The Awesome Stress Of Science And How To Relieve It

Now Gasser, who joined UC-Davis' biochemistry and biophysics department in 1989 after a five-year stint at St. Louis-based Monsanto Co., faces the unenviable prospect of repeating the application process. In addition, he is struggling to settle into the still-unfamiliar role of teacher at Davis and, simultaneously, trying to jumpstart his research program and rev it into full gear. Marshaling the time and energy to manage all three demands--teaching, doing research, and applying for grants--is a tremendous strain, he acknowledges: "Each one could easily be a full-time job." The complexity of Gasser's dilemma is familiar to researchers. "Scientist-types, by their very nature, are ambitious and intellectual, [which means] they can, by their personality, worry a lot, create self-sabotaging thoughts, be impatient with themselves," says David Munz, a stress researcher at St. Louis University who periodically leads a program in stress management for scientists and other employees at Monsanto. Indeed, University of California, Los Angeles, chemistry professor Donald Cram, a 1987 Nobel laureate in chemistry, credits the uncompromising--and often stress-inducing--standards he always held himself to as being instrumental to his success as a scientist. Even now, with a Nobel Prize and a bushel of other honors to his name, he refuses to lower his expectations. "I'm always running scared," Cram says. Whereas once it was the pressure to measure up to his peers that motivated him, now it's "beating out the younger people, surviving in a competitive atmosphere," that keeps the 69-year-old professor from growing complacent. Stress manifests itself physically and psychologically in a number of ways: muscle tension, heart palpitations, depression. While the temptation may be to dismiss these stress responses as a passing discomfort, the long-term effects can actually be very serious. Medical researchers believe stress can lead to the onset or aggravation of hypertension, heart disease, and peptic ulcers, among other ailments, and perhaps even diminish the immune system's ability to resist disease and infection. It can also take its toll in other ways, disrupting relationships at home and performance at work. In fact, stress has been known to drive researchers away from scientific careers altogether (The Scientist, Oct. 29, 1990, page 23). Job stress is difficult to measure, since reactions to challenge vary widely among individuals. A pending deadline may prompt panic in one person and creative excitement in another. Nonetheless, stress experts say positions that entail a heavy burden of responsibility but little control or authority tend to be the most anxiety-inducing for workers. One might conclude, by this criterion, that the scientific profession, particularly when practiced in the academic arena--where research is almost totally self-directed and where, presumably, parity between authority and responsibility is the norm--would probably rank low on a scale of stressful occupations. But as Gasser's story--along with the accounts of a dozen other researchers interviewed for this article--indicates, scientists are no strangers to stress. Their profession subjects them to a battery of pressures, some endemic to their environment, others arising out of their own commitment to the pursuit of science. Topping the list of apprehensions for academic scientists is one of the few aspects of the job that leaves them at the mercy of external forces: the question of funding. Harry Paxton, U.S. Steel Professor and the acting head of the metallurgical engineering and materials science department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, voices the consensus when he says, "These days the single biggest pressure is trying to keep grant money coming in. It's become very difficult the last four to five years. The number of proposals written compared to the ones that get funded is nonsensical." That the fierce competition for grants is making life uncomfortable for scientists has been well documented. Still, probably no one understands the problem better than new faculty members like Gasser, who are just beginning the grueling hike up the tenure trail. The cutthroat "publish or perish" climate that predominates at universities places assistant professors under enormous pressure. Their department expects them to conduct first-rate research in addition to teaching and serving on committees. At the same time, obliged to outfit a lab from scratch, young investigators often have little choice but to write one application after another in the hopes of funding their work in piecemeal fashion. His situation would certainly have been simplified, Gasser says wistfully, if he had obtained enough money his first time around: "I would be much less stressed out than I am right now because I wouldn't have a need of applying for grants this year, and that's probably going to take two months of my time that I could really use for [teaching and research]." Angst over job security may end when an academic researcher obtains tenure, but funding remains a perennial problem regardless of stature, senior scientists warn. "The business of raising money is eternal. It's with you all the time," says Nobelist Cram, who has had four decades of practice at writing proposals while running his laboratory. Even a major windfall may not ease a scientist's fears entirely. Brian Matthews, professor of physics at the University of Oregon and director of the university's Institute of Molecular Physics, saw many of his doubts about the long-term stability of his lab melt away when he was named to a seven-year appointment as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator last spring. But his good fortune has also sparked a new worry about the backlash the honor may bring. "[My] major concern is that the other granting agencies are tending to reduce support because ...the assumption is that the investigator has more than sufficient support from the Howard Hughes organization," he says. While scientists in industry and government tend to be spared the trials of writing grant proposals, money matters loom large in their minds, too. Upon joining Calgene Inc., the Davis, Calif.-based biotech startup, in 1982, plant pathologist Robert Goodman discovered that he had walked into a financial situation far more precarious than anything he had ever encountered during his eight years as a professor at the University of Illinois. "At times, for the first couple of years, we were week-to-week in terms of financing," he remembers. In retrospect, "the pressures to bring in revenues were not a whole lot different from writing grant proposals," says Goodman, who left Calgene last May to return to academia (The Scientist, Aug. 20, 1990, page 1). The difference, he says, is that in industry, "you meet face-to-face with the people you are trying to get funds from. And you do it many times a year." Of course, the volatile atmosphere of a startup is not exactly representative of the conditions at most companies, whose solvency is generally not in doubt. But even at a well-heeled organization like Monsanto, the necessity for reconciling research expenditures with budget allowances can frazzle a worker's nerves. "When you say you're going to do a research project, you are required to put a time and cost on it," Gasser says, recalling a problem he often faced at the chemical and pharmaceutical company. Given the inponderabilities inherent in any scientific investigation, he says, these estimations often go astray, and "you end up trying to fit a research project that's gone overboard into [your original] time and cost constraints. That probably is the biggest producer of stress: the need to predict when you will be able to get results and the fact that your predictions are rarely correct." In addition, "I had to constantly justify my research to my direct superior, my superior's superior, the president of the company, and visiting review boards" when he worked in industry, Gasser says. Stress is not a factor that necessarily increases or diminishes as a scientist rises in prominence. Rather, it takes on new shapes in relation to changes in the individual's status. While senior scientists generally face less pressure to prove themselves and have an easier time getting grants than do their more youthful associates, that stature carries a price. "You have more responsibilities to more people," Matthews says. "You're expected to serve on review panels and participate in site visits, and are asked much more to evaluate the work of peers." According to Matthews, the need to balance these responsibilities against his commitment to his lab creates a quandary that he finds very difficult to resolve. The load of administrative and managerial duties that come with rank can also cause a bit of anguish, especially for scientists accustomed to spending most of their time in the lab. This turned out to be true for chemist Michael Boyd when he was kicked upstairs from the bench at the National Cancer Institute in 1984 to serve as director of NCI's Developmental Therapeutics Program. Boyd says that it wasn't the volume of work or the character of his position that frustrated him so much as the "incredibly scheduled nature of my existence." Boyd says that while he preferred to devote his mornings to his more intellectually demanding tasks, the endless rounds of meetings he was expected to attend as director made it impossible for him to maintain even a semblance of a normal routine. "I was totally at the mercy of an unyielding calendar," he says. Boyd can speak in the past tense because last February he traded back his desk job and the executive "straitjacket" that went with it for his old lab coat and a new post at the helm of an intramural research laboratory at the institute. His job is as intense as ever, Boyd reports, but as a result of his switch, the constraints on his time "have diminished considerably." Besides the troubles already mentioned, scientists encounter stress in other areas of their professional lives. Overseeing the research of their graduate students and postdoctoral associates, keeping abreast of the relevant journals in their fields, juggling their commitment to work with their obligation to their families--each of these is cited as an agent of potential distress. "The trick is to lessen the wear and tear so we can enjoy the demands of daily living," says psychologist Munz. "When you reach your limits and start having stress responses, then you stop enjoying the [demands]." The seminar Munz gives at Monsanto is designed to keep these stress responses in check. His presentation is drawn from a comprehensive program called HealthLine, which he helped develop in 1979 and is now being delivered throughout the United States in hospitals and other health-care institutions. "I teach people practical things they can use day in and day out in their personal and work lives to manage themselves," he says. One of Munz's most practical recommendations concerns the importance of exercise in relieving tension. Evidence suggests that "10 minutes of complex movement can improve energy level, mood, and clarity of thought [for] up to two hours," he says, citing the findings of a seven-year study published last year by UC-Long Beach psychologist Robert Thayer in his book Biopsychology of Mood and Arousal (Oxford University Press, 1989). Overall, during his talk Munz runs through about 20 different techniques people can use to control stress, ranging from simple stretching routines to meditation. Robert Goodman lacks any formal training in stress management, but the strategy he relies on to maintain his mental equilibrium incorporates some of Munz's practices intuitively. "I've cultivated the ability to set aside the issue of the day or concern of the hour," he explains. Not all of Goodman's colleagues are so attuned to the delicate art of coping with stress. "Just work unbelievably hard" is Brian Matthews' prescription for answering the multitude of demands the profession places on him. His attitude is not atypical. Scientists agree that there are certain stresses that go with the job, whether it's the strain of working 60 to 80 hours a week or agonizing over the outcome of a multimillion-dollar research project. It's not that they are impervious to stress. Scientists simply appear willing to accept stress as one of the unavoidable consequences of embracing what Donald Cram calls the "challenge of doing first-rate and novel research." Jeff Seiken is a freelance writer based in Pittsburgh.

The Awesome Stress Of Science And How To Relieve It

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