My Ph.D. Story- II

It was February 2020. The institute that had been my home and workplace for four-odd years—the CSIR- Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad—had an event to commemorate the birth anniversary of our founder-director. I was drunk on science and art that were a part of the cultural events at the end of the day, blissfully unaware of the turmoil the coming months had in store.

I had my Ph.D. comprehensive exam a couple of weeks after the event. It’s no biggie; just an evaluation where a student presents their work in front of a panel and answers some questions. If they don’t do a satisfactory job, then bye-bye Ph.D. Like I said, no biggie. Naturally, I wasn’t nervous at all, except for staying up all night and my heart beating out of my chest. But to my immense surprise, it went pretty well. I felt confident that I was on the right track, I had a plan and needed to execute it.

I work on the biology of stress and depression. This statement invokes interesting responses from people, especially when I inform them that I work with mice. Can mice develop depression? Indeed, they can. Although, depression in the true sense is a uniquely human condition. But mice do display “depression-like” features, including an inability to experience pleasure and despair, making them an excellent experimental model to understand the condition better.

I was maintaining a group of mice to perform the experiments. But, within a week of the exam, the government announced the ‘junta’ (public) curfew. The seriousness of the impending pandemic finally hit when there was a complete lockdown, and the CCMB administration ordered that all labs are closed and students stay in their hostels. This essentially meant that we couldn’t run any experiments. The day I was supposed to start my animal experiments, I was instead forced to sacrifice them since the animal house was to be maintained at a minimal capacity. As researchers, we must be meticulous, ethical, and judicious, especially when working with live organisms. But since the situation demanded, no matter how unfair or unethical it felt, I had to make that hard decision of giving up the mice without performing any experiments. This was just one of the many ways in which the pandemic was testing us. The next couple of months demanded a lot more from all of us.

As humanity was collectively experiencing crippling fear and frustration, I was going through one of the most challenging periods of my life. I lived by myself in a hostel. I couldn’t work. I spent weeks without meeting a single human. Although I was talking to my family and friends over video calls, it wasn’t the same. I went from feeling sad to deep despair to completely numb in those two-odd months of lockdown.

After the restrictions were partly lifted and I could go to work, it was a Herculean task to get back into the routine. My sleep-wake cycle was utterly wrecked. I had lost motivation. I even started to think I may not make it and seriously considered quitting my Ph.D. I then felt ashamed for having thought that; I felt like a failure; at my lowest, I even considered ending my life. It was when that thought occurred that I considered professional help.

But I was not in the right state of mind for that. So, I turned to self-help. I started journaling. I discussed my troubles with a trusted friend and colleague. And slowly, I felt well enough to get myself to work. I acknowledge that not everyone can get away from their dark thoughts in the same way I did. I was fortunate to have had at least a moment of clarity where I thought of the good things in my life. With the help of the same trusted friend, I made plans for new experiments. The animal house was functional again, so I eventually started the experiments.

In my project on stress and depression, I primarily work on a novel protein with no known function. One of the best ways to understand the function of a gene or protein is to manipulate its levels. This is an approach that biologists have been using forever. From my previous experiments, I knew that the levels of my novel protein increase in a particular brain region called the hippocampus in stressed mice. The next question I was trying to address was if I increase its levels in the hippocampus, in the absence of any overt stress, would the animals develop a depression-like condition?

To achieve increased levels of protein in the brain, we employ viruses. Not the deadly COVID-19 or Ebola kind, but docile ones which we can modify to carry our gene of interest. When we inject such viruses into mice, it essentially expresses the gene and produces the protein of my interest, increasing its levels. Pretty neat, right?! Although I had my colleague’s help, we were both new to the particular procedure—mouse brain surgery. The experiment required that we perform brain injections on 24 mice, and a single surgery took about 2.5 hours. Performing a challenging task like that helped me get out of my cocoon and gave me a sense of purpose and satisfaction.

When it was time, we tested our surgery survivors to infer if they had developed any symptoms of depression and related anxiety. And good Lord, they had! Our hypothesis had been proved. I, my friend, and my Ph.D. supervisor all heaved a sigh of relief! I felt confident again in my project, which helped my mental health immensely. But I did not feel completely alright. I realized that I had some deep-seated issues that needed to be addressed. I finally started consulting a therapist, and almost two years later, I can confidently say that it helped a great deal. I don’t feel the need for regular therapy, and I can manage my mental health quite well. I genuinely believe I have been lucky to have supportive friends and family.

It amazes me how we all let our work become so important that it gets intricately tied to our mental state. I still struggle with compartmentalizing, but I’m getting better at it. At the end of the day, I remind myself that my health, family, and friends are more important than my work. I still value my work and give it my best, but I have accepted that work alone doesn’t define my self-worth.

Work is worship, but your body is the temple.

 

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Author’s note:

For those who are struggling, there is help available and suicide helplines. If you know someone who is suicidal, please don’t say things like, “Look on the bright side,” “It’s not so bad‚” or “Don’t be a coward.” Understand that they are suffering, tell them you are there for them, don’t give false assurances, and tell them you will try to help. Only seek professional help if they consent.

Author

Annapoorna P K is a Ph.D. student at the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, India. Her research is about understanding the biology of depression using mice as models. She hopes to build a career that lets her culminate her two great loves, science and communication. She’s vocal about mental health issues with the aim to lift the taboo associated with them.

Editors

Ananya Sen is currently a science writer at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. She completed her Ph.D. in Microbiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2021. She is an ardent reader and will happily discuss anything from Jane Austen to Gillian Flynn. Her travel goals include covering all the national parks in the U.S. with her sidekick Oscar, a Schnauzer/Pomeranian mix.

Roopsha Sengupta is the Editor-in-Chief at Club SciWri. She did her Ph.D. at the Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna, and post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge UK, specializing in Epigenetics. During her research, she was involved in many exciting discoveries and had the privilege of working and collaborating with many inspiring scientists. As an editor for Club SciWri, she loves working on diverse topics and presenting articles coherently while nudging authors to give their best.

Cover image- iStock