A Marie Curie Story: studying samples that don’t work

I contacted everyone I knew who could offer me a job as a post-doc or at least help me to apply for scholarships abroad. After some meandering, New York became a preferred destination. My partner and I were seeking a big city with opportunities for both. From my side, I had been in Florida for a short while during my PhD and worked with a professor who could provide me with excellent references— having good references is more important than it should be.

I was offered with a one-year contract as a post-doc in NY, and at the same time I applied for a Marie Curie Outgoing Fellowship. These fellowships were the equivalent of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions offered nowadays by the European Commission. The main idea behind the fellowships is for the Fellow to leave the European Union and learn about a new topic, and then to come back and apply it to a new field — an interesting live lesson: go visit those who know, learn from what they do, and apply it back at home. Once in NY the odds smiled at me and my Marie Curie project was awarded. I was first in the waiting list and fortunately for me there were some funds available. That meant I had to develop a scientific project on my own.

In the US, people are friendly and they help you both at work and everywhere else with lots of little things. However, nobody really tells you what overall direction to take. For example, in my job I was helped with all details when setting up a new machine I bought, but no one ever questioned me as to whether my purchase was at all relevant. In Barcelona, where I came from, it works the other way around: people show little interest in your day-by-day but there is always someone that follows you from a distance to make sure you take the right decisions, both at work and in life. I felt a bit alone, with my European standards, carrying out a scientific project for the first time. I told myself that if I worked hard I would get successful output from the project — but that was not enough.

My project involved fabricating tiny samples that could create tiny magnetic waves — just like water waves in the ocean, but with oscillations of the magnetisation in a solid material. The goal was to image them with X-rays (obviously there was no simpler way to do it because of the nature of the waves).

Every other week I took a ridiculously luxurious bus to go from NY to Cornell University, where I stayed in an old apartment, sharing a small room with other researchers (all of them were foreigners because a local researcher would have never accepted that sort of accommodation). I spent most of the time locked in a cleanroom, nanofabricating samples that would allow me to do my experiment, imaging magnetisation waves. The other weeks I worked in the office and in the lab in NY, trying to find ideas for using the magnificent and promising magnetic waves for building super computers and bio-inspired devices that emulate how the brain functions. But of course, I first needed to image them. During the weekends and the weeks I stayed in NY I enjoyed the city. I met people, I ran, and I took cooking classes.

In the lab I worked I met plenty of interesting people. We all had our own little project to work on, and although we did not share much about our scientific jobs, we developed a strong friendship. There I met DB, another post doc who was a bit too stiff and had limited social skills. He told me, the first day we met, that his ideas had been stolen by other people in all his previous jobs. I just avoided having contact with such a character.

After a year of working hard and having achieved almost nothing, I began wondering whether or not I was doing things right. The lack of results at work contrasted however with the joy I experienced living in the city with friends, and especially with my partner.

With only one month to go before we had to go to the Berkeley synchrotron for a first try at imaging magnetisation waves with x-rays and my samples were not working — and I knew this better than anyone else. I tried to tell this to the other people involved in order to stop and postpone the experiment. However, I probably did not make myself clear and the experiment went ahead as planned. Surprisingly to me, a week before going to Berkeley I learnt that DB was also coming as a collaborator. It seems that he had been involved in the conception of the idea before I came to NY (and probably someone responsible for the whole project was unable to refute it). I had already been warned by DB that he used to have ideas stolen.

I found myself trying to image magnetisation waves in a synchrotron with samples that did not work at all. I had tried everything until the very last moment. I had spent nights and days and whole weekends in the cleanroom and lab. I had even forgotten the existence of life outside of my experiment. Synchrotron experiments are usually organised in blocks of time corresponding to whole days. We had secured three days in a row and although I knew the experiment could not work, we had to be there all day and all night to watch for something.

The last day of the experiments, I got up at noon because I had had the night shift, and went to eat something. I walked alone down the street and I perceived a faint homeless smell, which did not surprised me at first because Berkeley has two homeless people at each corner (and surprisingly residents seem not to see them). Anyway, the light homeless smell persisted after two blocks and I finally realised it was me. Focusing on the work had made me forget about everything else; my jacket stank, my left shoe had a hole, and my hairstyle had gone one level further than the mad scientist style. I ate and afterwards, I decided to buy new clothes and shoes. I cut my hair, I shaved, and I headed towards the synchrotron in order to do my last shift in the experiment. That night we came up with some interesting ideas in the synchrotron on how to make those damn samples work. But we failed once more.

The next day I went to visit a friend of mine in Davis, a two-hour drive away, and I was sick for the three days I was there.

The following year, in NY and later on in Barcelona, I managed to create good samples and image the magnetisation waves with everything I had learnt on my first trip to Berkeley.

Ferran Macià