By Phil Prime, Editor of Laboratory News – 7th November 2011

There are several things that a PhD student hopes to hear after a supervisor reads the first draft of a recently prepared research paper – the sentence “you should really be a journalist” is not necessarily one of them. Especially when accompanied with loud laughter.

These, however, were the words that greeted me one morning upon arrival in my lab. It was meant as a jibe of course, yet the words landed softer than I think was intended. Rather than retreat and lick my wounds, I thought “Yes. I think that maybe I should.”

It is a thought that has led me here – to the Editorship of a magazine where I get to write about, think about and talk about science for a living.

Why am I telling you this? Well I was asked to write a piece on why I like working in the science media, and yet to answer that I feel I need to explain how I got here in the first place. It most certainly wasn’t the plan.

As a fresh faced – well, faced at least – PhD student in the anatomical neuropharmacology department of Oxford University, a career of laboratory investigation was unfolding nicely in front of me. Yet it was becoming clear that the things I loved about science couldn’t be found in the lab. They couldn’t be revealed by clever use of immunohistochemistry or patient examination under a microscope – not by me anyway.

The thing I loved about science was the big picture. It seemed to me at the time that being huddled away in a lab working on the minutia just got me further away from this big picture. It was the neat story of discovery that attracted me – yet, laboratory science is so rarely like that I found myself a little disappointed at the lack of, well, a plot arc.

Simply put, I am just too impatient. I need a hit of the thrill of discovery more often than they tend to come along for the average lab scientist. That of course is to my detriment, but nonetheless I followed my nose and decided that science journalism was more suited and departed from the lab to do battle with an NCTJ qualification.

And here I now sit producing not data but words, not empirical evidence but opinion and comment ­– and I have to say, so far I don’t regret a thing. I get to write about the success of science as a whole, and that really is what I love about working in science media – I get a front row seat for the big picture that seemed so obscured to me whilst in the lab.

I am convinced that a career path is really only something that becomes evident in retrospect. It would be hubris of the very worst kind, for example, if after his first successes Alan Sugar announced that he intended to eventually front a TV show where he gets to shout and gesticulate at publicity hungry buffoons. Yet in retrospect moving from a technology entrepreneur, to a business magnate, to a television ‘personality’ seems to hold some kind of logic.

For me also my career path only made sense once I became entrenched in science media and glanced back at my prior life as a scientist.

The team here at Alto Marketing would like to thank Phil Prime (Editor of Laboratory News, follow them on Twitter @Laboratorynews)  for contributing to the Alto Blog. If you are interested in becoming a guest blogger, then please do get in touch!