The story about Chlamydia

“You’re the only person in the world who has a folder on your computer hard drive titled Chlamydia,” my sister once said.

Now to get the story straight almost ten years ago I spent a year studying the molecular evidence of Chlamydia affecting our Koala population. It was my graduate science Honours degree and during the project I carried the scientific motivation and fascination for discovering something new although most of the year involved silently trying to spell Chlamydia correctly and pronouncing the species name C.trachomatis without embarrassment.

Now my results are not ground breaking (although I recently searched for my own publication and it has been cited a few times since – Whoopee for bibliometrics) but I did discover and characterise novel uncultured Chlamydiales in Free-Range Koala Populations.

Although I no longer work in the laboratory, I have never been able to capture the same feeling of accomplishment as I did from that project.

What made this project different? Was it:

• The autonomy and problem solving,
• The opportunities to experiment with an idea,
• Having access to skilled and intelligent mentors,
• Strict deadlines which meant late night and weekends in the laboratory to try new experiments, theories and repeat results. Extra hours which for some reason I did not mind doing.
• The meticulous writing up of laboratory notes. Like a Vision diary creative expression is all in your laboratory books and lastly
• The satisfaction of having your results in print.

I often wonder if I should have continued with the curiosity that drives career scientists into a PhD and research. Instead I chose the commercial world. Today I wonder if I had continued on the research trajectory would I have been driven to discover something innovative and groundbreaking or even becoming an expert in my own niche of science and would it have been a more fulfilling career.

So what parts of that project I enjoyed most can I start to replicate again today?

On a final note, not to dampen my achievement in the paper “Molecular evidence for novel chlamydial infections in the koala (Devereaux etal Syst Appl Microbiol. 2003 Jun;26(2):245-53), can you see the different interpretation my father had as he would proudly report in public that his daughter “is named after new species of Chlamydia and had a publication to boot.”?

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