Goulden’s goal was to find out how the locals coped with drought and floods. Communities living by lakes in east Africa are dependent on natural resources, and have always been forced to live with severe climatic variability. Goulden wanted to see whether their ways of adapting could be useful elsewhere as climate extremes become greater.

Instead, she found the people were much more vulnerable than she had expected and were not adapting well, even to the vagaries of the present climate. If there is a severe flood, the whole local economy suffers. The best off are families with strong economic links to the outside world, she found. “This means that road infrastructure, social networks and trade links are going to be an important part of the response to climate change in developing countries,” she says.

Goulden is a social scientist, so it may seem surprising that she works on climate change. In fact, she’s just one of a growing band of researchers from a number of fields whose work centres on it. What used to be the realm of physical scientists and mathematicians now has the attention of biologists, geologists, geographers, computer scientists, economists, sociologists, psychologists, engineers and more. “Name any discipline, and I could carve out an interesting research opportunity in climate change for you,” says Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich. “It is one of the great challenges of our time, and the UK is leading the world in conducting wider political debate about what it means.”

As a result, climate change has become a major research priority in the UK. Researchers are working hard on three fronts – prediction, mitigation and adaptation. In other words, how the climate is going to change, how we might prevent this and what we should do if it does. Prediction involves building and running simulations of the global system using increasingly powerful computers. The other two areas, which could jointly be called “what are we going to do about it?”, concern the societal implications of the science. And it is there in particular that the research has drawn in so many new disciplines.

Broader and deeper

Climate science was a relatively narrow field until recently. Keith Shine, professor of meteorology at the University of Reading, traces the start of the modern era to a series of papers published in the 1960s by Syukuro Manabe at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. Manabe developed the first mathematical models of the atmosphere to predict the effects of adding carbon dioxide.

Around this time, however, researchers were working in isolation, and there were as many warning of an impending ice age as there were that the Earth is warming, Shine says. “The early climate models were just atmospheric, derived from weather forecasting models,” says Peter Cox, professor of climate system dynamics at the University of Exeter. “Then the oceans were included, initially just as immobile slabs of water that absorbed and reflected heat.” Things began to change in the late 1980s, as researchers started to understand more about how oceans affected climate, and oceanography became a crucial part of climate science. “We now have a lot of models of the oceans,” says Harry Bryden at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, “but we still need more field observations. We only have very short records of what the oceans have been doing.”

In the 1990s, another discipline came on board: biological sciences. At the Hadley Centre, the Met Office’s research centre on climate change, Cox was involved with incorporating land surface into the climate models. “Initially our models were built in a rather reductionist way,” he says. “They did not use ecological knowledge, like how plants respond to changes in carbon dioxide levels, or how decomposition rates change.” This was where biological sciences came in. Pete Falloon, also at the Hadley Centre, who studies how carbon moves between soil and the atmosphere, says biologists like him are now common. “In the past, you needed maths or physics to work here,” he says. “Now there are more natural scientists.”

This century has brought a new wave of social scientists and engineers. The Tyndall Centre – a partnership between six universities set up in 2000 – has played a key role (see “Where it’s at”). The centre’s remit is to connect different realms of knowledge such as economics, psychology and engineering with natural sciences, to gain insights into what climate change means for society. Tyndall researchers were responsible for some of the main conclusions of the Treasury’s Stern Review on the economic impacts of climate change, published last October.

Jacks of all trades

Today, many climate scientists are truly interdisciplinary, which can be a challenge. To begin with, there’s the jargon. “The same word can mean completely different things in different disciplines,” says Shine. Take the term “high resolution”. To a global climate modeller, resolving every 50 kilometres is very fine scale, but to a soil scientist, that is ridiculously low resolution.

“You have to be brave to be interdisciplinary,” says Brenda Boardman of the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, whose career has spanned economics and sociology. “You will never know as much as the experts you are speaking to, so you have to be prepared to ask the silly question.”

“You will never know as much as the experts, so be prepared to ask the silly question”

Some scientists experience another problem, especially at the beginning of their careers. “A mix of social and natural science makes it very difficult to slot into a university department, where you’re expected to teach within a discipline,” says Goulden. Her degree is in geophysics and her PhD combined social science with basic climate modelling.

Not only is it difficult to find the right department, if you don’t fit into the traditional structure of science, it can also be difficult to win funding. “Research assessment favours disciplinary academics,” says Hulme. The problem is that researchers tend to be judged by their top four publications, and the assessment panels are divided into disciplines. “I wouldn’t want my research judged solely by social or natural scientists,” Hulme says, “but I have to be referred to one panel or another.”

According to Hulme, many climate scientists do not get the credit they deserve for research activities outside traditional paper publication. Sometimes called “knowledge transfer”, this includes meetings with ministers and the like. “The Tyndall Centre has had a huge influence on the policy debate,” he says, “but it’s almost impossible to get recognition for that.”

Boardman agrees that advising on policy is a thankless task. She should know – her team is looking at ways to reduce energy demand in the domestic housing sector. Boardman says you can never be sure that politicians are getting the message. “Sending a report to a civil servant is like throwing a ball over a brick wall. It doesn’t come back and you don’t know if anybody has caught it.”

However, Alan Thorpe, chief executive of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the largest funder of UK climate change research, says that extra activities such as policy advice are taken into account with funding applications. And the good news is that right now there is plenty of cash in the pot (see Graphic). “It’s a job-finders’ market,” says Cox. “The subject is high profile, so there is plenty of resource going into research.”

Tim Jupp, a young mathematician at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, is one beneficiary of this. “If I’m honest, I’ve come to climate change because that’s where the money is,” he says. Of course, that’s not the only reason. Jupp is fascinated by his research area, incorporating measurements of the amount of water vapour given off by vegetation and carbon from forest fires into climate models. “Any systems with feedback are interesting mathematically,” he says.

For most researchers, it is no longer a question of whether there will be climate change, but of exactly what should be done about it. “The consensus amongst scientists is extraordinary,” says Cox. And British climate change research has become a formidable, multi-faceted force. Researchers pursuing a career in this area have the opportunity to be at the cutting edge of science, and also shape society. “The agenda is still expanding so fast,” Cox says. “It’s tremendously exciting.”

Biologists often use a piece of equipment called a gene gun, which looks a bit like a hairdryer and shoots DNA into living cells using pulses of helium gas. O’Brien had been asked to improve the design. The problem was that from the cell’s point of view, it was like being hit with a sawn-off shotgun. “I was trying to enhance the accuracy and reduce the pressure from the gun so it could be used on living animals without causing tissue damage,” says O’Brien.

After early attempts to modify the gene gun’s barrel failed, O’Brien sought advice from a different quarter – a retired policeman. “He showed me a German machine gun, and explained that the angle of the holes in the barrel is crucial,” he recalls. At about 20 degrees to the horizontal, the air can escape from holes punched along the barrel more quickly. It was the breakthrough O’Brien had been looking for (see Diagram).

His modified gene gun does its job without damaging tissue. The gun can also fire markers such as dyes, which will be transported around the animal. It has been a huge success, and there are now 150 in use around the world. O’Brien has published two papers in Nature on how to use it, and is just beginning to realise its potential for studying cellular physiology in real time. One group, for example, is developing tiny nanosensors that, once fired into a cell, change colour according to pH.

Over the last couple of years, O’Brien has become an internationally renowned expert in gene gun technology. Several colleagues have been surprised that he doesn’t have a PhD, he says. “Looking back, my boss had a lot of faith in me.”

O’Brien’s story is not unique. Boundaries have been blurring in the scientific ranks, and the old distinction between technician and researcher has all but faded in the public sector. Today’s scientific workforce is a continuum from bottle-washer to professor, with research assistants and lower-grade scientific officers hovering somewhere in the middle.

These days, plenty of technicians carry out independent research and publish papers. Like O’Brien, they may be extremely specialised in the practical side of a particular branch of science. In fact, at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, the title “technician” has been shelved altogether, although it is still used elsewhere.

This blurring inevitably leads to some confusion among jobseekers about a technician’s career options. In one sense, technicians are scientific support staff. They run labs. They buy, maintain and operate equipment and handle waste. In another sense, they are the hands-on scientists, representing a skill set as vital to modern research as theoretical understanding. In universities, they often train PhD students to find their way around a lab. Most organisations have two or three types of technician: the research technician, the service technician and, in universities, the teaching technician. Any of these can become a specialist in their own right.

John Turner, head of biological sciences at the University of East Anglia, runs a bustling plant microbiology lab. He relies heavily on his research assistant, Elaine Patrick, because she has mastered every technique in the lab. “She brings continuity,” he explains. “Most of our research staff are on three-year contracts.” When key people leave, Patrick is on hand to show new people the ropes. She often features in the author list of papers from Turner’s lab.

He admits he would struggle to carry out some of the activities she performs. “I’ve been out of the lab too long,” he says. “Techniques like DNA cloning, where you multiply DNA inside a bacterium, take an extraordinary amount of skill.”

Technicians with hands-on expertise are in great demand in labs across the country, and certain skills are becoming scarcer. Instrument and equipment making is a case in point. Most university science departments used to have an engineering workshop, but many have now been closed. Peter Jessop runs the medical engineering unit at the University of Nottingham Medical School, one of only four accredited medical devices workshops in the UK. The unit produces one-off, bespoke equipment for medical research, some of which it sells to other universities around the world.

Just rewards

All Jessop’s staff members are apprentice-trained as instrument or tool-makers and have a breadth of skill that is difficult to find now. “We had a lad on a youth training scheme for two years, and I funded him for a further three years, but at the end I couldn’t give him a job,” Jessop laments. “The company he went to work for couldn’t believe the quality of his training.”

By contrast, becoming a service technician does not require a high level of scientific training (see “Career briefing”). Their job is to act as lab support for researchers in industry and universities. “The technicians provide all the essential lab functions, from keeping the benches clean and the cupboards stocked to performing basic assays,” says Barry Davies, who manages the technicians at AstraZeneca’s Alderley Park site in Cheshire. He stresses they are very much part of the scientific team.

Starting as a technician doesn’t stop you from becoming a research scientist. But your chances may depend on where you work. There are plenty of stories of technicians who later became professors or group leaders. Perhaps the most well-known is conservationist David Bellamy, who started as what he called a “lab boy” at a technical college and progressed to senior botany lecturer at the University of Durham before becoming an author and TV presenter.

Sophie Petit-Zeman left school at 16 to work as a technician at the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College – and now has a PhD in neuroscience. “I found the scientific environment very stimulating,” she says, “I used to feel frustrated in the pub after work, when the group were talking about glutamate receptors and I did not understand the bigger picture.” This encouraged her to return to academic study. She was given the freedom to do her own experiments at work, and time off to study for A levels, a technical diploma, and then a pharmacology degree, which ultimately led her to apply for a full-time PhD. “Whether you can make this step depends on the environment you’re in and the encouragement you get from your employers,” she says. “I think in some labs, or perhaps in industry, I would have stayed a technician.”

Lorna Skiera, chief technician in the department of biology at the University of York, agrees. “Each research technician is managed by their own academic supervisor,” she says. “It’s almost a system of patronage. Most academics encourage technicians to develop their skills. There are people who treat their technician as a skivvy, but it happens less and less.”

Skiera has found her career as a technician very rewarding. “As a technician, you can still enjoy the science and you may get a permanent post relatively quickly.” The only downside in universities has been a lack of training and career progression up to now. But things are improving. By August this year, all British universities should have implemented a new agreement on pay structures so that people are justly rewarded according to their skill level. “At York, the technicians have done very well out of this,” says Skiera.

The role of the technician is what you make of it. “There is such a wealth of knowledge around you,” says O’Brien. “You can get a lot out of the job if you put your mind to it.”

Head of science for biogeochemistry, Plymouth Marine Laboratory

When someone starts a conversation by telling you that climate change is not the full story and there are other issues to think about in burning fossil fuels, you could be forgiven for expecting a lengthy argument from a sceptic.

At a major conference in Exeter last year, Carol Turley of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) stood up in front of the world’s climate change experts and did just that. But Turley is no sceptic. She went on to explain that there is another global threat posed by rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide that is at least as serious but largely overlooked. “Climate change is only half of the CO₂ problem,” she told the conference.

Two years earlier, while assessing the risks of seepage from CO₂ stored underground, Turley came across a body of scientists who were concerned about the potentially irreversible damage to marine ecosystems from rising atmospheric CO₂. The gas dissolves in seawater, which makes it more acidic and reduces the concentration of carbonate ions. Many marine organisms, such as planktons, corals and molluscs, use carbonate to make their shells or skeletons, so a rise in CO₂ levels will hamper their ability to survive (żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 9 July 2005, p 15). Turley predicts that the construction of coral reefs could slow by more than a third by 2065.

To make matters worse, because the oceans absorb CO₂, they are buffering the rise in global temperatures at the moment. The more acidic they become, the less CO₂ they can absorb, thus speeding up climate change.

Turley was not the first scientist to realise the enormity of this issue, but she has played a key role in bringing it to the fore and convincing policy-makers. Her philosophy for achieving this is first to put the hours into the research and second to seize every opportunity. On a recent flight Turley found herself sitting next to the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Rather than relaxing with the in-flight magazine, she spent the time explaining the impact of ocean acidification, and followed that up by sending him the relevant scientific papers. She is now one of the lead authors for the panel’s fourth assessment, due in 2007.

Turley’s career so far is impressive by anyone’s standards. It has been no easy ride, though. Before landing a permanent post at PML, she spent 14 years moving from one short-term contract to another, with periods of unemployment. That time was by no means wasted. She recalls how some of her most successful research was completed during the jobless periods, including a paper published in Nature on deep-sea bacteria. She persevered for the love of her science.

Above all, she says, impartiality and integrity are the prerequisites to success. It is vital to base your answers on actual scientific data, rather than trying to push an agenda. “Admit when you don’t know the answer or where you are uncertain,” Turley says. “Avoid spin, and your opinion will be respected.”

Jeff Kenna

Director, Energy for Sustainable Development

Jeff Kenna shows that it is possible to translate environmental concerns into wealth and jobs. In 1989, he co-founded the consultancy Energy for Sustainable Development (ESD), which advises companies and governments on renewable energy projects and how to cut carbon emissions. Its clients include the European Commission, the UN and the World Bank, as well as multinationals such as Shell. So how did he become one of the UK’s most successful environmental entrepreneurs?

Kenna started out as a physicist, but always had an interest in the application of science. Travelling around Africa and Asia after completing his degree in the 1970s, he saw how useful renewable energy technologies could be in places with limited electricity supply but plenty of sun and wind.

Back in the UK, Kenna went to Cardiff University and joined what was then the biggest academic research group working on solar energy, to do a PhD on the design of solar-powered water heaters. He places high value on his academic training. “There are not many people in business with good technical expertise. You can differentiate yourself with a physics or engineering degree,” he says.

After completing his doctorate, he helped start a small company delivering renewable energy projects in developing countries, from solar water pumps in Mali to photovoltaics in Romania. It was while working on a biomass project in Ethiopia that he and five colleagues conceived the idea for ESD. “In the 1980s, most renewable energy work was in developing countries,” Kenna says. “We began talking about how to get it going in Europe.”

The vision became a reality, and in its early days the consultancy grew by up to 30 per cent a year. It now has offices in four countries. Among other accolades, it has won the Queen’s Award for Export Achievement and has just been included in the Financial Times list of the 50 best places in the UK to work.

ESD has also spawned a number of successful spin-off ventures, such as a company that was one of the first to allow householders to buy “green” electricity by matching their energy use with renewable power generation.

Another of ESD’s daughter companies, Camco International, holds the world’s largest portfolio of tradeable carbon credits, which are bought and sold to help companies and governments meet emission-reduction targets. Camco was floated on the stock market at the end of April with a list value of £83 million. “Recognition from financial institutes is the ultimate mark of success,” says Kenna. “With access to their monetary muscle, you can really do things.”

From his position at the helm, Kenna is able to make his voice heard about how we obtain and use energy. He believes there need not be a conflict between businesses making a profit and a more sustainable society. “I have much more influence than I would in research,” he says. “Government pays attention to industry.”

Rob Wilby

Climate change science manager, Environment Agency

Rob Wilby is the Environment Agency’s climate change encyclopedia. It is his job to answer the technical questions of 12,000 Environment Agency staff as well as all the organisations that work alongside them.

It’s a tall order. He has to keep abreast of a huge range of scientific developments, from complex mathematical models of how the climate will change to the mechanics of flood defence. His advice is used on the front line of protection of our air, land, water and ecosystems. Wilby also plans and manages the Environment Agency’s own research programme on climate change.

Attaining this degree of influence and freedom has taken time and required flexibility. After a degree in physical geography, Wilby started out at a private water company. He has since researched and taught at five universities, finding little trouble hopping between private, public and academic sectors. żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs shouldn’t be afraid to make big career changes along the way, he says. The diverse range of people he has worked with over the years helps him appreciate the needs of different groups.

Along with his advisory role in the regulatory sector, Wilby makes time to continue his own research on how to manage water as the climate changes. Research has always been central to his work: he has a publication record longer than your arm and a professorship at Lancaster University. He sees involvement in scientific discourse as vital to keeping his understanding fresh.

“To a researcher, it’s a bit like being a kid in a sweet shop”

Wilby puts his success down to always choosing work he is passionate about. “In the Environment Agency I am working at the coalface in terms of tackling climate change. I come across a host of interesting questions that need to be answered. To a researcher, it’s a bit like being a kid in a sweet shop.”

Some time between 2000 million and 700 million years ago, bacteria entered into an uneasy truce with larger cells. These cells were the precursors of complex eukaryotic cells, that eventually evolved into today’s multicellular animals and plants.

The bacteria wound up losing around 90 per cent of their genes to the host nucleus and became mitochondria – the energy-generating components of complex cells. But modern mitochondria are so intimately involved in sexual reproduction that one scientist thinks they may even have been responsible for the evolution of sex itself.

Chris Bazinet, at St John’s University in New York believes that early mitochondria were mischievous. They could have colonised new hosts by bursting out and jumping to nearby cells.

Paradoxically, this might have benefited the host cell if the mitochondria took genes from the nucleus with them. Sharing genes can be a big plus because it allows a cell to adapt to new environments or threats.

This in turn could have led to the process of gene donation and acceptance becoming formalised and controlled by the host’s genome. “Donators” were proto-males and “acceptors” proto-females (Bioessays, vol 26, p 558).

Bizarre behaviour

Bazinet accepts his idea is highly speculative, but he says the bizarre behaviour of mitochondria in the fruit fly Drosophila might point to their earlier behaviour. “Mitochondria do some weird and complicated things in the production of sperm and egg cells that they don’t do anywhere else in the body,” he explains.

When Drosophila sperm form, for example, mitochondria move into position using a bundle of actin fibres resembling a comet’s tail. Strangely, while these mitochondria do not make it into the final cells, that shuffle is integral to sperm development – if it is disabled, the fly is sterile.

The movement looks very like the technique a parasitic bacterium called Rickettsia uses to push itself into neighbouring cells. And Rickettsia are thought to be close relatives of the bacteria that became mitochondria. Bazinet believes that this odd behaviour may be a vestige of an ancient process that led to the development of sperm and eggs.

RNA from mitochondria has also been found within the nucleus of human and mouse sperm. No one is sure what it is doing there, but it suggests that mitochondria play an intimate role in sperm development.

Extensive exchange

Rick Michod, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, agrees that mitochondria had a hand in the evolution of sex, but he departs from Bazinet on the details.

Sexual systems were reorganised when cells took on bacteria as mitochondria, he says, “but systems of genetic exchange were already in place, before the eukaryotic cell evolved”. Genetic studies in bacteria have revealed that extensive gene exchange is the norm between different bacteria even though they do not have formal sexual reproduction.

Bazinet hopes to test his theory by working out whether Rickettsia transfer host genes from cell to cell. The bacterium, which causes a serious, tick-borne disease called Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, spends time in the nucleus of human cells.

If they can pick up and transfer host genes, then perhaps this also happened in the earliest eukaryotes. So did early mitochondria set our distant ancestors on the route to males and females? The jury is out.

Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, who revived the 19th-century idea that mitochondria are descended from bacteria, is reluctant to go that far. “Bazinet has shown that mitochondria behave just like their bacterial ancestors,” she says. “But I wouldn’t make his grandiose claim about mitochondria being responsible for the whole of the evolution of sex.”