Being a Western Scientist in China

I mainly started this blog as a way to keep my friends and family updated with how I am doing in China, but I've recently had more questions about my work, so this is going to be a technical post. As most of you already know, the original reason why I went to Shanghai is that I'm a microbiologist PhD student, and I was going on exchange to a lab there to work on a collaborative research project. But I have been making the use of this opportunity to visit some old friends and new places. I've had some of you asking me pointedly asking “how’s the work going?” and others just being more forthright and coming out with “are you actually doing any work there, or is it just all fun?”. Yes, I am doing some work! Of course, I've mainly been posting about the fun things that I got up to at the weekend, rather than my daily work, but to balance things out, I will describe how the work has been in Shanghai compared to my old lab. Although things were a bit slow to get started, I'm pretty much used to everything now, so it’s going as fast as research normally does (ie. not very fast at all). I have also now given three presentations, including one I was asked to do in Huashan hospital when I went to visit old lab friend Dr Jiang:

Giving a presentation for Dr Jiang, who’s English has improved impressively since he left Leicester

   People normally ask about the “culture shock” when you arrive in China, but since I already have a lot of experience with Chinese culture, this was not much of an issue for me. My younger sister has her undergraduate degree in Chinese and already spent a year in Kunming. In addition, I've made many Asian friends over the years in Nottingham and Leicester, who have taught me many different things about Chinese culture, and helped me prepare for my move. So I think my biggest shock came from how different things were in the lab. Yes, I expected some big differences, since every lab does things differently, and this is after all, a country that’s only just reaching comparable research standards to the West. But as with everything here in China, my lab experience was full of contradictions.

   In actual fact, this lab has significantly more money than my lab back home in Leicester. One of the reasons for this is that unlike in the West, China has not cut funding to science in response to global financial issues. On the contrary, they've actually invested even larger amounts of money into research. This has been in a focused effort to raise the profile of Chinese research and to attain a level of standard that is comparable to that of the West. While China’s universities still rarely make it into the top groups of the international university league tables, they have been steadily rising, and their research has been garnering more respect and they increasingly have equal footing in the community, and as China is approaching an era where for the first time its number of publications will outstrip that of the US, the effort definitely seems to be reaping its rewards.

R & D spending relative to GDP by top six countries ("China's Absorptive State" Bound, et al. 2010)

   So this means that they have plenty of high standard equipment for starters:

Several refrigerated proper eppendorf centrifuges line the lab

These two brand new incubators arrived while I was in the lab

Also, since the building doesn't have gas piping throughout to support Bunsens, all sterile work has to be done in cabinets. And there are lots of great cabinets, new and old. Our lab has two new ones, which they boasted were made in Germany:

YZ working in one of the brand new cabinets (and sporting an unnecessary but apparently compulsory face mask!)

But as you can imagine, there aren't enough cabinets for everyone, so sometimes you have to wait, which I find very frustrating, as I'm used to a Bunsen each, meaning that everyone can do lab work at the same time. Also it’s annoying because I don’t understand when people have verbally “booked” a time slot for the cabinet, so that causes some confusion, but I'm getting by. Another thing which frustrates me is that there are only two gel tanks - one medium, one small - to share between two labs worth of people, so work is often slowed because I'm waiting for a tank to free up.

One of the best things about working in this lab is that the turnaround time for primer and sequencing services are really quick, operating seven days a week, and pick-ups and deliveries start very early and can go on until 7 or 8 pm. If you order before 12 pm, you’ll get your primers tomorrow morning. Having these services every day certainly helps to speed up the pace of the work. And I’ve done sequencing twice here now, and it’s the only time I've ever had over 1 Kb result, with NO Ns! None!
So the downsides: Most lab meetings are all in Chinese. As I mentioned in one of my first posts, the students are required to write up their PowerPoint files in English, but since many of them and their supervisors sometimes struggle with English, they give the presentation in Chinese. It was cute when Dr Jiang translated my presentation for others, slide by slide, but it does get to be a bit of a drag when I sit for two hours in the weekly lab meeting, without a clue what is going on. Occasionally, they will spend about 20 minutes discussing the minutiae of one slide which takes me less than a minute to read. This is pretty much the time when I catch up on the news from home on my phone, lol. Thankfully, they don't ask me to go to the departmental meetings, since most of those presentations are irrelevant for me anyway because the rest of the department all works on Streptomyces, and the thought of others who don't really know me being forced to speak English just for my benefit would just be too much to bear (for them, and for me!).

 On my arrival in the lab, a new lab coat was ordered just for me, but it was far too big. It quickly became apparent that this was probably because I'm the tallest person they've ever seen. They ordered me a size XXXXL (yes, that’s right, four Xs!), and I don't think they realised that large sizes were for overweight people rather than tall ones, so I billow around the lab in my tent like so:

Fun in my tent. No howie-style labcoats here. Nor labcoats with any style at all, really

However, despite the riches, there is some random stuff that they do to save money, that doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever, given the resources at their disposal. For example, using old newspapers or free tourist maps to cover flasks and tying it up with string instead of just buying aluminium foil!

Random, but cost effective way of covering flasks

You can see from this picture that bottles alcohol and other flammables are just stored randomly around the lab, in fact, there is no flammables cabinet as far as I can see. Chloroform is freely used in the open air, although I can’t stomach the smell so much, and I'm regarded as a bit of a wuss for only being able to open the bottle in the cabinet.
Also, there is no blue roll - none! They simply use toilet roll for everything that we would normally use blue roll for. Infuriating when the stuff disintegrates in your hands and leaves tiny clumps everywhere.

 They are also missing some other, really obvious, and vital items in the lab too. For example, there are no P10 pipettes! Not even one to share between all the members of the lab! So we have to make do with our P20s, even for really small amounts like pipetting 0.5 μl on an enzyme! (For anyone that doesn't know, this is really, really bad for the pipette – you should not really go below 2 μl on a P20, as it can distort the spring, and it will get decalibrated and eventually break!). Even Lu seems confused about this, and she says they had plenty of P10s in her previous lab in Yangzhou University for her masters, so this must just be this lab.
**************************UPDATE*******************************
Since I have whined and laughed about the situation, there has now been a new P2 purchased to share between the members of the lab. I do hope it's not because they've been reading my blog and hearing me complain about it! But anyway, even if it is, it will benefit everyone in the lab, so hooray!
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Also, there are no regular autoclave runs or media kitchen staff. We have to do all our own autoclaving, as and when enough stuff comes together to fill an autoclave.This plays havoc with my OCD/probably mild Asperger's, since I normally plan my experiments around our regular twice-daily autoclave routine at home. However, the plus sides of this system is that there are plenty of people needing to autoclave runs so probably most days will have a run three times, including one in the evening, which wouldn't be possible at home. But due to the haphazard system, it means that people never really know when to go back and get their stuff, so autoclaved things are just piled up on the floor, creating a total mess. Honestly, a few months in China would easily cure anybody of their OCD.

 They also don’t buy kits for most things, including gDNA extraction. The in-house plasmid extraction system is pretty good and working well according to the standards required. But the gDNA extraction is not so good, to the point where the people in the lab have to use colony PCR for every kind of chromosomal PCR, otherwise they get no product. When they asked me what we use, I just gave them the name of the supplier for our gDNA kit. YZ was so surprised to hear that the max yield of our kit was 24 μg gDNA from 500 μl, and that I regularly got 15 – 20 μg. But he told me that nobody else in the department buys kits, so it would look really bad for them to order one, and cause problems in their relationship. This is due to some kind of unspoken Chinese social rule called “guānxì” (关系) and to do anything to disrupt this would mean causing a lot of problems and “losing face” and so basically in China it would be social suicide. When I suggested that other groups in the department are probably also having the same problem and are dying for someone to order a kit so that they can order one too, this point was acknowledged, but then I got the shoulder shrug which means “This is China”. This doesn't make any sense to me, since it seems so obviously to be in everyone’s benefit for all the supervisors to just get together and agree to change the procedure in the department, but I could see that this was never going to happen! However, I know that guānxì is very important in China, so I didn't want to rock the boat too much by pushing the issue and risk offending anyone.

  In addition, there is no real system for waste disposal to speak of. This was pretty much to be expected I guess, but I was still a bit surprised to find that there is no waste autoclave system set up, there’s just a general pour-everything-down-the-sink kind of attitude. There isn't even really a receptacle for waste liquids, you just pour it into the tip box, and then wait for evaporation to take its course! Tip boxes are emptied into general bins (not autoclaved), and even for dangerous organisms, tips are just put into a jar with floor cleaner in, and then this is poured down the sink too! So generally, there are many things happening that would have a certain technician from home in fits! But hey, when in Rome, do as the Romans, but I just know from this that I'm going to have to do a lot of explaining to and keeping an eye on YZ when he first arrives in our lab in the UK, as our system will be so very different.

   The contradictory part of all of this is that despite all the negligence, YZ has to wear a facemask and other protective equipment when working with Klebsiella, because it’s regarded as a highly dangerous organism! How can it be that so many health and safety rules are ignored here, but they adhere to a completely unnecessary one so rigorously?! Needless to say, I refuse to partake in such nonsense. YZ has also started to use the mask less since I've been here, and nobody has died yet.

   However, what the lacks in sense, it makes up for in friendliness. For certainly, the atmosphere in this lab is much more relaxed and friendly. Between the hours of 8 am and 10 pm, you’re pretty much guaranteed to see a friendly face there. Yes, this seems like long hours, and yes, they do get up and start working earlier than we do in the Western world, but it's not a crazy amount, it's not like they sleep in the lab (well actually sometimes they do, especially in the summer, because then they can get free air con through the night!). In fact, there is a lab rule that you should not work at night (athough this is mainly a request from the departmental technician to save money on electricity!). Obviously, sometimes people break this rule (myself included!) depending on what deadlines they have coming up. Also, the pressures are much greater here, because every masters student must publish at least one first author paper, and every PhD student must publish two first author papers, totalling to a required amount of IF of the journal they publish in. This isn't a requirement at all Chinese universities, but it seems to be more common in China than the UK, from what I understand. In addition, if a Chinese student publishes in a high impact factor, they can be rewarded for their troubles by the government in the form of increased scholarship! A recent example is a friend from a neighbouring lab who published in Nucleic Acids Research, and may be entitled to up to £3000 extra scholarship next year! Update - the first thing he did was go out and buy an iPhone 6 plus *facepalm*

My general impression of Chinese research is that they do try to step things up a gear and be more hard working. The whole lab is geared towards getting everything done much quicker, whether this means having primer and sequencing services on every day, or only incubating transformations for half an hour instead of the usual one, right down to using fast digest enzymes and blitzing gels through at 130 V to be done in half an hour. But opposite to what I expected, this actually doesn't feel like working much harder, and the results come much quicker, so it was much easier to stay motivated on the project - you don't have to work late against your will to get some samples ready in time for sequencing pick up days or getting primer orders in before the weekend, because you know they would come every day anyway. So overall, I thought it was a great working environment, and I felt much more productive than I normally did in Leicester.
But with regards to friendliness, everyone is approachable and helpful, and there is much more of a lab camaraderie.  The lab shares the ups and downs of research and life, as well as meals together twice a day, helping each other out - the lab is essentially the hub of the community. This is a great recipe for collaborative problem solving and great science in my opinion. Not to mention that it’s emotionally healthy. I have to say this has been one of the highlights of my trip, and the guys in the lab have really made my time here that much more enjoyable and comfortable. I will miss this when I'm back in Leicester, that’s for sure.