Postdoc Appreciation Week: Lawrence Bates

During Postdoc Appreciation Week, which recognises the exceptional contribution of research staff to the University, we speak to Lawrence Bates about life as a postdoc in Jenny Nichols’ lab, which studies the early stages of mammalian development, from formation of the blastocyst to implantation, gastrulation and the onset of organogenesis.

What was your route to becoming a postdoc?

I was lucky to have a friend who had started her PhD when I started my Masters in Cambridge and she let me know about an opening for a research assistant in the lab she was working in, so I went and worked there for a year.

An opening for a PhD position came up which enabled me to stay in the same lab working on mouse embryonic stem cells, studying how they maintain their state and how they make decisions about what they are going to turn into downstream. I really enjoyed that as I was working on things I cared about.

When I finished my PhD, I stayed on for a couple of years to finish my projects. I was working with a couple of other labs and I got to know Jenny Nichols. She was working with mouse embryos but was shifting her focus to human development and I was really interested in how the sorts of things we were learning in mice could be taken further in a human-centred direction.

When she moved to the MRC Human Genetics Unit, at the Institute of Genetics and Cancer, I was able to join her as a postdoc.

What does the role of a postdoc involve?

The type of work involved depends hugely on the lab you’re in and the type of person you are. It’s a very demanding position but it’s very rewarding to be doing research.

Postdocs often feel undervalued and I think I’m in a very lucky position that my group leader has always been incredibly supportive and shown her gratitude. Often the way labs succeed is through postdocs who go above and beyond. Sometimes, that is just something that is expected of them rather than being cherished and respected.

What kind of research do you do?

We’re very lucky to have a licence to work with real human embryos which have been generated for infertility treatment. We have these remarkable resources we can use to understand how the early embryo develops.

The embryos come from couples who have undergone IVF and have embryos left over which are not going to be used for reproductive purposes. They are offered the choice to donate them to scientific research and will have a discussion with their doctor about the types of experiments they could be used for.

In theory, we can work with them for up to about 14 days. There’s a critical stage of development – gastrulation – where the cells begin to acquire more diversity and we’re not allowed to go beyond the start of that point. Even without that limit in place, practically we can’t go beyond seven days. That’s the point the embryo would implant in the uterus.

However, it depends how we work with them. If we have them as an intact embryo, it’s still considered to be a human embryo. If we break it down, taking individual cells from within the embryo, it’s considered its own separate thing and we can work with those as cell lines and tissues. We have adapted cell-based models of embryo development to allow us to start to interrogate both the normal development and anomalies that can occur in the first month of development.

A huge number of embryos fail to develop – only a third of conceptions become a live birth. Somewhere in the region of one third of embryos fail to develop before they implant into the uterus. Another quarter or so fail in the first week after implantation. That’s a huge number that are lost as miscarriages.

That’s obviously a problem for purposes of fertility and it’s significantly worse for couples with fertility issues. If things go wrong, it can lead to dramatic consequences later on and significant health issues.

What is the difference between using mouse and human embryos?

I think there are two big differences between studying mouse and human embryos. One is the value of the human embryo donation. Someone has had to make a conscious choice to give this embryo to us. They are precious and we work with them all the more carefully because there is so much value to them.

From a scientific point of view, it’s interesting because the mouse work was always both a model of cells in general and understanding how cells behave, and also a model of human development and a proxy for work that used to be impossible in humans. To switch to specifically human cells, it’s realising that next step.

What are your career aspirations?

I want to have my own lab someday, hopefully fairly soon. I have been applying for lectureships which would be a mixture of teaching and research where they would support me through grant applications to gather the funds to run my own lab.

I think it’s rewarding to share what you have learnt. In a sense, teaching is a critical aspect of academic research because it’s always a fundamental part of our job to share our research findings in publications and at conferences. Sharing that knowledge with students is really just another aspect of that communication. At the moment, I give one lecture a year but I do a lot of one-to-one and smaller group teaching and supervision in the lab.

There are specific projects that I have developed from scratch here that would form the backbone of my new lab, and there are things we have started working on which I would also love to carry forward.

What is life like for postdocs at the IGC?

There are a lot of people who have worked here for a very long time which demonstrates they are happy. I feel I am in a lab where I’m really respected and appreciated. I have section meetings which are engaging and encouraging. That just makes it an environment where you want to be the best you can be.

The Chancellor’s Fellowships are a fantastic opportunity. We always have several new Chancellor’s Fellows at the IGC. We have been really good at recruiting talent in that way but it’s still an incredibly competitive position.

I want to say thank you to all the people in the IGC who support the work postdocs do – including support services, facilities, the finance team and everyone across the board.