Hitting the headlines with stem cell research

On January 9 I was interviewed live on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme about my stem cell research. Within an hour, as I was getting the kids ready for school, Channel 4 rang and sent round a car. Then the BBC World Service. It got picked up by Reuters and CNN. My blackberry was ringing all day. We got a whole page in the Guardian and more in the New Scientist. It went worldwide. It was surreal and really good fun!

I work at Imperial College: I investigate how we can harness the body’s ability to release stem cells into the blood stream to promote tissue regeneration. I knew that my results were newsworthy but what really made the difference was going to the UKRC conference on the media. As a result I contacted Imperial College’s press office and wrote a press release. I never would have considered doing that if I hadn’t attended the UKRC event. I was surprised by the fact that the media coverage brought my work to the attention of the scientific community and has resulted in many invitations to speak about my work in the UK and abroad.

I was in to science from an early age. Even at primary school I remember being very impressed when the teacher talked about blood and cells. There was a presumption that girls good at science would go into medicine, but I didn’t want that. My mother did a lot of hospital charity work so she was able to introduce me to a female scientist who had a lab and a family and was growing cancer cells in culture. It all made sense.

I went to Kings College to study pharmacology. I did a PhD and worked in California before returning first to the ICRF and then the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial. I knew I wanted to have kids and a proper job, so I applied to the Welcome Trust for a Career Development Award and then the University Award. It was during my maternity leave that I decided to focus on stem cells – it was almost like being on sabbatical, a time when I could ask myself, ‘right, what do I want to do next?’

It’s definitely tough juggling your scientific career with family life when your children are under three years old. It slowed me down and in particular made travelling to conferences, where most of the networking gets done, very difficult. But now things are really moving forward. I do a lot of outreach work and that’s helped me talk to the media - when you’re discussing stem cell research with school children, you need to talk in simple language. Journalists are interested in the big picture and not the scientific detail so you have to be clear and very wary because they have their own agenda and you can’t edit afterwards.

The coverage was a great experience and has opened a lot of doors. But whatever happens, I am going to carry on with the research.

Dr Sara Rankin  is Reader in Leukocyte and Stem Cell Biology at Imperial College and editor for the British Journal of Pharmacology. She runs  outreach workshops with schools as part of the Imperial College INSPIRE and Creative Futures schemes. She is on the Education Committee of the British Pharmacological Society  . She is a member of GetSETWomen. You can listen again to her Radio 4 interview at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7819000/7819377.stm

Photographs taken by Randy Quan