The Neverending Wait

Within the Research Center, we’ve been working on the 2010 newsletter. We expect it to go out in a few weeks! Hoorah!

We feature an interview with one of our laboratory technicians, who answered the question, “What is the hardest part of your job?” I’m not going to steal her thunder by telling you her response. However, it did get me to thinking about this question, and how I would answer it.

I love my job. I work with fantastic families. The team at the Research Center as well as at the Registry is great. I am able to work on several different types of projects, which always keeps things interesting. I find my job to be very rewarding, intellectually and emotionally. I consider myself very lucky to be working here!

I think that possibly the most challenging part of the position, though, is the waiting. Research is such a long process. You start with a research question. Then, it is a matter of finding the funding to answer the question. Once we get the funding, then it is time to collect the data. Sometimes, this means bringing families to San Antonio. For other studies, we send out surveys to the membership and wait for the surveys to be completed and returned. We may need to interview many families, which can be difficult if they are hard to reach via telephone or email. If labwork is involved, we must order the supplies, run the experiments, and sometimes re-run the experiments if they didn’t work the first time around. Then, it is time to analyze the data. No small step!!

Once the data is analyzed, and we understand what the data is telling us, we can finally write up a scientific paper. This can also be a lengthy process, as it is sent around to authors for multiple rounds of editing and approval. Then, at long last, we are able to submit the paper to a scientific journal! At that point, the process is out of our hands for several weeks or months while the journal’s editors review the paper and decide whether it would be appropriate to publish. Typically, the editors will send the paper back to us with some suggested revisions, which may include more data collection or analysis. We revise the paper,run some more experiments, then re-send it to the editors. Again, we wait until we hear whether it was accepted for publication. If it is accepted, there are another few rounds of edits as we look for typos, misprints, and so forth. Once we have gotten the paper to its final form, it is frequently several months until the paper comes out in the journal.

Of course, sometimes the paper is not accepted for publication. Sometimes this is because the editors don’t feel the paper is a good fit for the journal. Sometimes, it is because they feel we need more data. Sometimes, we’re not completely sure why it wasn’t accepted. At this point, though, we return to an earlier stage in the research process.

So, while I love the work that we do, and I think it is very important, it can be very hard to have to wait for the scientific process. I know that families have expressed feeling the same way about research!! It would be so fantastic if we could just ask the question and have it answered within a few weeks! Unfortunately, that’s not how good, reliable, useful data is collected. It is a slow and often frustrating process. But, rest assured that we’re working, even if it does sometimes seem like things are taking forever!

On a completely unrelated note, I am, again, unable to post a photo of a Registry mug in Warsaw Poland. I’m afraid that I am not sure where, exactly, the photo went, as it was not on the camera card after all! When I AM able to find it, though, I will certainly post it here!