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The room is kind of overheated; I'm sitting near the middle of one of the rows, closer to the back. I had intended to sit by the aisle, but people kept coming in late, and it seemed like the conference planners hadn't anticipated this session to be as well attended as it is. My talk is closer to the end; I'll give a quick talk about my paper, which is standard for conferences like these. I had a few people stop by and look at my poster earlier, so I'm wondering if anyone will have comments after my presentation.
I glance at the little paper that had he agenda for the session and wince, but try to hide that behind a hand. I recognize the session moderator; he had some opinions about the provisional paper when it was submitted months ago. I was surprised my paper wasn't desk rejected because of his comments, but apparently his opinion hadn't held enough sway to get me kicked. Woodford was an adamant traditionalist in evolutionary microbiology, and he had not taken my position of a life-form evolving independently of hydrogen with panache. I actually laughed over the email I got from him with a couple of other postdocs after lab hours over beers. We taped up the email to one of the lounge cabinets; none of us had ever drawn fire by someone who'd written a textbook before.
Seeing his name in faded ink on the crumpled agenda gave me pause though. I momentarily considered abandoning the session, wriggling in my seat as I thought. But no... this was science! This was a conference of my peers! He can't be the end all of every scientific opinion.
The usual quiet chatter that swarmed over the start of a conference session quieted as Woodford stepped up behind the podium. He was maybe in his fifties and had the look of a successful academic; silver haired, tweed coat that looked like it had seen the Nixon administration. He gave a benign smile as he waited for the last of the conversations to die down. I sunk lower in my seat, prevaricating. Should I leave? Damn it, maybe I should.
He even sounded like a typical professor; well modulated lecturing voice, you could hear him clear to the back of the room. "We've had some interesting contributions here today. Some might even say unorthodox... contributions." He gave a slightly derisive chuckle, and for a second I could swear his eyes flicked toward me from where he was on the podium. I could feel a flush clamor up my neck. Even worse, the crowd echoed the chuckle, and it felt like I had stepped on a tiger trap and plummeted into a pit of spikes. My stomach curdled. I had to swallow hard to keep down a sudden rush of bile.
However, Woodford had warmed to the topic. His expensive, pampered skin gleamed under the warm speaker lights. "Never thought that a speculative paper on xenobiology would be the talk of the town over cancer research papers, but I guess every year teaches you something new in microbiology." A ripple of laughter from the audience, including the people seated next to me. A wave of nausea rolled over me. Doubtless three-quarters of these people, probably more, couldn't even link my face with the name on the poster down in the display room. But they sure as hell knew my paper.
I couldn't breathe. I wanted to sink down in my chair until I was on the floor. My heart was beating so hard that the pulse in my temples jostled my glasses.
Woodford had taken a moment to let the laughter breathe, and he lifted the little glass of water by the podium. As an after-thought, a snide little smirk crossed his face. "Water, anyone? Stuff of life." And he snickered as he took a sip. Unfortunately this was the dam that broke the attendees' reserve, and now there was honest to god guffaws from a few of the rows. In spite of myself, I had to look to see if I knew any of them; I spotted a few faces that had stopped to ask me about the paper, and had seemed polite and interested. I felt the flush creep up my face until it hit my hairline. The tiny hairs on the back of my arms pressed against my rumpled button-up shirt.
I could hear my breath shaking as it strained out of my tight throat. I reached forward to grab the back of the chair in front of me and stood as unobtrusively as I could, using the other hand to tuck the second-hand, overly large suit-coat and conference badge against my stomach and chest. The world had become strangely indistinct and blurry, and thankfully I could no longer hear the specifics of anything Woodford might have been saying.
If I didn't move fast, I was going to throw up over all of these people, and I sure as hell didn't need that on top of being ritually shamed in a conference. I think I must have mumbled a few 'excuse me"s given I had been pushed into the center of the row as more and more people joined the session late. I couldn't look at their faces, the sheer terror of seeing that parsimonious judgement there suffusing me.
I somehow made it out of the row without tripping on anyone or loosing the meager lunch I had picked out of the provided prepackaged sandwich line. My one goal was making it to the bathroom, hopefully to stay there until halfway through the session and then I could creep back to my hotel room and stay there until it was time to leave. My entire body was too hot and too cold, and I could feel a fine sweat across my entire body.
This wasn't a PhD-focused conference either. The average age of the attendees here hovered somewhere around 50, making these people solidly tenured professors or mid-career scientists in industrial and government labs. The thought that these people were casually kicking a very junior scientist (me) while he was at the bottom of the ladder made the bottom of my stomach drop out. I felt like I was in an elevator on free-fall.
I made it to the bathroom while I felt the bile burn the back of my throat. Thank god the bathroom was empty; I hated throwing up, and I especially hated the pathetic sounds of my emotionally driven social sickness.
The laughter, like a jeering ocean wave, replayed in my head, and I could feel a sudden sting of tears behind my eyes. Woodford's smarmy grin plastered itself across my inner eye, and I had a sudden moment of clarity before I threw up again: 'My god. That man hates me.'
It took a few seconds of heaving, and I could feel my ribs aching as I drew back, my breath clattering across the tiled walls of the little cubicle, but the more logical part of my brain interposed. He doesn't hate me. He thinks I'm ridiculous. Which was somehow even worse than hating me. He didn't even respect me enough to hate me.
The same went for all of those people in there. You didn't laugh at people you respected. They thought my work was a laughingstock. It felt like my brain was being forced through an event horizon. All those months I had proudly checked my models, argued its merit with other postdocs over beers, presented updates during weekly meetings. I really thought I had been doing something important, *saying* something important. Something revolutionary. Hell it wasn't even reviewer 2 coming for my ass this time! Reviewer 2 was the nice guy! Some random professor is the one out here ambushing me.
Wasted. All those months wasted. Because I was too stupid to even see, too willfully blind to want to acknowledge, the push back. Still sitting on the ground, gasping, I swiped a hot hand over my face to clear it of sweat and reflexive tears, trying to think back. Had anyone really said anything during those lab meetings? I tried to even think back to the peer reviews on my poster abstract, but all I could think of was the pride I felt when I remembered the feedback of the novelty of my position. A cold trickle of dread cut through the panic as my brain frantically dug through the muck of those months.
Sure it was a novel position, and I was proud of that. But the reviewers had also pointed out there wasn't much in the literature to even establish this as a solid rebuttal. Initially I had thrown the criticism off because yeah, this was at its core a theoretical paper. I didn't actually have experimental data to show a hydrogen-free microbiota; no one did. And it was unlikely I could even get one, the conditions of my paper suggested environments too extreme for any existing technology to survive potential collection. My brain briefly went down a spiral of potential deep see thermal vents before casting it aside.
I was trying to vindicate myself to myself, sitting on a sour smelling hotel bathroom, pin-balling between recrimination and devastation. I hadn't even been this dejected when I lost a month of data during my dissertation.
I would sit here a little while longer, let my stomach settle. But there was no way I would go back to the session. I couldn't face all those people, who thought my contributions were absurd. I would go back to my hotel room and watch cable, maybe raid a snack machine and clear out the minibar.
It was the coward's way out for me.