For those of you who don’t know, genetics and evolutionary biology were my first loves (in science). So this post kind of goes along with that…

In evolutionary biology, there is a hypothesis for evolution called “The Red Queen Hypothesis”. This hypothesis proposes that “species must continually evolve to survive in the face of their evolving enemies, yet on average their fitness remains unchanged.”¹ In other words, species must constantly adapt and evolve to effectively defend against (or attack) other species in order to survive. Additionally, these adaptations don’t really make a species “more fit” or “stronger”, they really just do enough to help that species continue to survive (I hope that rephrasing is actually helpful…).

If you were wondering, yes, this hypothesis is named after the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland (if the picture at the top of this post didn’t already spoil that). As my undergraduate genetics professor said (which I think makes a lot more sense than my previous rephrasing), just like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, “species must run as fast as they can just to stay in place” – in other words, species must constantly change and adapt to survive, but for the most part, they do remain the same. These changes are very, very small, but they are enough to survive, and that is all that matters.

While this hypothesis has to do with the evolution of species…I think it relates to my experiences in graduate school 😂 (tbh, I bet a lot of people would apply this to their lives and jobs too). And what I mean by this, is that in graduate school, it seems like you are constantly trying new things, running new experiments (or repeating the same ones), analyzing data, running as fast as you can…mostly just to stay in the same place. Yeah, I know I’ve only been in this lab for 6 months and so realistically it makes sense that I have not had a “breakthrough” finding yet…heck, I’ll be lucky if I have a truly groundbreaking finding in all of graduate school, but I’m still going to write and complain about it. And I like the comparison…mostly because I really like this theory of evolution and I want everyone to know about it.

I say this often, and I say it so often because it is true, I’m not sure I could do graduate school if I didn’t have such a great mentor. Because, yes, while everything that I just described is very typical of graduate school, and really what you should expect going into it,…knowing that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to deal with (mentally). (In my personal life, I often say “knowing that it could suck more doesn’t make it suck any less” – kind of a similar deal here).

For example, back in July before I left for my trip to California (post coming on that soon), I ran my first ever Glucose Tolerance Test (GTT) experiment. I won’t bore you with the details, just the important parts (for this story). When conducting GTT, you have to come into lab by 7AM to begin fasting your mice (6 hour fast). The time to actually do the GTT doesn’t take that long (~2.5 hours). BUT, because I work in reproductive toxicology…these exposed, pregnant mice are very precious samples, so we also collect as many tissues as we can following the GTT experiment (in other words…I dissect them). AND because we are interested in the potential developmental effects on the developing fetus…I also must separate out each embryo/placenta (and usually pregnant mice have 6-10 pups/litter). SO, when all is really said and done…if you have 4 mice in a day, you can expect to leave around 6PM. AKA, an 11 hour day. BUT, sometimes you have more. Like one day I had 7 mice and I was in lab until 9PM (a long, grueling 14 hour day).

It was hard, but it was also fun because this experiment was new to me and you get data back pretty quickly. But no matter how fun it is, it’s still hard. And you do this multiple days a week for about 3 weeks. I’m truly exhausted by the end of it. Naturally, after getting my results back, my PI told me I would have to do it again so that I could have more samples to conduct statistical analyses. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks. And, I just learned, I will be repeating it again so that I can get even more samples. My PI apologized (lol), and I was like, “it’s okay…I kind of expected you to say that.”

And while I expected this and agreed with this decision…I just thought back to that quote about the Red Queen Hypothesis, “I’m running as fast as I can just to stay in the same place.” Again, I know I’ve only been in this lab for 6 months and so I can’t expect to have a bunch of cool data from a bunch of different experiments, but, it’s still hard 🥺 Especially because I’m supposed to select the members of my thesis committee by the end of the calendar year, and how am I supposed to know who might be helpful to my project if I’ve really only been able to ask one question so far (and I still don’t really have an answer)??

And, admittedly, I often struggle with not knowing what is ahead of me (I was not joking about anxiety in my intro post lol). So that makes things difficult. But…I remain hopeful. Because one day, many months in the future (maybe many years), I’ll be able to ask some really cool questions about environmental exposures and how this affects maternal and fetal health and, who knows, maybe change the world? (I should probably set my expectations a little lower than that). More likely, just add more to the literature that hopefully, maybe, possibly, will inspire change in environmental policies so that maternal and fetal health can be more protected, no matter the cost to industry and corporations.

And to tie this all back to the Red Queen Hypothesis, even if I am constantly running as fast as I can just to essentially stay in the same place, I’m still here. And that’s all that matters. I’m surviving. And that’s enough. And one day, I’ll get my PhD. And that’s pretty fucking cool.

I hope other graduate students can relate a bit to these feelings, I hope some non-science folks enjoyed learning about this evolutionary theory, and I hope one day I look back at this blog post and giggle at how dramatic I can be sometimes. 

-K out 😉 

Sources:
Brockhurst, M. A., et al. (2014). Running with the Red Queen: the role of biotic conflicts in evolution, Proceedings: Biological Sciences, 281(1797). (Link)