My obscure route into science: Jim Lipscombe

I worked in a village pub, where I was barman, cook, cleaner, cellar manager, occasional bouncer and unqualified relationship counsellor to drunks.

I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t meet my potential at school and so started my working life at 16 when I was hired by a dry cleaning firm to take orders at the counter but later ended up doing the dry cleaning itself and pressing clothes. This was demanding work in a hot, humid, noisy environment and eventually I grew tired of it.

I spent several months trying to find a steady job after relocating to Norfolk and tried all kinds of things including roofing and a day-long stint at a vineyard where all I really achieved was a repetitive strain injury. I have also worked as a cook in a busy student pub and as a junior manager in a certain well-known fast-food franchise from which I learnt a great deal about people.

Though I never studied biology after leaving school, I always had a personal interest in and enjoyed reading about science, and in particular was fascinated by evolution.

During a period of unemployment, I was alerted to an opportunity for a maternity cover position operating a Sanger sequencing service. The role involved a lot of customer service, which I was used to, but also a technical aspect that I picked up quickly and thoroughly enjoyed.

I applied for a permanent position and was later transferred over to the Earlham Institute (in its former guise as TGAC) being one of its founding staff members. In truth, to work in science had never really occurred to me up to that point, so for me, it was a great stroke of fortune - and now I can hardly imagine working in any other field.

Lab work for me can be quite a mixed bag of things and is often broken up by spells at my desk. A typical week might consist of performing and scrutinising library QC, preparing reagents, preparing libraries, loading instruments, washing instruments, assessing sequencing data quality and quantity, liaising with the project management team and troubleshooting.

At other times I might be running or programming the liquid handling robots for processes such as DNA extraction or high-throughput library construction. Otherwise, I might be giving or receiving some training, hosting a student or giving a lab tour to members of the public.

In terms of fiction, I always loved Ted Hughes’s Iron Man and have enjoyed revisiting that tale with my children. But my favourite real robot is a Biomek FXp featuring a beautifully engineered 384 mandrel head that has been heavily used for high throughput BAC sequencing.

Bread wheat appears to be the thing most likely to keep a bioinformatician busy (and to make them cry), but for me I think the most extraordinary organism I have sequenced would be the Naked Mole Rat (Heterocephalus glaber) which is in some ways insect-like rather than mammalian in its lifestyle and has a remarkable resistance to cancer that makes its genome of particular interest to researchers in that field.

That an obscure subterranean rodent, adapted to one of the harshest environments on Earth, could possibly offer humanity such hope is for me a truly beautiful prospect.

I think I may already have it!

Do it. Science is, now more than ever, an international pursuit - and working with people from all around the globe is a hugely life-enriching experience that can open many doors. There is everything to gain by having a go and even if it turns out not to be for you, you cannot fail to learn from it and the talented, skilled and dedicated people that do it.