CivicSciTimes - Stories in Science
An Immunologist’s Perspective
Dr. Viki Male started her scientific career as a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, where she worked on the development of NK cells in the human uterus before moving to Imperial College London to find out how NK cells develop in mouse bone marrow. After spending a year at home with her baby son, she moved to UCL to start her own research group, which focuses on the development and function of NK cells in the liver.
Viki Male
[su_boxbox title=”About”]Dr. Viki Male started her scientific career as a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, where she worked on the development of NK cells in the human uterus before moving to Imperial College London to find out how NK cells develop in mouse bone marrow. After spending a year at home with her baby son, she moved to UCL to start her own research group, which focuses on the development and function of NK cells in the liver. The story below was originally published on November 12, 2017 on The Female Scientist. You can follow Viki onย Twitter [/su_boxbox]
How did you get into science?
When I was a kid, I used to get up early on Saturday mornings and watch TV. There was a programme which explained how the body worked by representing all the different cells as characters. Bacteria and viruses were the main โbaddiesโ and the immune cells were the heroes. It was my favourite part of the whole week.
Thatโs how it started, but I was also encouraged a lot by my dad. Heโs a professional scientist, but he also has a real knack for doing science with whatever comes to hand. One time we discovered that the leaves from a pot plant of my mumโs could be used to make quite a good indicator. We took a lot of leaves, the plant didnโt do well and my mum was unimpressed! Still, I guess it sparked something in me because I always thought I would feel at home working in a lab, and it turns out that I do.
Which topic are you working on at the moment? Why did you choose this topic and how do you think it will make a difference?
When I was at school and later at university, I was really interested in viruses. I like how they can do so much with so little of their own by hijacking the cellโs resources. Natural Killer (NK) cells are immune cells that recognise and kill virally infected cells, and they have a really clever way of doing it. Almost all the bodyโs cells have a protein called MHC, which shows a sample of what the cell is making to what are probably the most famous immune cells, the T cells. This way, the T cells can see if a cell is infected with a virus and kill it. But lots of viruses try to get around this by stopping the cell from making MHC, so the T cells canโt see whatโs going on inside. NK cells act as a riposte to this kind of dirty dealing by viruses, because they kill any cell that refuses to show its MHC. When I learnt about this, I was enchanted by its elegance and I have been studying NK cells ever since.
Quite recently, it turned out that there is a special kind of NK cell that is only found in the liver, and my group showed that these special NK cells canโt ever leave the liver โ they are liver-resident. The thing is, we still donโt know what they do. There is some evidence that they could act as an early warning system for certain viruses that particularly infect the liver, but I think they might also do something important in the healthy liver. โGoodโ bacteria are a normal part of the healthy gut, and weโre looking at the idea that these special NK cells might respond to bacterial products that are carried from the gut to the liver in the blood. Whatever it is they do, I think it will be important since these special NK cells are the most numerous immune cells in the healthy liver.
What were the biggest obstacles you had to overcome as a woman scientist?
There are a lot of obstacles for women scientists. I know from working with A-level students that some young women feel that they canโt do science because itโs โnot for girlsโ. I sometimes see that lack of confidence even in women who have made it as scientists. And I have colleagues who feel they have been treated as lesser because they are women, and even some who have been treated as sex objects.
For me personally, though, the biggest obstacle came when I had my son. Scientists often work on fixed-term projects and have to move labs every couple of years, and that was the position I was in when I was pregnant for the first time. My boss expected that the funding for the project would be renewed, but it wasnโt and I lost my job two days before my son was born. I started looking for another job when he was about 12 weeks old and spent almost a year sending off job applications. It was tough because even though I felt I was a strong candidate, I got very few interviews and, when I was called to interview, wasnโt offered the job.
I nearly left science then, just so that I could have a job and pay the rent. But the desperation of that time also pushed me to apply for things that I felt unqualified for. Thatโs how โ encouraged by a senior woman scientist at my current university โ I came to apply for my Sir Henry Dale Fellowship. That application was funded, and it allowed me to start my own lab.
Youโve got two children now. How do you balance career and family life?
The short answer is by having a lot of support! My husband used to work very long hours so I would take care of both the drop off and pick up at the childminder, which really ate into my working hours. Recently, heโs taken a role with a more family-friendly company, and he now only works four days a week. Thatโs helped immensely, although I still work shorter hours than I did before having children. I manage by prioritizing my time quite carefully.
Iโm also very lucky in that my Fellowship pays for me to have a research assistant. Sheโs a brilliant scientist and having two of us on the project means that we can tag-team long experiments. The Wellcome Trust, who funds me, is also really great about supporting scientists as they come back from parental leave. I came back from maternity leave after having my second child in the summer and the additional research support theyโve offered me as Iโve returned has been invaluable.
What changes do you think are needed to make science more attractive to women?
In my field, lots of women start at the bottom, doing PhDs and post-docs. Itโs as you start to look at more senior positions that you see fewer women scientists. I think our system of short contracts does play a role in this, since it disadvantages those who take time out of science for family or other reasonsย โ and thatโs usually women.
Itโs hard to see how anything can be done about that within the current funding system, but perhaps having more ways to get back into science after a break would help. Now that we have shared parental leave, another part of the solution will be to encourage fathers to take their share of parental leave too. That will put mothers at less of a disadvantage compared to fathers, although there will still be a problem for parents in general. Itโs definitely a knotty problem.
I think we shouldnโt forget, though, that there are other groups who are even less represented in science than women. Race, class and sexuality are all things we should be talking and thinking about. I used not to be comfortable talking about my experience as a woman in science, or asking my colleagues what barriers they face โ it seemed rude, somehow. But Iโve come to realise that pretending that these things arenโt issues isnโt making them go away, and that talking about discrimination isnโt the same as discrimination. We have to do these things in order to fully define the problem. And if we donโt understand the problem, how can we come up with a solution?
Read more about Viki Male Here: Life story: Viki Male
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