Adrian Briggs, 25, is studying Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig.

Tell us what you are up to in Leipzig…

I am a graduate student working towards a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. As the name suggests, the Institute’s purpose is the study of human evolution, investigated in a multidisciplinary approach by several scientific research groups. I work in the Evolutionary Genetics department, where human genetics is compared to that of our close relatives such as gorillas and chimpanzees; one thing we are doing right now is sequencing the DNA genome of mankind’s closest extinct relative, the Neandertal. In fact I am doing my PhD in the Neandertal Genome group, under my supervisor Svante Pääbo.

Backtracking a bit, have you always been interested in biology? Did you enjoy studying biology at university?

Most of my family are interested in nature and I do have some biologist relatives, so I was always keen on the subject, although at school I preferred chemistry and physics since to me they relied much more on thinking from first principles than the rote learning of, for example, GCSE biology. But at university I realised that once you really know the basic principles in a particular area of biology, which does of course mean a fair bit of fact-learning, biology offers huge opportunities to start thinking creatively about what questions are most important to be asked, and best to get answers to them.

When did u decide to pursue academic research? Were you tempted to go off and get a regular job?

I started the Biological Sciences degree not having any idea what I hoped would come next – but does anyone? Throughout the degree, though, I became more convinced that I should do a PhD. I was enjoying the course, increasingly as I became more familiar with each topic, and I concluded that a PhD would be a good way to continue and to learn if I would really be suited to a career in research. Regarding “real” jobs, I did attend a few “milk rounds” that would regularly come to Oxford from mostly London-based companies, but I never felt attracted to the opportunities. I realised that at the same time as I was hearing things like “man, I really couldn’t work in a lab for a job” from other biology students while I was actually enjoying all the labwork, I would regularly hear excited conversations from the same people about joining Law/Consultancy/Accountancy firm x/y/z while I was pretty uninterested in any of that work. This really confirmed to me that I should stay in science – at least for a bit!

What’s a typical day or week for you in Leipzig?

A typical day: I get up late. I don’t put on a suit. It’s pretty normal here to come to the lab at about 10am or later. Once at the lab, (after the standard check of internet news and sport), I will start planning the day’s labwork – preparing a protocol. After coffee, I’ll go to the lab and spend a few hours following the protocol exactly – usually something to do with Neandertal DNA amplification and sequencing; either protocol optimisation or actual data collection for a project. In the afternoon and evening I’ll sit at my desk and analyze the results of an experiment. Even though some days I’ll only test a small question, such as in which of two conditions a reaction occurs more efficiently, I find it really satisfying to be able to have a scientific question in the morning which by the evening you really know the answer to (as long as you have designed the experiment properly!), and allows to progress further with your larger project the next day. Once weekly we have a big group meeting where we all discuss the main genome project (for example, which million dollar sequencing machine to buy next!) as well as all our individual projects, with everyone giving input into the project planning and result interpretation of each other’s work. I have lunch and dinner at the institute, and generally work until 9 or 10pm. Afterwards we usually go to a bar in town and have a couple of drinks with friends till about midnight – it’s so good to live without UK closing times!

Have you had any work published? How important is this?

For a scientist, publication of your results in a peer-reviewed journal is the aim of the game. It is possible to get a PhD without having any of your work published, but pretty hard to find any position afterwards without having a decent publishing record. Trying to get papers published in high ranking journals is what drives competition, which admittedly can sometimes get be a bit intense. However, I strongly believe that this should not discourage keen graduates from embarking on a career in science. In my opinion, if projects are properly thought out beforehand, carefully carried out and sensibly analyzed, it’s almost always possible to find a journal who will publish them. I have had one paper published in the journal PNAS as the first author (which reflects who is the main contributor to the paper) and a few others as co-author, including articles in Nature and Cell. I need one or two more first author papers to make an acceptable PhD: if this happens, due to the German “cumulative thesis” system, I can simply staple the papers together, write an introduction and summary and that will be my thesis , thus avoiding having to write an old-fashioned ~300 page “doorstop” write-up of all my work during the PhD.

You've been on TV! Tell us about that…

The media are very keen to report on science that everyone can identify with – and I guess the study of human evolution is one such area. We get radio, newspaper or TV crews visiting fairly regularly, especially around the time that big papers are published. Normally, a filming with a TV crew takes the same path. I set up an experiment, drilling a mock fossil and carrying out typical lab actions while the crew walk around taking hours of footage which will probably be cut to a few minutes at most in the final programme. Normally the presenter of a show will interview my boss, but sometimes they interview us too, which is fun. TV crews vary a lot in how interested and friendly they are. Sometimes it takes some time away from experiments, but it’s a good way of communicating our research to the public, and no-one can deny that it’s fun to be on TV...

What are your plans for the future?

I plan to finish my PhD within a year, and then perhaps stay a for a bit longer while there is so much exciting Neandertal research to be done using upcoming new technologies. After that I will need to find a job somewhere else, and that will most likely be in a different country such as England or the US, where I can use the skills in DNA sequencing technologies and evolutionary analysis that I have developed here. There’s huge investment the genomics field at the moment, so I’m quite confident of finding something interesting for my next job. However, it might not be so cool as sequencing the genome of an extinct species of human!