are all deposited in public repositories. If you publish things, you’re still liable to sort of scrutiny.
And if anybody who reads one of our papers comes across anything that they want to query, I have to be able to answer the question and show that our experiment was done correctly. And I can, we can get access to it if we need to. Well, I hope not, because we were always very careful.
Julie Gould 16:09
Not all materials that are left behind are harmless or easy to dispose of.
The University of California, Los Angeles, has a lab close-out checklist document that retiring PIs can refer to.
According to chemistry professor Craig Merlic, who is also the executive director of the University of California Center for Laboratory Safety, this document deals with what should be done with the materials in the lab.
Craig Merlic 16:32
We decided, I decided, to create the letter so that we have, you know, a policy in place, but also guidelines for faculty.
So it turns out that this need is actually across every research university. So whether it’s UCLA or other universities, the United States or the United Kingdom, the issue of what happens with materials and potentially in particular, hazardous materials, what happens to them when faculty close down their labs is an international issue.
And so I decided that by being proactive, we can hopefully avoid, you know, issues or challenges down the line.
Julie Gould 17:17
Craig shared some stories of what these challenges might look like. For example, one university had a lab that was closing down as the PI was retiring. And as part of the laboratory, there was a piece of apparatus that had a large quantity of mercury inside it.
Craig Merlic 17:32
The professor retired and shut down, but this apparatus at another institution was sort of put in a closet.
And then some years later, a custodian was told, “Oh, clean out that closet.” So this custodian started pulling things out and throwing it, throwing it in the dumpster. And it turns out that they didn’t see the hazards of this mercury filled glass object. And so it broke when they’re throwing it into the dumpster.
And so it, they ended up spilling the mercury on the ground and then into the dumpster. So the dumpster is like, you know, six feet by six feet by six feet steel container, had mercury contamination. All because, you know, someone retired and left behind this apparatus that was stuck in a closet, and then a custodian, you know, was asked to clean out the closet years later.
So they ended up, they had to clean up the ground area around the dumpster, but the dumpster itself, they ended up just wrapping up the whole dumpster, six feet by six feet by six feet steel box with all the trash in it, and they took it out and they buried it in a hazardous waste site, the entire thing.
Julie Gould 18:47
So to avoid expensive mistakes like this Craig wrote the checklist, because there are many potentially hazardous materials that can be left behind.
So what does this checklist look like?
Craig Merlic 18:57
And so the checklist is a list of all the things that need to be taken care of when a professor is shutting down their lab.
So not only chemicals, but also radioactive materials, biological materials, gasses, if they have animals in a vivarium. All of these things need to be taken care of as the professor is preparing to shut down their laboratory.
And if things are not taken care of, then that’s when we have to call in our Environmental Health and Safety [team]. They have limited resources.
An example of something that could be challenging is an unknown material. So suppose there’s a vial with a white solid in it. And if that’s left behind, what does the university do with that white solid?
If we have to dispose of it as an unknown material, Environmental Health and Safety can contract with an outside contractor and it can cost literally a couple hundred dollars per bottle to dispose of an unknown material.
So basically, by being proactive, we can try to avoid situations like that, where there could be significant costs to the university.
Julie Gould 20:15
Carol Shoshkes Reiss, a professor emeritus at New York University, retired from scientific research and closed her lab in 2015.
It was an early retirement from academic research that she had planned because funding had dried up, which meant that she didn’t have the luxury of planning five years in advance, like Roberto Kolter.
Carol Shoshkes Reiss 20:33
Projects were finished, papers were written, essential reagents that were not available anywhere else I maintained in a freezer.
But all of the other things in the freezer that were, you know, just working supplies, or were readily available anywhere else, were discarded, and appropriately discarded.
I gave away my equipment. And you know, basically, that’s what I had to do. And in most universities there is a shortage of space and so, nature abhors a vacuum, and the labs were immediately taken over by other people who needed to expand their space.
And one thing I found, when I did close the lab, was my stress level was tremendously reduced. I didn’t have to worry about writing grants anymore, I didn’t have to worry about supporting the people in the lab anymore.
I didn’t have to worry about getting the next paper published because I needed it to maintain the, you know the string of papers. Now if I want to publish, you know, an opinion piece, I can write it and publish it.
But I found it to be a tremendous relief, not to have the responsibility of being the PI anymore. And it enabled me to enjoy so much more of my life.
Julie Gould 22:20
In the final episode of this series, we’re sharing a little bit about the tension that exists between younger and older generations in academia, as well as why some people believe that the older generations of scientists shouldn’t be set aside once they hit retirement, so that they can be of great value to the universities and their students.
And finally, I’ll share a story about a woman who became a scientist once she retired from a career as a teacher. Thanks for listening, I’m Julie Gould.
