#22 I Believed I Was a Hot Shit Scientist

I believed I was a hot shit scientist. I believed I had good ideas.

During my PhD, I studied gold nanoparticles. Why?

Because they’re awesome.

How awesome?

They’re not gold.

They’re red, blue, green, purple, orange, yellow, all the colors of the rainbow. I studied the shit out of gold nanoparticles, one at a time. We looked at how their size, shape, and arrangement affected which colors of light bounced off of them.

There was a difference, between a crystal 20 nanometers wide, one that was 40 nanometers wide, one that was star-shaped, one that was 30 nanometers wide and 60 nanometers long and one that was 30 nanometers wide and 80 nanometers long and one that was 50 nanometers wide and 100 nanometers long.

I almost published a paper called “Size Matters, Not Just the Aspect Ratio.” The reviewers asked us to “tone it down” and we changed it to “Single-particle spectroscopy of gold nanorods beyond the quasi-static limit: varying the width at constant aspect ratio”, the biggest regret of my career.

Just kidding.

That was one of five papers with my name at the top of the list and one of twelve I had my name on over six years of grad school.

I thought I was hot shit.

I went to Los Angeles for a postdoc. I was hired by someone famous in the field, who founded a leading journal in the field and who had a line of postdoc wannabes wanting to join their group.

I took on a project they were excited about.

Gold nanoparticles became easy to study.

What I was looking at was invisible gold, possibly a layer no more than one atom thick, stuck to transparent rubber stamp.

No, I didn’t have to do that. But I was stubborn.

How was this invisible gold made?

The previous postdoc found a way to pattern molecules on a gold film by first making an even layer of molecules on the gold and then ripping some of them off.

This is like taking some molten wax, writing your name on the hairiest part of your body with said molten wax, then pressing a cloth strip over it while it’s still molten and riiiip — voila, you’ve got name written in your hair, and it’s going to take weeks, if not months for it to grow back to conceal your name, depending our long your body hair is.

This process of patterning molecules on gold is like waxing, not shaving.

How? When you wax, you pull the hair and its root out. A little something comes out on the follicle from under the surface of your skin.

That doesn’t happen with shaving. You just shorten the hair to skin layer, the root stays there.

With this technique for patterning molecules on gold surfaces, we were ripping off molecules that took with it something stuck to their roots — some gold, and we were ripping it off with a transparent piece of rubber chemically treated to bind to the heads of those molecules. If that stamp had the shape of the letters of your name sticking out of it, then you would ‘wax off’ your name into the molecules. What remained on the surface would be your name in relief.

What got onto the rubber stamp at the points of contact were molecules and gold.

You couldn’t see the gold with your eyes. You found out if it was there if you put the stamp in a kind of spectrometer that can help you figure out the chemical composition of solid surfaces, i.e. what elements are there.

I wanted to study this ripped off gold.

I wanted to figure out how many gold atoms came off per molecule.

These kinds of good ideas made the male-dominated field of physical chemists very excited.

I also had lots of ideas about what else we could do with this.

Pattern the invisible gold. You could see it only with the right type of microscope, or if you added molecules with elements that bound easily to gold and attached fluorescent dyes to those molecules.

When I drew lines of gold on the surface of flat rubber stamps, people thought the lines in the images were artifacts of the microscope.

When I drew the letters UCLA, they knew the microscope wasn’t sick enough to play that trick on them.

I did something no one figured out how to do before.

I made the letters UCLA — invisible on a flat, colorless, transparent piece of rubber — glow with the right combination of molecules, dyes, and microscope.

I thought I would be successful, so many papers could come out of this.

Two and a half years in and a month into moving in with my new partner in a new apartment and no papers published yet, my big deal professor told me, “we need to find you a new position.”

My good ideas didn’t lead to outputs worth my 65,000 USD per year post PhD paycheck.

I would hand over everything I had worked on. I would let all of this go.

Three years after I let all that go, I was a research scientist in a different country, living in a different apartment, knowing a different partner.

Seven years after letting all that go, I am a single science writer, career coach, business owner, community builder, hiker, and singer living in an apartment between the beach and the mountains in Hong Kong with good ideas.

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This is Day 22 of “Don’t Break the Chain” — a master writing class with Cole Schafer.

Today’s prompt: “Write about a time in your life when you believed in something or someone more than you ever have anything or anyone before.

Then, tell how it all collapsed and why you were better for it collapsing.”

By the way, Cole writes a regular newsletter you might enjoy. Check it out at this link.