In early 2020, my postdoctoral project hit a wall. I was working on how a family of genes could affect neurotransmitter identities in C. elegans, when I realized that the field didn’t yet have a reliable atlas for all neurotransmitters in wild type animals. In other words, I needed to build better controls before I could dissect whether my genes of interest had any impact. The work would then be a “side” project, but far from a trivial one – I would need to generate and analyze 16 new CRISPR-engineered strains in all neurons and both sexes of the worm. That would take a couple years without doing much else.

While I was contemplating whether this side project would be worth the detour from my main project, COVID broke out. Quickly, neurotransmitters became less of a concern. Labs shut down. Campuses shut down. People stayed home. People died.

For the first time, it dawned on me that even though as a PhD-trained biologist I could understand the basic mechanisms of diseases, when those efforts were met with the horrific death toll in the city I live in, my wishful efforts to help and comprehend what was going on were really just … wishful. This realization generated a wave of existential crisis in me, and it hit harder and longer than I expected, lingering even after we all went back to our labs and the vaccines came and the death toll slowed down.

Unexpectedly, what eventually saved me from the existential crisis was the decision to push through the “side” project. For reasons I didn’t fully understand at the moment, after quarantine ended I found myself going straight into it. For the next two years, my days consisted of hours of imaging on the microscope and hours more analyzing images. It was the most tedious and labor-intensive research work I had ever done, but somehow, I found a strange sense of peace from the routine of living in that tedium. Countless times I needed to decide whether I should extend an imaging session to double or triple check a neuron ID, and to my bafflement, I always found myself extending that session. Finally, in 2023, with the help of other postdocs and students in the lab and after editing more than 30 versions of the manuscript, my advisor and I submitted the paper. A year later, it was published with the editorial assessment as a “fundamental study” that “could be a seminal reference in the field”.

It was much later, when I thought back on this chapter, that I realized why I suddenly committed to the project, and where all that stubbornness to be extra meticulous came from — after months of not being able to do anything about the horrific reality, I was trying to hold onto the notion that this would finally be a way I could give. I work in a lab with ample resources and tools that most in my field lack, and I happened to have the skillsets to make something useful out of them. I was not just doing this side project to get better controls for my main project anymore. I was trying to justify my usefulness with what was in my control in that chaotic time, even though what was in my control was minuscule in the grand scheme of things.

Whether the work has an impact as much as I want to believe is, of course, something only time can tell. However, witnessing how I found my way out of the COVID-derived existential crisis has already become an invaluable lesson. It became clear that the deepest source of fulfilment for me is being able to give. I now understand why I always enjoy mentoring students, even though it requires time and energy away from my own work; why I once went through all the trouble to set up a campus-wide interdisciplinary symposium to bring people together, even though it did not directly benefit my own research; and why whenever a conflict arises between the productivity of a project and the wellbeing of people working on it, I always find myself prioritizing the people.

The side project was a two-and-a-half-year detour from my main project, but it clarified my identity as a scientist: I am a member of the scientific community, and the core of that is to serve the people in this community.