Science Estranged: Power and Inequity in Laboratory Life during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

In March 2020, academic research laboratories across the world shut down in response to the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic. As labs began to resume work in the weeks and months following the shutdown, the realities of daily life in the lab changed. This article offers an empirical investigation of how COVID-19 disrupted laboratory life and impacted laboratory workers in the United States, drawing on in-depth interviews with biomedical research trainees (postdoctoral researchers and advanced doctoral students) conducted between September 2020 and March 2021. This article demonstrates how laboratory life during the pandemic was marked by emergent stratifications and inequities in access to sufficient lab time, increased stress around productivity, and frustrations with the culture of academic science. I show how the loss of social interaction, and the ensuing lonely scientific struggles, made visible the importance of sociality in science for workers. Finally, I contend that pandemic disruptions not only amplified and exacerbated existing social inequities in lab settings but also resulted in workers’ estrangement from science itself.

Keywords

laboratory life academic science COVID-19 inequity labor

Introduction

In March 2020, academic research laboratories across the world shut down in response to the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic. The key recommendations to slow the spread of COVID-19 were to distance from one another and avoid contact in indoor settings--exceptionally challenging guidance to adhere to in most laboratory spaces. Save for those doing COVID-19 research and other essential projects, institutions instructed principal investigators (PIs) to shut down research operations.¹ Halting ongoing experiments, culling animal colonies, and preparing samples and animals for storage were cumbersome and costly feats (Nowogrodzki 2020; Thurston et al. 2021). When research activity resumed—for many, weeks or months later—the nature of “laboratory life” (Latour and Woolgar 1979), had changed. Time “in lab,” or working within laboratories, became a scarce resource: working safely in lab through the pandemic and its multiple surges meant a new experience of compressed time, shift work, and little, if any, socialization. With this new mode of laboratory life, the routine ways and workflows of normal science that had been taken for granted by laboratory workers were gone. In their place emerged new stratifications and inequities in access to sufficient lab time, stressors around productivity, and exacerbated frustrations with the structure and culture of academic science.

Sociologists and science and technology studies (STS) scholars have demonstrated how disasters such as weather events, epidemics, and economic crises amplify and exacerbate existing social inequities (Tierney 2012; Quarantelli 1998; Petryna 2013; Adams 2013; E. Kleinman 2003). As COVID-19 played out on the national and global stage, participants in this United States (US)-based study witnessed how the pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of our social safety nets, enduring health inequities, and racial injustices. Lab workers drew parallels to their experience in academic science. In the lab setting, workers highlighted how the pandemic intensified existing problems within the structure and culture of academic science. They expressed deep frustrations with power and inequality in their labs and institutions, problems they were aware of long before the pandemic began but that were amplified in its wake. The pressures to produce throughout the pandemic, set against formidable working conditions, highlighted misaligned values between lab workers and their PIs, which led them to question their participation in academic science. Participants were aware of such misalignments and power dynamics long before the onset of the pandemic; yet against the backdrop of crisis, these critiques became more visible and the disconnects more jarring.

Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with biomedical research workers in US academic laboratories during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article offers an account of how the pandemic impacted laboratory workers. For many laboratory workers, the pandemic underscored the importance of time—that is, time to do science in the ways participants enjoyed and are necessary to produce “good” scientific work. Time in lab became a scarce resource, leading to inequity in shift work and scheduling, loss of joy in work, and increased stress around productivity. The loss of social interaction, and the ensuing lonely scientific struggles, enabled workers to understand the importance of sociality in their science not only for their personal fulfillment but also for the benefit of their science. As I demonstrate, the ways institutional and lab leadership responded to the pandemic exacerbated existing inequities in academic science laboratory work. Consequentially, workers’ experiences during this time brought about structural critiques of the culture of academic science and its policing of boundaries between science and society.

Academic Capitalism and the Bureaucratization of Science

STS scholars have documented the transformative pressures facing academic science in the late 20th century, including the capitalization and bureaucratization of academic science and their concomitant institutional changes (Hackett 1990, D. L. Kleinman and Vallas 2001). Academic capitalism captures universities’ turn toward market-like activities, in which university employees are increasingly encouraged to engage in activities meant to generate external revenue (Hackett 1990; Jeske 2021; Nickolai, Hoffman, and Trautner 2012). Such work has shown how the boundaries between academic science and industry have blurred, markets increasingly shape academic research agendas, and scientists are encouraged to think like entrepreneurs (D. L. Kleinman and Vallas 2001; Hoffman 2021; Johnson 2017; D. L. Kleinman 2003; Popp Berman 2012). This literature has focused on the knowledge that is produced in these spaces and the practices through which such knowledge is produced, including how researchers and fields pursue particular research agendas and questions and work, to articulate doable research problems (Jeon 2019; Frickel et al. 2010; Hoffman 2017, 2021; Fujimura 1987).

Other scholars have attended to changes in the organizational structure of scientific teams, documenting their increasing size and how labs often function as small shops or quasi-firms (Etzkowitz 1983; Milojević 2014; Wuchty, Jones, and Uzzi 2007). They contend that academic capitalism and bureaucratization have created a class of “academic marginals,” which Hackett (1990) defines as scientists who hold positions in academic institutions but are not faculty (similarly, Lee and Walsh [2021] include “supporting scientists” such as staff or contract scientists and “permadocs” in this category). Hackett and others attribute the rise of academic marginals to the aforementioned structural changes in academic science, in which scientific teams are getting larger (Milojević 2014; Wuchty, Jones, and Uzzi 2007), and there is a growing mismatch between the production of new scientists and number of permanent positions in academic science (Hackett 1990; Gaughan and Bozeman 2019). Scholarship in this tradition has examined the institutional inequities that lower-ranking workers (e.g., staff scientists, trainees including postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students, and lab technicians) are subjected to and under these macro-level shifts (Gaughan and Bozeman 2019; Hackett 1990). Such work has also documented the increased specialization of doctoral and postdoctoral training, leading many to conclude that doctoral training in scientific fields no longer leads to independent, integrated scientists but to skilled technicians who need further training following the completion of the doctorate (Lee and Walsh 2021; Johnson 2017). These structural features now seemingly sustain the model of requiring long postdoctoral fellowships prior to the potential acquisition of permanent academic positions.

Recently, researchers have theorized how the bureaucratization of science and the shifts toward large teams in science have led to alienation among researchers (Johnson 2017; Lee and Walsh 2021), attending to the infrastructure of academic science and how macro-level trends shape the conditions under which scientists can feel fulfilled in their work (or not). However, less attention has been paid to the interpersonal dynamics of the laboratory environment and the experiences of low-ranking laboratory workers. In the case presented here, I link structural forces to lived experience, foregrounding the experiences of those in lower-status positions in academic science to show how the exogenous shock of the pandemic, in many ways, illuminated the conditions of their estrangement.² As will become clear in the analysis, workers not only recognized and articulated their estrangement, they also leveraged critiques of the academic science infrastructure that shaped their realities and, through these critiques, imagined how science—and the ways that laboratory groups are organized and managed—might be otherwise.

This study builds on the extant literature, offering an analysis of the experiences of advanced doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers—often termed trainees—in an era of bureaucratized academic capitalism during a particularly tumultuous time. Trainees occupy liminal roles in academic science: they are at once pursuing advanced training (e.g., doctoral degrees and postdoctoral training) but also operate as workers in labs sustaining the model of lab organization in which one PI builds a lab comprised of multiple graduate students, postdocs, lab technicians, and staff scientists. Their training is inherently tied to lab labor. As one participant, Sonia, put it plainly, “we are essentially workers. After our first year, we don’t even take any classes, we just work in the lab.” Thus, in what follows, I intentionally use the term workers to encompass trainees in order to underscore the tensions they experience in these liminal positions and highlight the well-documented precarity of pursuing scientific careers under academic capitalism.³ In doing so, this article centers the experiences and voices of everyday laboratory workers as they navigate the pursuit of scientific careers in academic science.

Method

Over an eight-month period, I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with biomedical research laboratory workers at research-intensive institutions who spent 70 percent or more of their weekly pre-pandemic work time at the lab bench. Eligible workers included advanced doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, and lab staff at US institutions with high research activity (R1s).⁴ Initial interviews (T1) were conducted in September-October 2020 (n = 39), approximately six months into the pandemic, and follow-up interviews (T2) were conducted in February-March 2021 (n = 36),⁵ approximately six months following each participant’s first interview. This second time point was approximately one year after early cases of COVID-19 were reported in the US, and eleven months following widespread shutdowns. Having spent significant amounts of time in biomedical laboratory settings as an ethnographer, I was familiar with the hustle and bustle of these spaces. When the pandemic hit, it was clear that the nature of work would need to change in order for workplaces to be safe. In the absence of observations, open-ended semi-structured interviews provided the best way to collect data on the events unfolding during the pandemic, and are regarded as a method that yields rich qualitative data (Charmaz 2014; Weiss 1995).

Participants were recruited through academic institution listservs, website advertisements, and by word-of-mouth. Participants were offered a US$25 gift card in appreciation for their time. Participants represented multiple disciplines within biomedical sciences and were located at universities and research institutes.⁶ T1 interviews ranged from forty-five to ninety minutes and covered trainees’ background and training, COVID-19 disruptions and consequences for research projects, experiences working during the pandemic, mental health and well-being, and reflections on trainees’ roles in science, as well as future plans and career goals. T2 interviews ranged from thirty to seventy-five minutes and followed-up on each of the areas discussed in T1 interviews, gathering further data on how laboratory work progressed between T1 and T2, new challenges and experiences of participants, and reflections on work and future plans.

All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed for analysis. All data were imported into MAXQDA for analysis. Analysis procedures followed constructivist grounded theory practices, including memoing and coding of data (Charmaz 2014). Interview memos were written following T1 and T2 interviews. In the spirit of iterative data collection and analysis, analytic memos and interview memos were used to develop T2 interview guide questions. A codebook was developed inductively from open coding initial interviews. The refined codebook, which included code clusters on COVID-19 disruptions, mental health, laboratory organization, scientific practice, career planning, and institutional structure, was then used to complete focused coding on all interviews (n = 75). All names used in this manuscript are pseudonyms. Institutional review board approval was obtained from the University of California, San Francisco.

Laboratory Life in the Pandemic

Across the board, workers experienced the pandemic lab life—from shutting down to developing shiftwork models to going into work—as chaotic. This section explicates what working in a lab was like for laboratory workers during the pandemic’s first year. Importantly, the new mode of lab life was marked by scarcity: not only of time in lab but also in terms of leadership from their PIs. As I show in this section, the lack of leadership emblematic of laboratory groups during the pandemic months led to a new normal that exacerbated and extended inequities in lab groups.

Lab Maintenance and Division of Labor

In the weeks leading up to their institutions’ shutdowns, most participants reported that neither they nor their PIs expected lab work to be disrupted or at least for not such an extended time. In lab meetings, many did not even talk about the possibility of shutting down. When some academic science institutions began shutting down, or at a minimum instructing employees to work from home when possible, some participants at other institutions brought this up with their PIs. For instance, Isabel recounted, “I remember having an exchange with my PI that really bothered me in which he wrote, ‘well, your work is hands on.’” Even once institutional closures were announced, some lab PIs appealed to their institutions to permit their labs to remain open, on grounds that they were conducting essential research, resulting in lab workers continuing work as normal in the early days of the pandemic.

The shutdown ended up having very little lead time, in part because of this resistance, which meant that lab workers found themselves traveling into the lab at a moment’s notice or working longer hours to finish experiments and get their materials in order, freeze cell lines and worms, or prepare flies for safe storage for an indefinite time. Biomedical research heavily relies on the use of model organisms such as Drosophila melanogaster (flies), Caenorhabditis elegans (worms), zebrafish, and rodent models (e.g., mice, rats) that are specifically bred for studying certain biological processes, disease conditions, and potential therapeutics (Creager et al. 2007; Rader 2004; Nelson 2018). These models, or “tools,” are both bought commercially as well as developed in labs. For many labs, building these model organisms is an important aspect of the research itself, and they are costly both in terms of financial resources and time.

Model organisms are highly specific to experimental work: they must be at particular developmental stages, exhibit specific genotypes, and be maintained at specific conditions in order to be used in a given experiment. Critically, these model organisms are often not ready-made but instead the process of building the transgenic models for cells, flies, mice, worms, and other model organisms can often take many weeks if not months or years.⁷ Most biomedical research institutions have dedicated animal facilities where organisms are housed (though some, particularly worm and fly models, typically have their own rooms within a given lab). Institutional animal facilities have their own technicians and veterinarians for animal care and veterinary needs, but during the pandemic, animal maintenance was a particularly challenging obstacle as it requires extensive labor on highly regimented schedules.

During the period where operations were fully shut down, it was common practice for labs to designate “skeleton crews” that were responsible for going in a few times a week to maintain animals and cells. Across the board, participants noted that these responsibilities fell to postdocs, graduate students, and animal technicians—those lower in the lab hierarchy—and not PIs. While some PIs asked for volunteers to do this work, many workers found themselves assigned to this role. As Maia explained:

I wasn’t asked whether I wanted to be, I was sort of voluntold that I was going to be this “essential” person. And through all of that, there’s been no acknowledgment really that those things have fallen to the people who earn the least.

Similarly, Nisha acknowledged that “someone needs to take care of the mice and the cells” but that she did not feel comfortable about it: “I would go super early in the morning so that I wouldn’t see anybody else. Honestly, in the beginning of this, I was a little—I didn’t want to [go in] basically. I was a little worried.”

Implementing Shift Labor Models

As institutions allowed research operations to resume in the late spring and early summer of 2020, many labs returned at 12.5 percent capacity, ramping to 25 percent, and eventually 50 percent.⁸ Most labs adopted shift schedules to navigate these capacity restrictions. By and large, PIs tasked lab groups to “come up with a plan that worked for [them],” and participants attributed this tactic to the “democratic” and “hands off” style their PIs often exhibited. Yet, without clear leadership over how resources would be allocated during the pandemic, such hands-off approaches led to inequitable distribution. Participants described idiosyncratic approaches to shift models: some adopted a group model where the lab was divided into two or three groups depending on size. Each group could sign up for times and the order would then rotate (to create equity in preferred shifts and total amount of time per week). Others opted for “pod” models to keep the same people working together to limit necessary contact tracing in the event of someone becoming ill. Still others, especially smaller labs, opted for a free-for-all signup sheet. If there were priority projects happening in lab (e.g., papers in revision experiments), then PIs did step in. If working on these projects, workers were able to get first dibs on hours. For instance, Jasmine’s PI emailed her lab saying, “let Jasmine choose the hours because we are trying to do this [project] as fast as possible.”

If the idea of shifts seemed reasonable on paper, implementing them in practice was far more complicated and unequal, with the burden of these adjustments being distributed unevenly across workers. Participants discussed an assumption that because many postdocs and doctoral students were in their late twenties and thirties, often without children, that they should be more accommodating and flexible. Maia described her frustrations:

It seems people have pitted against one another parents and nonparents. I’ve seen so many articles and commentaries on Twitter about how hard it is for parents right now and how nonparents need to understand that burden. I would rather if the dialogue was more like, “this hurts everybody, because when we don’t have good support for parents, then they’re not able to contribute as much as they want to, to the team.” The responsibilities get shifted around in strange ways. And so I don’t feel at all that the lack of childcare only affects the parents. Then [the institution] gets to kind of take a backseat and people aren’t talking about the right things. People are instead talking about how we should work. We should be ready to meet at weird times ‘cause parents might need that. And instead, we should be discussing how our society doesn’t support science and working parents.

Maia and many others felt unable to voice these frustrations in their labs and institutions. They explained that they felt that the pivot to lab work as shift work pitted individuals against one another, obscuring the institution’s responsibility to support its workers and failing to create the space for conversations about equity.

Accompanying the shiftwork models that labs adopted, logistics such as commuting and planning lab time became substantial obstacles. While this added layer of planning was merely a nuisance for some workers, it was overwhelming for many, especially those with long commutes as well as those who relied on public transportation to get to work. Participants explained how they often needed to go in earlier or stay longer in order to accomplish necessary lab work. Labs that implemented morning and afternoon shifts left “nonbusiness hours,” typically before 7 am and after 6 pm and weekends, up for grabs. Those working the morning shift, typically 7 am to 1 pm, often felt they needed to come into lab earlier in order to have enough time to complete experimental work before the afternoon shift workers arrived. For workers with a forty-five-minute to sixty-minute commute, which was quite common for participants in this study, this meant waking up around 4 am in the morning, in order to arrive by 6 am. This was complicated by the realities of transportation: public transit often did not start running until 5 am or 6 am and was affected by limited schedules during the pandemic. Moreover, in the early days of the pandemic, few participants felt comfortable taking public transportation altogether due to the risk of infection.

One participant said her PI’s expectation for workers to show up for their assigned shifts regardless of transit challenges sent a message: “It feels like, ‘Hey, you go risk your life. And I’ll be at my house because I own a house in [expensive west coast city].’” Initially, some PIs offered to pay for car services (e.g., Lyft, Uber) or reimburse parking expenses. Other participants explained that they felt the offers to pay for individual cars only served to underscore that their PIs still expected them to come into lab, even if they did not feel safe going in. Moreover, as Luis explained, the reimbursement offers often did not last long: “initially our boss said, ‘I can pay, I can reimburse you for parking.’ After a month or two, he was like, ‘actually I don’t think I can do it anymore.’” This left intact the expectation to continue lab work, while shifting the costs of commuting—in both safety and financial terms—back to the workers. Consequently, some participants scraped together funds to purchase cars or bicycles.

While participants expressed excitement when they were finally able to return to lab, this shared enthusiasm obscured the new asks being made of lab workers. Ronnie explained how her PI anticipated everyone was excited to be going back to work after a few months of shutdown. She described a virtual lab meeting where:

My PI said, “You guys must be so happy to get back in the lab. I bet you’re all willing to work twenty-four hours.” He was a proponent of the twenty-four-hour schedule and people in my lab were getting that. He offered to pay for our Lyfts, and with that felt like a desire or expectation that we can work weird hours.

For Ronnie, her PI’s anticipation around a twenty-four-hour lab schedule and expectations for productivity highlighted the very different playing fields of lab workers and their PI. Though she did not feel comfortable going into lab, especially when research operations resumed initially, she also felt unable to voice her discomfort. Her new schedule consisted of working from home during the morning and early afternoon, then going into lab in the late afternoon and staying until eleven o’clock or so in the evening. Not only did she have to buy a bicycle to avoid public transportation for her commute, but now her workdays stretched to twelve hours and often more. Like many other workers who transitioned to working from home during the pandemic, most participants in this study reported increased number of hours per week spent working (Maurer 2020). Indeed, though typically regarded as expert and highly technical knowledge work, laboratory work began to bear new resemblance to shiftwork labor.

Adjusting to New Working Realities

At the time of initial interviews, in September and October 2020, many participants reported they felt these adjustments were somewhat feasible and were willing to work unconventional shifts and navigate cumbersome work protocols because they anticipated that they would be short lived. But at the time of the follow-up interviews, a year into these shift schedules and a new normal, those working early morning and late-night shifts were utterly exhausted and felt unable to voice their complaints to their PIs. As one participant put it, “Doing it for a couple months is okay. Doing it for six months plus, a year…it’s just not sustainable.” Aimee explained feeling “exasperated,” saying:

The earliest train I can take to work gets me there at like six. I have to leave my house a little bit before five, which means I’m waking up around four and then of course my body has gotten adjusted to that. It starts waking up before my alarms and I wake up at 3:30 am. I’m going to bed around 8 pm, and it just disrupts your whole life. I’ve kind of just started getting really resentful about it, I guess. There’s research about how shift work leads to poorer quality of life. I feel that. I’m unhappy. I’m certainly not as healthy. I know I’ve gained weight, I’m not exercising as much. I get home and I’m exhausted.

For Aimee, it was the little things that symbolized her daily experiences of alienation and powerlessness. She relayed a recent experience seeing her PI when she was leaving the lab for the day around lunchtime, having been there since 6 am that day. “I happened to notice him in his running clothes, leaving the building for a run and it made me so angry. Cause it’s just, sure you can get exercise when you’re coming into work at nine o’clock. That must be great.”

Though it was common prior to the pandemic for many workers to go to the lab semi-regularly on weekends, as needed, the adoption of shift schedules and reduced time made working on weekends an expectation. Many participants required the use of core facilities to conduct particular aspects of their experimental work, which was extremely challenging for those working on weekends when core facilities were closed.⁹ Many reported feeling slighted when others in their lab got advantageous hours, particularly over the long term. Mina described how competitiveness in her lab increased because of inequity in scheduling, where people working on the weekdays had access to equipment and core facilities that were closed on the weekends:

Competitiveness in lab got worse because people during the week were able to get more done. Some people got almost normal hour shifts and they were able to keep producing data. And here I am trying to mish-mash my shifts and trying to work on a Saturday and Sunday when the equipment isn’t available to me.

This had implications for people stuck with shifts where these facilities were unavailable, or when the only hours not booked were in the midnight hours, leading again to implicit expectations that they would make these schedules work.

Finally, the act of going into labs during this time also looked very different both in terms of COVID-19 protocols and how people organized their working time. Once in lab, only one lab member could be in a bay (the U-shaped workbenches characteristic of laboratories) at a time. Yet the nature of life in the lab is constant movement: from tissue culture hoods and centrifuges, to microscopes, to imaging machines, to computers and desk areas. Put simply, the principle of staying six feet apart from one another was impossible to accomplish in practice. Moreover, many participants talked about the space in which they work: old buildings with poor ventilation, some windowless, and many in open shared spaces with other labs. The design of these spaces, particularly in the early months of the pandemic when uncertainty loomed around how COVID-19 was spreading, added to concerns about working in the lab environment. One worker, Isabel, was so concerned and fed up that she bought fans and an air purifier for her lab. While she did bill these expenses to the lab, it took her initiative to get them purchased.

Participants often contextualized their experiences, knowing that the negative impacts of the pandemic were widespread—for scientists and others—and unevenly distributed in society. The world was in chaos, and after detailing their struggles in interviews, participants often felt the need to acknowledge their social positioning. Many echoed the sentiments of Elise, who said, “I know it is worse for others. I’m fortunate to still be getting a paycheck.” Nevertheless, the working conditions during the pandemic made lab life extremely stressful for the participants in this study. Going into work itself was a “logistical nightmare,” as Olga described it, and became taxing in ways that participants felt were not recognized by lab leadership nor by their institutions. As time went on, participants were quite frustrated that explicit conversations about the “new normal” were not happening. As I elucidate in the following sections, these frustrations were compounded by changes to the nature of scientific work during the pandemic.

Losing the Sociality of Science

The advent of shelter-in-place and requisite pandemic work practices demonstrated just how social the practice of laboratory work is; sociality not only made work enjoyable for laboratory workers, it was also essential to doing good science and making structural inequities more bearable. As STS scholars have shown, science is a social practice. Scientific work is carried out through interactions (e.g., conversations, negotiations, debates), and it is often through these interactions that researchers come to understand and create meaning from data (Knorr-Cetina 1999). For participants in this study, the absence of this sociality during the pandemic made visible and crystallized just how important these aspects were to their scientific work and to their experience in the workplace.¹⁰

When asked what they missed most about pre-pandemic lab life, across the board participants reported missing social interactions with lab members and the social aspects of science more broadly. Being in community with other lab members made lab work enjoyable for many. Without a sense of community, they began to wonder what drew them to science. Not only did the sociality of the lab make the mundane aspects of science more pleasurable, but it was also critical to troubleshooting, moving work forward, and feeling creative and energized in their science. Many participants remarked that they had not previously realized or appreciated how important the social life of the lab had been. The loss of this was profound for participants and they felt its impacts on their mental health and well-being as well as on their work progress.

Helen explained how social interaction was fundamental to creating “the lab experience” and, in fact, “the whole science experience.” She said that with physical distancing and density restrictions:

You have to be so isolated, even if there are other people in the lab. There are times where I’ve felt I’m almost reconsidering whether I really enjoy doing science. Because I just realized how social interaction is so important. It’s so fundamental to create the lab experience, and going into lab where it’s quiet, not talking to anyone, doing experiments for six hours straight…and it feels like it’s been twice as long because there are no breaks. You’re just doing the experiments consistently, not chatting to anyone. It definitely has changed the whole science experience. I personally don’t consider myself a very extroverted person. I enjoy going into a dark microscope room and imaging for many hours. But I really also enjoy those discussions after a talk, the random bumping into people, and it’s become so apparent how important those interactions have been.

Bumping into lab mates and colleagues from other labs spurred conversations about current experiments, and inevitably, struggles with those experiments. Researchers shared pointers or referred to others who they knew were experts in an area, creating connections in their scientific communities. These conversations were important yet they were also challenging to recreate virtually. Rachel explained:

The hardest part about not being there together is just the lack of knowledge. It’s like in the air, maybe the best thing to say about it. One thing that I miss a lot is that the lab would have lunch together. Half the time we’d talk about movies or whatnot, but things come up. It’s like, “Hey, I have this cloning problem.” “This isn’t working and I don’t understand it.” Or, “I read this thing in a paper. What do you all think?”

Similarly, Heidi described how her lab’s break room, where people were allowed to eat and drink and “do fun things” that were prohibited in the laboratory space, was an important site of community building and collective troubleshooting:

The break room was where you went with your cup of coffee to just think it through or to talk to someone…[shaking her head] The amount of problems that got fixed in that room. I’m convinced that if we still had that level of conversation and just casual interaction about science, I could probably have saved myself quite a few weeks in shelter in place when it’s just been me thinking to myself.

Activities like causally sharing data were made more difficult during the pandemic. Ronnie explained how when she saw something interesting in her data, she would normally just turn to someone nearby and say, “Hey check this out. What are your thoughts?” Sharing data was hard over Slack, the online platform her lab had adopted for work management, and the impromptu nature of the conversation was lost.

Participants talked about how in pre-pandemic times, their time in lab was less efficient—due to social interaction—but that the benefits of sociality far exceeded this. Lane, for instance, talked about coffee and lunch breaks that extended their workdays. Nisha talked about the nagging feeling of “I know I should be working right now” while attending talks or social events before the pandemic. Yet, for both, this was a key part of the lab experience that made their work enjoyable. In the absence of these interactions, they questioned whether they wanted to pursue careers in science, and many noticed that the absence of socialization negatively impacted their work and energy. For instance, Elise highlighted the exhaustion after twelve-hour shifts in lab:

Before we would just be chatting, or at lunch for an hour and time was eaten up. Now when I come into work my time is not chewed up by that kind of stuff. It’s literally chewed up by just work. It’s a lot to go twelve hours nonstop. It’s hard to want to do things when you get home. I’m spending more time actually working, and I’m also trying to get everything you can done because you don’t know when the next chance might be.

This time crunch also led to dwindling camaraderie, and a mentality of “getting in and getting out,” just staying in lab long enough to get one’s own work done. Marsha noted that it felt like, amid the scarce resource of time, it was “every person for themselves.” Others noted that it seemed colleagues just had less energy to give. Rita reflected that there was “less camaraderie now. And, of course, we’re only doing virtual lab meetings and people are not paying attention as much. So, you’re not getting as much feedback or suggestions for your work from people. I notice this for myself, too.” Similarly, Olga stated that:

There is a marked decrease in interaction from people, nobody wants to interact during lab meetings on Zoom. Nobody wants to interact during subgroup or department seminars. It was definitely bad at the beginning, but I think people were trying and then now it’s just abysmal.

She explained that she had recently given a talk to her department, virtually, and felt like she was “speaking into a vacuum.”

Many labs tried to recreate a sense of community during the pandemic, but it was challenging when many were feeling overwhelmed by the ever-changing environment, compounding current affairs, and juggling shifts. In normal times, Melissa’s lab had an ad hoc journal club where they would meet to discuss a paper of interest. “We tried once during COVID to do that virtually and it was okay,” she said, “but no one’s tried it since.” Heidi explained how her lab’s attempts at recreating community ended up becoming another stress-or. Her lab started a “casual” lunchtime and research online chat, however:

No one ever showed up, so then they became mandatory. Then they were definitely not casual because it suddenly involved a sign-up sheet. And you’re wondering, how is this casual science? People started preparing slides and it became like a tiny little group meeting instead of anything else and it stressed all of us out.

Spontaneous activities that once sparked rich conversation now had to be compulsory, leading to more work and stress for lab workers. The loss of social interaction in the lab environment negatively impacted lab workers’ experiences working, as well as their ability to move projects forward. Workers felt alone, physically and mentally, in their science. Though the conditions of their working environment had greatly changed—highly regimented shifts, severely restricted time in lab, and no social interaction—the pressure to produce persisted. Weekly lab meetings, one-on-one meetings with PIs, and other accountability mechanisms kept on throughout the pandemic. As I demonstrate in the following section, this unrelenting pressure seemed to make the failures land harder.

No Time to Fail

Failure is a normal part of doing science. A successful experiment and eventual publication represent many failures along the path of finding what works. Jasmine said bluntly, “When you’re doing original research, only 5 percent of what you do is ever going to work.” While many acknowledged that this can be demoralizing in normal times, failure was readily accepted as par for the course. As I show in this section, the restricted lab time combined with the loss of sociality intensified participants’ experience of failure, leading to further estrangement from their work.

No matter what shiftwork model a lab adopted, time in lab was substantially reduced from pre-pandemic times, and participants in this study reported spending a minimum of thirty hours in lab per week (and for many, well above forty). In the first few months of reopening, participants averaged around ten to fifteen hours back in lab though many were going in far less often.¹¹ Indeed, routine lab failures that would otherwise have been normal parts of science now felt insurmountable because they led to delays of days and weeks. Many described how they would normally get ready to restart a protocol the same day when a given assay or experiment failed. With shifts, there was no longer the time to do this in lab, and when coordination with other labs or core facilities were needed, this was even more challenging. Luis put it simply, stating: “You fail and it sets you back a week basically, whereas before maybe it set you back a day.” On top of this was a fear of not knowing when things might need to shut down again, and whether it was worth starting long and/or expensive experiments. Carmen felt as if time was slipping away:

Just knowing that you’re on like a finite time limit, you know? It’s kind of like an hourglass, you can see the time slipping away, but you can’t do anything to get back that time that’s been lost. So if you’re doing an experiment that fails, previously it was, “oh, I have time to do this again.” But now there’s so much unknown. … Constantly I’m worrying about if I do get sick, I would have to quarantine many days. Having that at the back of my mind makes me think like I’m not doing everything fast enough.

These failures, and the resulting extensions to time lines for degree completion or applying for postdoc and faculty positions, coupled with the looming economic uncertainties that the pandemic imposed on academic science, impacted participants’ longer-term goals. Longer experiments delayed papers and subsequent goals of graduation and future jobs. Those at critical junctures of their doctoral and postdoctoral training, nearing the “transition stage,” as Ines called it, felt this pressure acutely. Some participants, for example, found themselves trying to negotiate with their PIs how many more experiments were needed before they could submit a paper, a critical step in most biomedical science doctoral programs. Others, like Ines, felt they needed to move on but found it hard to do so. She had been looking for postdocs but was finding that many labs (her own lab included) were not currently taking on new postdocs. This worried her, saying “the context of a pandemic makes it even stranger because it restricts people’s perception of funding. I don’t know that funding has actually changed.” Though others assured her things would work out, the looming uncertainty brought on by university hiring freezes in response to the pandemic worried Ines and others about their own future prospects. These uncertainties contributed to workers’ experience of failure and anxiety about their place in their fields.

In normal times, participants felt they had outlets to help process and contextualize their failures, typically with their peers over lunch or on breaks. With the loss of sociality, discussed in the previous section, these failures seemed more demoralizing. As Heidi reflected:

I have some stuff that hasn’t been working and it feels so much bigger than it used to. I don’t think I have more lab failure now than I did before, but emotionally it feels way worse than before, it feels like I’m like getting off course way faster. Whether it’s like a real project plan, one that I’ve made myself, or some like unspoken expectations I have of progress, it just feels like it deviates from that much, much faster in a way where it rarely feels in my control. And there’s much less room for it—we have some things as I’m sure most like wet labs do, where you just gotta do it for two weeks and figure out what is happening. And that feels totally unreasonable. And I don’t know if that’s the pressure of you gotta be productive when you’re in lab because you know, it’s precious time, or if it’s because everything is really hard right now.

Across the board, participants felt like their current failures were tangibly more difficult than they normally were both in terms of delaying lab work, as well as mentally overcoming them. Some attributed the latter to not having other things in their lives to take their minds off lab work. Lena explained it this way:

Seeing friends super regularly on the weekends, even though it’s not every day…there’s this continuity of other activities [in normal times]. When that’s happening, then I do love science. But it’s hard when it’s the only thing going on. It’s the only thing and it’s just hard when it feels like a constant failure. When you’re only focused on your little experiment that just hasn’t worked for a month, it really spirals you down.

For Lena and many other participants, social activities outside of lab were important to taking her mind off lab failures and to feeling like a whole person. During the pandemic, Lena said that failures sent her “spiraling.” Similarly, Olga said, “the work itself is hard and the failure is hard. When you don’t have the social aspect or even just the opportunity to talk about your project…it just feels like, what am I doing?” Several participants experienced depression during the pandemic and many described an utter loss of joy and estrangement from in their scientific work.

While participants routinely told me how normal failure was, they also explained that failure is rarely talked about by their PIs or in settings where science is “on display.” Participants often talked with their peers—graduate student to graduate student or postdoc to postdoc—about their failures, struggles, and anxieties. But beyond that, these experiences of failure were not often publicly discussed. Helen said:

The lab environment doesn’t set the tone that it’s okay to talk about failures and like talk about things that aren’t working. Every lab meeting has a certain way of presenting things. And so it’s weird or different to talk about it, or it might seem like it isn’t as productive or successful to talk about the failures and things that aren’t working. I think talking about the slog is useful to have the people who are higher up, the PI, set the tone to talk about it. So if he’s talking about it, for instance, then it feels like it’s okay as a student or postdoc to do that. But, of course, the PI doesn’t present at lab meetings ever or really have any informal conversation.

Similarly, Isabel recalled a recent experience where she was pleasantly surprised a PI shared his own struggles with her in passing. For her, this spoke to bigger issues in leadership among PIs:

There have been a lot of times when I’ve wanted a real strong leader and to feel like I’m part of a real team and maybe that would have helped. I’ve been thinking about the leadership of a PI and how COVID has exposed vulnerabilities in that sense or existing problems around leadership. I ran into a very senior PI on my floor recently. He asked “How’s it going?” And I said, “Oh, it’s actually, it’s okay. But pretty slow.” And he was like, “Everyone’s having that.” I was shocked because my boss has never acknowledged that. He says things like, “I’ve written so much. It’s so productive.” Just the acknowledgment that things are difficult right now helped me.

For Isabel and others, not seeing their PIs discuss their own struggles and failures in their work reinforced the notion that these conversations were taboo.

Though failure was largely understood as a normal part of scientific work, it became particularly taxing in the context of lost socialization and unrelenting pressures to produce. Participants’ experiences of failure during the pandemic were intensified by reduced time in lab, alongside continued expectations of productivity emanating from lab leadership and cultural norms of academic science. In other words, the very sense of having no time to fail is the product of a particular environment produced by the coupling of trends in academic capitalism and bureaucratization. The productivity-at-all-costs culture of many high research activity institutions in the US intensified for lab workers during the pandemic. As I show in the next section, participants readily acknowledged this in interviews and among peers, yet they felt bound by the cultural norms in academic science to that all too often serve to minimize and silence critique.

“The World Is a Dumpster Fire” Yet “Data Comes First Over Everything”: Workers’ Critique of Science as Usual

Without the space to process what was going on in the world, or the toll lab work was taking on their lives, the distance between “science” and “society” became jarring for participants and their experiences throughout the pandemic sparked poignant critiques about science as usual. Overwhelmingly, participants felt like they were expected to continue producing data at pre-pandemic levels, despite having less time in lab and reduced mental capacity to do so.¹² Many participants explained that they received no messaging from their PIs about expectations. In the absence of acknowledgment, and alongside the unaltered accountability mechanisms such as weekly lab meetings, many interpreted this as an expectation to continue as if the world was not, as both Callum and Beth put it, a “dumpster fire.” In what follows, I explore how workers’ lived experiences during the pandemic led them to articulate their estrangement and launch critiques of academic science. Yet, however, emboldened workers were to raise these issues among their peers and in interviews with me, they felt unable to raise them with their PIs within the context of their labs’ prevailing power dynamics.

Heidi explained that her lab received institution-wide messages about COVID-19, as well as other crises co-occurring in the US (e.g., racial injustice and multiple extrajudicial killings of people of color by the police, record wildfires on the west coast, the January 6, 2021, insurrection), but no communications from their PIs. This lack of communication was interpreted by lab members as if they should continue working as usual. “It’s just kind of showing some of those like weaknesses in our community system,” she said. Miriam also felt pressure to just keep working despite what was happening in the world. She explained:

It’s coming mostly from my PI being like, “you should have a paper together.” And then me getting mad at that and being like [to myself], “what do you want from me? It’s a global pandemic and none of my stuff is working.” I feel like he knows there’s a global pandemic and so it’s not useful to really say that. For my PI in particular, there’s probably a couple of things going on. One is that he hasn’t been into lab in almost a year to the day now. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to do work here.

She explained that because PIs rarely are in lab, and because “he doesn’t see the parts that are actually bad,” it felt challenging to bring up the issues she was facing in a constructive way with him. Many workers described how their PIs seemed to be frustrated by the lack of data being produced in their labs during the pandemic months. Luis said his boss was “fed up with the whole shut down…. My PI told me, ‘you need to be more greedy with your time. You need to take more shifts.’ And I’m like, okay, I’m not taking more shifts because I’m trying to allow everybody to have their full amount of time.” He later learned that his PI had been giving this advice to multiple lab members. Routinely, workers explained that their PIs’ expectations were unrealistic, but that they were unable—or did not see the point in trying—to push back against such demands for continued productivity.

Participants’ frustrations built up over the course of the pandemic, leading to strong structural critiques of academic science and its culture. Just as the pandemic had crystallized the value of the social and interactional aspects of science, it also made visible long-standing issues that participants had previously just accepted as “science as usual.” Nico explained:

I still feel pretty frustrated at the environment of my lab, but not even just my lab. Kind of just all of academia and this institution. And the culture where data comes first over everything, literally everything, even the health of the people doing this work. So that’s a bit frustrating. I feel like my PI tries her best in the way that she knows how to be understanding and to accommodate, but it only goes so far. I’m doing the best that I can, but I still feel like the expectations are unreasonable.

Like Nico, many participants pointed to the broader structure of academic science, in which papers and grants—and the data needed to achieve them—are paramount.¹³ Data updates were a routine part of weekly group meetings pre-pandemic, and many participants described that these meetings and their normal structure continued throughout the pandemic, adding to the pressure they were feeling. Though workers’ lab time was severely cut, the continuation of weekly lab meetings, alongside silences about expectations, implied that lab workers should still be as productive as in normal times. Callum explained how this contributed to the pressure he felt:

I feel like my PI still has the same expectation of productivity as before the labs shut down. Especially because we’re still having those weekly meetings and you’re supposed to present data every week. Sometimes I just don’t have data, like I can’t go down [to lab]. I can’t even do anything. But I feel like we’re still expected to produce the same amount every single week.

Throughout the pandemic months, there were multiple compounding social crises that contributed to participants’ experience of upheaval and uncertainty. This was particularly frustrating for participants in the wake of the killings of multiple people of color in the spring and summer of 2020, and the institutional responses that followed. #ShutdownSTEM, an event focused on acknowledging systemic racism in academic science and the cumulative disadvantage faced by Black academic researchers, occurred in the height of the pandemic, and many participants reported that their PIs did not publicize or actively encourage participation. As institutions started hosting events to talk about institutional racism, many lab groups did not take up these topics unless a lab member brought them forward. In these cases, participants reported that PIs were encouraging and often lead to dedicated discussions among the group. But largely, these ongoing events were siphoned off, in both explicit and subtle ways. For instance, Maia recalled that her PI sent a subtle message when asked to reschedule a lab presentation:

Our institute started hosting a lot of Black Lives Matter related discussions and activities over Zoom. And sometimes, they conflicted with our lab meetings and my PI didn’t reschedule. So even one time when I was scheduled to present, I said, “if possible, I’d like to like present and leave a little bit early, like present quickly and then leave because there’s a person of color caucus meeting that I wanted to attend at our Institute at the same time.” I was hoping they might say, let’s just reschedule your presentation. But they didn’t do that.

Like Maia, many participants discussed how their PIs failed to discuss life events that impact the well-being of lab workers. As these events seemed to pile on, PIs’ insistence on continuing “science as usual” became untenable for workers. Participants expressed that they wished their PIs would acknowledge the state of affairs in a more meaningful way than a quick mention with no substantive discussion. For instance, Callum expressed disappointment that his lab carried on with meetings the day of the January 6 insurrection. Reflecting on the culture of these meetings, he continued:

We still have meetings. And then my PI is like “You know, this is not the country we live in. It’s hard for me to focus. Okay. Let’s continue.” Maybe PIs feel that we can sit around and kind of mope about it, but we can’t really do anything to fix the situation. Maybe that’s how they felt. But I don’t know, he literally just said like one sentence, like “God, I’m having like a hard time focusing, but let’s continue with the meeting.”

Similarly, Carmen described how her PI begins meetings with “lab business” and then immediately jumps into discussions about data, but never makes space to consider all of the events that might be affecting people working in the lab. She explained:

You know, there isn’t really a time to give a state of the union address. We don’t have that, which I think would be nice. Acknowledgment that, oh this week has been hard. This is what happened. It would be nice if we had something like that, but we don’t. It’s always been about the data and it really hasn’t changed. Even when we had in-person meetings, it’s always been that way. Just straight to the data.

Participants voiced concerns about working in the lab during the pandemic, productivity expectations, and research failures with lab mates or other small circles, but never “up the food chain.” When I asked trainees why these felt like hard conversations to have with their PIs, they often paused reflectively and found it challenging to answer. When they did respond, they were clear that it felt like an unimaginable encounter. Heidi reflected:

I don’t know. But it seems totally unimaginable…I think part of it is like not wanting to appear weak. Yeah. I mean, so many of us put on this front that like, everything is fine and we’re doing fine. I kind of talk myself out of it with this like very stupid thing that I don’t think she can change it. But then sometimes maybe just her knowing, like, I’m sure that that would be, make a difference.

At the time of our second interview, Heidi’s lab had just had its “state of the lab” annual meeting. Some participants’ labs held similar meetings at the beginning of each year to discuss priorities for the coming year, plans for grant funding, and to acknowledge the past year’s progress and challenges. Heidi explained that at this meeting, it would have been nice for the challenges of 2020 to be acknowledged. Instead, “as always, there was the ‘we’re not publishing enough’ which we get every year.” With the unrelenting focus being on the data and scientific progress, participants internalized that social issues were not appropriate conversations to have in the space of the lab.

Critically, the ethos of “data comes first over everything,” as Nico stated plainly above, is not inevitable. Instead, as this analysis underscores, it is socially promoted and produced both through affirmations and also through silences. A lack of overt recognition about the challenges of the pandemic and silences about expectations and social issues were important boundary management moments. Workers consistently explained how their PIs seemed to take these events in stride and often did not acknowledge them within the working environment in substantial ways, subtly but firmly reinforcing the boundaries between private and professional life and between social issues and scientific work. This neglect shaped the culture of lab groups, reinforcing notions about what can be discussed in scientific settings and what is deemed inappropriate or unprofessional. During the pandemic, this boundary management exacerbated workers’ frustrations and anxieties and also led to their articulation of these issues as structural problems within academic science.

Conclusion

STS scholars have raised critical questions about how academic capitalism and bureaucratization are reshaping scientific careers, the training of junior researchers, and the idea of science as a calling (Hackett 1990; Lee & Walsh 2021). In their recent article, Lee and Walsh (2021) contend that in the age of bureaucratized academic science, marked by increased division of labor, hierarchy, and standardization science is “at risk of losing its vocational character” (p. 14). Under these current institutional and organizational regime and alongside pandemic realities, workers questioned their love of and calling to science. Conducting scientific work in the pandemic required a new mode of lab life that negatively impacted workers from their mental and physical health through to finding fulfillment in their scientific work. Emergent working conditions, combined with the compressed time and loss of sociality in lab, led many participants to question whether they really felt a calling to the practice of science, a calling that many described as deeply connected to their identity and sense of self. Their enthusiasm and commitment had been exploited to work extended hours and onerous shifts. Their failures hit harder. The demands to produce data were endless. Moreover, the failure of lab leadership to investigate and acknowledge how ongoing events impacted workers, as whole people and not just workers, magnified the estrangement they experienced. Without the key elements that enabled workers to tolerate and navigate power dynamics and failures in normal times, the new realities of lab life not only resulted in a loss of creativity and problem-solving capacities but also in their estrangement from science itself.

It would be a mistake to credit this estrangement to the pandemic. Time and again, workers explained that organizational inequities and their daily frustrations with the culture of academic science had long histories; they were key features of science as usual under academic capitalism. In this case, as with so many others, the pandemic may be best understood as illuminating what had always been bubbling under the surface. Indeed, the pandemic and its disruptions both made existing inequities in academic science more visible as well as provided a lens through which US laboratory workers could articulate their concerns, even if only in protected spaces. Though nearly all participants in this study were vexed by the lab environment during the pandemic, none felt comfortable bringing such issues up with institutional leaders.

Workers’ inability to raise concerns—whether about inequities in shift schedules, logistics of lab work, experiences of failures, or productivity expectations—show how power operates in academic science. PIs’ active policing of the boundary between science and society, however artificial that boundary may be, served to silence dissent. As the pandemic and other events were impacting workers, PIs’ unwillingness to actively consider pivoting or altering course, and willingness to continue as if the conditions of laboratory life had not changed, reinforced a culture in which space is denied for anything outside “the science.”

While the existing literature has pointed to macro-level trends that structure academic science, this study links these trends with interpersonal dynamics at the level of the lab group. These relations are essential for understanding the culture of laboratory work, as well as how norms, values, and hierarchies are reproduced. While academic capitalism and bureaucratization certainly structure how scientific work is carried out, they are not the only forces that shape scientific work. Put another way, the meso- and micro-dynamics at the levels of the institution and lab group also shape everyday laboratory life. US lab workers articulated not only the structural causes of their estrangement but also how critical interpersonal relations within laboratory groups—particularly laboratory leadership—are to creating an environment in which doing science is more than just labor.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I thank the participants of this study, who made the time and space to participate in this study during particularly stressful period in their lives. Additionally, for their generous feedback that improved this manuscript, I thank the Social and Behavioral Sciences community at University of California, San Francisco, as well as the editors and reviewers at Science, Technology, & Human Values.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Melanie Jeske

Notes

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