Technician Week 2024: Helen Caldwell – Histology Service Manager
Helen works as Histology Service Manager in the first-floor lab in the South Building of the IGC, running the histology service for users within the university and outwith, including students from other universities who don’t have histology services and some private companies.
What was your route to becoming a technician?
I have been here for about 30 years. I had wanted to work in a lab since I was at school – that’s what I was interested in. I went to Stevenson College and then to Napier to do an HND in Biological Science.
I came here initially on a one-year research contract, and when that finished, I moved onto another one and another one until eventually I moved into a permanent post as a departmental technician.
There was a histology service within pathology at QMRI and a satellite service at the Western General Hospital. That satellite lab was located in the lab I was already working in and when the manager retired, I took over the running of the service. We moved over to IGC building in 2018.
What does your typical working day look like?
We do lots of mouse and human tissue work and recently we have also had some marine life samples, some coral and lichen, from groups doing work around climate change.
The main parts of our job are tissue processing, sectioning and staining. 
The tissue samples are processed overnight and the samples are embedded into paraffin blocks in the morning before being sectioned to be used for various staining techniques.
We then need to stain the sections which were cut the previous day. These sections are normally H&E (haematoxylin-eosin) stained, which shows the morphology of the tissue, or any other requested staining, as and when required. We then load up the tissue processor to start all over again with another round of processing overnight.
I also look after the histology Do-It-Yourself lab in the West Building, where users can cut sections and do general H&E staining themselves. It takes practice to get nice sections and some people don’t manage it at all. We have experienced technicians in the histology service who can do all your histology requirements for you.
Another part of my job is to look after the Hamamatsu slide scanner which is located in my lab.
What’s your favourite part of the job?
I enjoy doing immunohistochemistry (IHC) which uses antibodies to detect antigens in a tissue sample, which is another service we offer. The sectioning and H&E are routine but with IHC, when you have new antibodies, it’s interesting working out the conditions required for them to work. People are always pleased when you get the IHC to work.
Would you recommend this as a career?
I’m not sure and this is mostly to do with funding rather than the job. Funding is getting harder and harder to get. There’s not so much grant money around and everything is getting so expensive.
There are very few permanent jobs around in this field and in research in general, even for Postdocs and PhD students. They do their PhD and then have to find funding to carry on. Even if they have good research, there’s no guarantee they will get funding afterwards.
However, it’s a nice environment to work in. There are six groups in the lab and we all help each other out as we’re all doing the same sort of thing.
How has your job changed over the years?
Things have moved on so much. We used to do a lot by hand but it’s a lot more automated now. The development of equipment makes life easier – it’s quicker and more accurate.
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