Okay. Can you just stop me by telling me your name?
And if you could tell me what your post was at the time we're going to be talking about and what your post is now.
So okay. So my name is Rebecca moore pre-COVID.
I was a postdoc in the lab of Quentin Sutton and also did the day to day lab managing
of his lab and the day to day lab managing of the containment level three facility,
which had one person working on HIV using the room.
Now, I've subsequently left the university said, You want me to talk about what I do now or what I did to him?
Just say what you're talking is now is my title now is senior scientist for a company called SPI Biotech.
Fine, thank you. So if you could just tell me a little bit about your life history up to this moment.
I mean, we, you know, we don't want to spend hours on it, but how did you first get interested in biomedical science?
And and what steps did you take to get ready?
My interest in science started with very animated teachers at school, and I went to university thinking I quite like genetics but wasn't sure.
So I started off with very broad biological sciences and within the first couple of weeks the biology lecturer had inspired me.
He was so animated, I decided that viruses were the thing I wanted to work on.
And so. I, especially after my second year in microbiology, in virology,
and then did a year in industry completely unrelated in IVF lab because that was
where there was a place and then came back and was able to specialise just in
virology which worked institutionally that then I was at work university and then
I finished my degree and thought I didn't want to go straight into a Ph.D. once,
a bit of a rest. So I joined, um, an HIV viral load lab as part of Imperial College,
where I was down doing day to day routine blood processing to get viral load results to the GP's in that part of the GBM clinic.
And within about four months I was bored of doing the same thing every day and spoke to the person running the department to see if I could do a Ph.D.
And she said yes. So I switched. I got some Wellcome Trust funding to do a PhD and I did a piece on Adenoviral vector development for gene therapy.
So did all that work already involved working in high containment levels?
So the the yes, there was an element of the containment level three HIV work during my Ph.D. The viral load work was
surprisingly done in a containment level to set editing because we weren't propagating the virus,
we weren't expanding it. We were just extracting it from blood samples and activating it and then working out how much was there.
So there was no containment laboratory work there. But with my Ph.D. there was.
And then I moved to the States for a couple of years to do a postdoc again on HIV.
But it was again, it was only in in the States.
They put HIV in a designated Category two plus or two star.
So it wasn't a full containment level three facility, but it was sort of two bonus extras.
So we had to do slightly more things than just a normal containment level two.
And I was there for three years and I met Quentin at a conference and he'd been at Imperial College the same time as I was doing my Ph.D.
And his post-doc Claire, who I also knew, mentioned that he was looking for a postdoc in lab manager.
And during my Ph.D. and my postdoc in the States, I realised that I quite liked organising as well as research, and so it seemed like a perfect fit.
So I came over for an interview with Quentin and got a position and my husband was also with me in the States.
We weren't married at that point, but he came over as well and got a position with William James in the department as well.
And we've sort of I've spent 13 years working with Quentin.
My husband was nine years with William, and over the years my role with Quentin sort of evolved.
I was doing various different projects when people left. I took over their work, if it was okay, if it needed to be continued.
So I tried to kind of absorb everyone else's knowledge so that I could be the source of history,
living memory of the lab and help train, train lots of new people.
I've given some lectures and seminars and tutorials as part of Quentin's program, and yeah,
it just sort of took on various managing positions with the Cat three facility, uh, various committees within the department.
The things one committee that the Lab Management Committee and the postdoc committee just,
I think if you're anywhere for a very long period of time, you find yourself in a lot of committees, which it was, it was a it was a lot of work.
And after a while, I did have to start saying, no, I can't be in any more committees.
But it did make me feel more connected to the department.
I felt like I knew more people. More people knew who I was.
I knew what was going on.
And in that regard, I think it was it was good because I did feel like I had more of a connection than someone who was just coming in,
doing their research in their lab and then leaving again.
And I think if you if someone were to say to you, if I were to say to you, what is the thing that really gets you have to put it back in the morning.
Wasn't the big question that really interests you? What would you say?
Was I just a it's not really a big question.
I just really like doing experiments. I really like being in the lab doing research and just finding out results.
It's not necessarily for one big question. If I'm for the last of four pre-COVID, I was working on HIV vaccine design,
using the envelope surface of HIV and trying to make versions of it that were more stable to be used in vaccines.
And the work was it was just really rewarding because things did what they were supposed to do on paper, which is always nice.
It's often in research that's not the case. And so the experiments where you set them up and the results would be interpretable and reliable.
And so it was just it was good. It was just satisfying.
And so, yeah, I just really like doing, going in and doing experiments and I also really do quite like training the two students.
The we get used to get F it just medical students and if they're with good and keen.
FHC Final I'm a student of the third year medical students and I was quite lucky.
I had a couple over the years who were very good and really keen and picked up the techniques
quickly so I could sort of show them everything they needed and then they would go off and they,
they both did very good projects and they've got firsts for the work that they put in.
And so I find that quite rewarding. Like 1 to 1, feeling like I can give people advice if I'm giving a lecture is absolutely terrifying.
And I used to get very nervous in the build up to them. But I do.
I like the 1 to 1 hands on teaching because I feel I can share sort of my, my wisdom that I've learnt experimentally over the years.
Yeah. So we've mentioned cartoon cat three and a couple of times we have to stop and explain the capabilities of what it's involved in,
in working on life viruses and how is yeah, safety insured.
So different viruses have different levels of risk obviously and things like HIV because
there's no vaccine and it's a lifelong infection without a cure that puts at Category three.
And so a Category three lab. There are just there's just more safety measures put in place for Cat three.
The main ones are obviously only trained. People have access to the room.
So it's like access in it's under negative pressure, which means all the air is being pulled into the room.
So when you open the door, air can't escape the room.
So everything, everything is going into the room. All the work is done in microbiology safety cabinets again where the air is being pulled in
and you don't open due to virus on the lab bench for HIV because you've got a pair of gloves.
You go through the well and not know because because HIV is a bloodborne pathogen you
don't need the sort of hoods with seat completely sealed where you put your arms in you.
It's just an open front, but the air is still being pulled in.
We wear safety specs, two pairs of gloves, a disposable surgical gown,
but we reuse them until they start to fall apart because that that's what made it very soft material.
And then we have a single use disposable apron over the top of that. But bigger because HIV is a bloodborne pathogen.
There are no sharps in the rooms and no needles, no glass.
And anything that you could potentially cut yourself with is removed from the room.
But you are allowed to come in and out of the hoods carrying things you can.
Once you've got your arms in the hoods, you can move around, do things,
and then move over to the ventilation and take your arms in and out so that you can move freely around the room because it's not an airborne virus.
We had to change a lot of that. And but yeah, that's what containment level three is.
Containment level two is. So all of the labs in the only building where we are now, all containment, level two, they don't have as many restrictions.
But if if the pathogen you're working with isn't that infectious or there are vaccines or treatments for it, you can work more on the bench with them.
Most of the time you still work within a microbiology safety cabinet because you don't want your samples to get infected with bacteria from the air.
But there's just less restrictions and you can use sharps and things.
And it this might sound like a very silly or naive question, but why do you need to work with live virus?
There are certain things you can only discover using a live virus.
Obviously for for HIV.
If you want to look at anything past entry into the cell to do with any of the viral genes that are involved in replication,
you have to have a virus that can replicate and come back out of the cell through the process, and you can't do that with a sort of attenuated sample.
So yeah, it is said that you can study the full lifecycle of the virus and if you're trying to inhibit that with drugs and things,
then you need to have all of the virus components there. So.
Right, let's let's get to it. Yeah.
Can you that going back to your own memory of that time it early in 2020 can you remember how you first heard that there
was a pandemic in the offing and how soon you sort of think it might be something that would affect the way you were?
Well, I remember we were in the combination, the T area in the Dunn's school.
In early January, just talking about what was going on in China and.
Being sort of quite excited in a weird virologists way about this was kind of cool.
I mean, people have been saying for a number of years that we would do another big pandemic.
It's been 100 years since the 1918 flu.
So from a virology point of view, it was quite exciting because I hadn't really probably properly appreciated the the life
impacts it would have on me because it was at that point so very far removed as a department.
I don't know, obviously, what everybody was thinking.
I know that the Cat three itself being adapted to work with COVID didn't come
until just before government put the proper government lockdown on the 2020,
23rd of March. My daughter had apparently had a fever at work.
That's called rather, although this was never corroborated.
My husband picked them up from school and he never retested her, and I'm not sure that she did because she was perfectly fine for two weeks,
that we were at that point in isolation already because the school had kicked her out.
And I think, yes,
probably the Wednesday or Thursday before the Monday that we went into full lockdown was when we as a family were already self-isolating.
And I had some online meetings with William James and Nichols.
It's been from the media and one other person from our lab who had an experience working with an airborne pathogen, maybe DuPont.
She worked with TB, so I said it would be useful to have her in on the meeting.
And. Nichols It's been had Michelle Hill, who was her Cat three facility or the person in her lab, he worked in Katherine.
So they have a chemistry lab in the in the manual. They have one in the same, yes.
So we had a meeting with them online to discuss how it would work if we wanted to start working on an airborne pathogen,
what sort of things we have to consider, which is why I thought maybe it would be good to have in the building in the meeting because
she'd got some experience and then which facility would be the best facility to use.
The medical facility. I've only been in it once. It's it's not as spacious, I think, as the Don't Donegal facility.
And it's also it was very heavily used. That facility has over the years I've had over the years been much less heavily used.
The people who use the room normally were William James Group and Quentin's on task group, but we hadn't got anybody actively using it a lot.
William hadn't had anyone for a number of years, and we'd rented out of room to Alfredo.
Paul Morris, who was at the time in the biochemistry building and he subsequently moved to Glasgow.
So he was using the room more heavily than the people who officially were supposed to be using it for HIV, the HIV work.
So it was decided that it would make more sense to turn the dumb school Cat three into the COVID room or to adapt it for working on SARS-CoV-2.
At the time, I was secretly hoping it wouldn't be the done school Cat three because I have two small children and I was already
trying to homeschool them because they'd been kicked out of school and I honestly didn't know how it would work.
Um, with homeschooling and, and running, setting up the lab.
So I was fingers crossed on my back thinking please don't pick up going to be gone.
And they did pick us and yes. And we had to adapt.
I don't know. Should I continue the it? Well, the code of practice is about 20 pages long and it was all for HIV work.
So we had to rewrite that to include how to work with the cat, the facility.
And that also has two rooms, one big room with two hoods and a small room with one hood and then a large service area.
And we went through various versions of should we have the sales room being smaller and kept the big room, the HIV room?
In the end,
we decided to cover the sales room for the big room with two hoods because we thought there'd be quite a lot of demand because it's been scraped,
had had a drug screen assay that they had used for dengue,
and so they were going to use that and they knew from their dengue experience that it was
quite labour intensive and used quite a lot time in the cabinet and lots of incubator space.
So it made sense to have to, but so that other work could go on at the same time.
So the idea was that you would be setting up a facility that medical researchers across the whole university would be able to use.
Yes. So that was that was. Yes. William's sort of vision was that it would be available for anybody who wanted to work on cells to use
or at least to have access to either through a trained user or get one of their staff members trained.
So he did do all the work to change the code of practice.
That was that was he did that. And then I went through and edited it and we had a meeting between William myself and Tracey Mustoe
from the Safety Department to kind of run through all of that to make sure we were happy with that.
We had to write a risk assessment for working with cells and then sort of protocols for the growth and titration.
So working out, growing it and then working at how much it grown and William has experience of those kind of assays from his work with Zika,
which he'd been doing in the P2 facility.
So he put together those documents and then again I went through them and met them and we,
we discussed all that with Tracey and then that all had to be sent to the agency for approval.
So we sent everything off late March and then we had to wait until they given us approval.
And William had contacts with people in Public Health, England,
and he arranged that we would get a vial of the England strain and a vial of Victoria, which came from Australia.
And as soon as the HSC had approved, which they did in early April, he arranged to have these vials of virus sent to us.
And what's the what's the main difference involved in working with an apple?
Yes. So. Officially,
we've discovered that Tracy has been on various safety courses after the fact and is discovered that officially we should
have had one of those cabinets where you put your arms in and work through a pair of gloves that are built into the hood.
We didn't have that.
And when we told the agency what we were doing, we said we'd be doing everything in a standard class to microbiology safety cabinet.
And they just it's a funny thing that you submit all your documents and the paperwork you get back from them just says,
we acknowledge that you were going to do this work. It's not approval that they're happy with anything you said you're doing.
It's just acknowledgement that you're doing it. They can still come and inspect you and say you're doing it all wrong.
So based on that wording, we sort of did what we said we were going to do, which was we set up a buddy system.
So once you've put your arms in the cabinet and started working,
you can't bring them back out because they are hoping that just by by when you move your arms out,
you do disrupt the air flow and some air can come back out to the cabinet.
And you because it's airborne, you can't be sure that you haven't got small air droplets that have ended up on your gloves.
We added an extra layer of plastic over sleeve so you'd have a pair of gloves, a lab coat, another pair of gloves so that you sealed your wrist,
and then a plastic over sleeve that went from your elbow to sort of halfway down your hand that could be removed and stay in the cabinet.
So you kind of also. Yes. And goggles. And then we brought in the masks, which created the the annoying thing as a glasses where you steam up.
So there were a lot of people trying to see through fog of their steam glasses while working with this virus that they never worked before.
But it was the actual the extra safety precautions that we had to put in.
And so once you've got your arms in the cabinet and you're working,
you can't bring them out again without removing the sleeves and the extra pair of gloves.
And then you can then you can come out. So rather than having to do that every time you wanted to leave,
we had a buddy in the room with you, and that person's job was to hand things through the cabinet.
So all of the work done in the incubators was done in plastic Tupperware boxes containing all
of the flasks of cell culture that you sealed in the incubator and then brought them out,
took manhood, undid the lids, the Tupperware, lifted it up.
The person working in the hood would then take the samples out, then you'd seal it, then they'd spray with ethanol, and then you'd sit for 30 seconds.
When those things were up, the person would then take that out and then you can carry on and start the work.
So any time anything needed to go in and out of the hood,
you went through this process of spraying and sitting and waiting and not carrying on working or someone coming in and guessing.
So everything took a lot longer. We did get through more PPE at the time when it was quite difficult to source PPE.
So that was always sort of the worry is, are we going to run out of gloves,
are we going to run out of our sleeves and aprons and gowns and all the extra stuff that was required?
And it also meant that if you wanted to do any work, you had to find someone else who was trained who could come in with you and do the work.
And being a buddy is quite boring. You have to sit a lot and watch other people work.
So it yeah, it changed everyone's ways of working in the room.
He said to ABC that only one other person working in. Yeah.
So how did you get the extra staff that you need? So the virus, if I remember correctly,
arrived on the 7th of April and William and I went in to the room first because we I mean, we were sort of training ourselves.
We've worked out how we wanted to do it. And then we said, Well, let's just go and see if we can work in this way.
And so Harvey from William's lab had prepared us some medium sized tissue culture flasks of various cells,
which are the cells that the virus can enter and replicate in a monkey cell line.
And he prepared a ten flasks of cells, and we took them down in a big transport box, big sealed plastic Tupperware.
And then we basically went through the process of infecting the cells in that flask
in the way that we'd written for the for the SRP to see if it if it was a doable
process and it worked and we got virus and then we went through the titration
process and that worked and we were able to trace it and we made a stock of it.
What does that mean? Was it work out how much virus that was in, in the sample?
So we, we, we infected ten flasks, ten mills per flasks.
And then three days later, we had 100 mils of virus which we allocated into 100 vials and scooped hundreds and froze them in the -30 freezer.
And that was our sort of working stock.
And so having gone through each process, once, we then started training other willing people to to go through that process with us all from within.
So they were yes, they were all from within the department plus the people who we'd been renting the HIV space to.
So it was because at the time that at that point the department had locked down, nobody was allowed to any work unless it was coded.
So we had Michael from Irvine Focus Group was willing to be trained.
The Marco Nierenberg from Alfredo's lab, who were using the space already was trained,
and then Michelle Hill and Julie at the time it was just Michelle from Nicole's it's
been lab and I trained the three of them because they all began with then Michael,
Marco and Michel. I trained them in growing the virus and tracing the virus and.
The official before COVID, the official training time with HIV work was somebody was supervised for six months in.
And by that point, you decided they had gone through everything enough times.
We significantly shortened that to about six weeks longer if you'd had no Cat three experience.
But everybody I was training at that point, with the exception of Michael,
had had lots of Cat three experience and also with the HIV work, people weren't in the room quite so much.
So it took six months to have gone through all the processes, whereas this was obviously very intense.
People were in the room almost every day doing something, and so it was we did a shorter experience,
a shorter training time just to make sure that they done all the techniques while being supervised
and they'd been in the hood and they'd also been a buddy because it was the buddying process.
You have to learn how to do that as well, and also to go through all the processes for the general lab cleaning,
because all this work generates waste, so people have to go through the process of how to deal with the waste.
And so in that period of time, they would have done all the different steps.
And I was doing obviously I was training those three people and my general day was wake up in the morning early to register my kids at school,
do maths and English homeschooling, one of them in the lounge,
one of them in in that room they had next door that we have open plan doors in the middle.
So if they needed to have meetings we could shut the doors and make it.
And then I would sit on my older daughter's desk next to my younger daughter and still able to kind of see the older daughter
whilst trying to deal with paperwork and emails and things that were coming in and also being available to help them.
And then any time from one, I would plan to come here and do the lab work with the people I was training.
And so then I'd be in the lab between one and six ish,
then I'd go home and then I dealt with all the emails that would come in while I would be in the lab.
And so then I'd be doing risk assessments and protocols and emails until about 11:00 every night.
And I did that for goodness. I had, uh, yeah, that probably until about September, but the summer holidays was slightly different subject.
So that was until about July and that sort of that working because at the time my husband's company, he wasn't allowed to work either.
And so he was at home, but he had random meetings scheduled any point throughout the day and he could control when any of his meetings were.
So that's why I tried to stay at home doing maths and English,
and the afternoons were generally more topic, so there was more drawing and creative, crafty stuff.
So if I wasn't there, they could still survive.
If they couldn't get hold of Daddy, he was in the meeting, so I wanted to make sure that the core subjects,
they had an adult supervision because my youngest was only in year one and a lot of her instructions said,
Get your grown up to help you do this and read this when your grown up and some her work was
very much they were assuming she had a parent just sat there able to help her any moment.
My other daughter was in year three and she was supposed to be a little bit more self-sufficient.
Not to say that she was, but she was supposed to be.
So I felt like I needed to be there for the core subjects so that they didn't fall behind too much in them.
And the school said that you could get key worker school if you were a medic or a firefighter.
Frontline worker. And I didn't feel researched involved as the frontline workers, so we couldn't get them into work or school.
We didn't it didn't feel right to try and push them into work or school just because of what I was doing.
So we did that.
I developed a twitch in my left eye that didn't go away until September was quite unpleasant.
I spent a lot of time Googling that, trying to work out whether I was dying, but basically it was stress.
So now I know what my stress tell is. If my left eyelid starts twitching, I know I'm too stressed.
And then in so yeah that basically carried on throughout the first full proper lockdown in May.
I don't know if they slightly changed the school rules and anyone in year one could go back to school.
So after May half term, my youngest could go to school, which was great,
except it put more time constraints on things because she had to get to school, but the other one had to be at home.
So I couldn't sort of say, Oh, I'm just going to go to the lab at the crack of dawn,
because then my husband would have had to take them both to school and bring one of them home again, and that wouldn't have worked.
So one of us would take the younger one to school, but then again,
one of us also had to be around to make sure they were available to pick the younger one up or be in the house for the old one.
So that changed. I couldn't then be in the lab all afternoon, so I had to fit working in around, dropping off or picking up from school.
That sort of constrained things slightly.
In the summer holidays we changed again and I worked from seven until about 12, 1230.
Then I came home and then my husband went to work from whenever I got home
until about seven in the evening because he'd been allowed to go back to work.
Then we kind of shifted to morning again because the holiday camps weren't really running either.
So we had to sort of someone had to be at home to entertain them. Um, I've rambled the topic.
I was going to ask you about all that later, but we've done okay.
That's fine. So what were the projects that were being done in the lab?
So initially, yes, there was lots of interest in the room.
Obviously everybody who couldn't do any work on the main thing was thinking, what could I do to do with COVID?
And so there was there were lots of people wanting to use the room. And so William set up a sort of grant process.
Basically, the question I should ask you, did you need to get extra funding in order to do the adaptation of the building?
The well, there was the university had their COVID funding.
William kept applying and being given money through that.
So that did support, yes. The sort of PPE and getting all the reagents and things.
Yes, there was money and we were able to buy some new equipment and things.
But yes, William applied for the university's grant.
I think he got three of them. So he was very successful. Yes.
He set up a sort of grant review process for people who were interested in using the room he gave priority to at the time to Nichols Expense Group,
who had drug screening. So they kind of pretty much had access to one of the hoods whenever they needed it.
We'd set up a calendar for booking the room and the I.T guys had advised me that the best way to do that was through my Nexus 365 account.
So I got all the penny reminders from everybody using the room.
So that was irritating so that people weren't double booking rooms.
And so, yeah. NICHOLS It's been a great priority on one of the hoods so that they could do drug
screening and they could basically ask any of the trained people if they could help.
So sometimes they use two hoods with one body.
After we trained the three that were then just somebody from Yan Raving whose lab came and I trained her.
William then trained somebody from his lab,
and so we slowly trained more and more people throughout until I think we probably trained about 13 or 14 in total.
And so everybody who was interested in the room wrote a small proposal.
What we want to do, William, set up a little committee of peers who had expertise in viruses and would give them the proposals that fit in best with
what they were doing to see whether they thought it was a good project and whether they could be allowed to use the room,
basically. And lots of people. And the idea was that you would write the proposal should be if you wanted to do further sales work,
it was sort of to get the preliminary data for writing a grant and moving forwards with with the work.
So we had lots of people would write to William, I don't know how many people exactly wrote him.
He had a spreadsheet. So he he might be [INAUDIBLE] be able to give you a spreadsheet.
And then when people had been approved, then he would say, right now, contact Becky to get all of the physical processes done to get you in the room.
And so then I'd get emails, people saying, my, my proposal has been approved.
I want to come in the room and then I'd be sort of have to go, right?
So what exactly do you want to do? How many people do you have that want to be trained?
Is it better that one of us does the work for you?
So for somebody in the module, we did the work for them because they just wanted some cell lysates so infected cells.
You've done lies. And then they just did a process on those life cells, whereas other people from the Arabian Peninsula,
they wanted to do quite a lot of work involving RNA. So it made sense for one of that people to come and be trained.
And she also did some helping with other projects as well.
Uh. What else? William set up what's called a michael neutralisation assay for looking at antibodies.
Because this was not protesting drugs, William was trying to see if there were some anti antibody inhibition could be shown.
So they were the sort of the core processes, and then other people were doing their own personal things.
So Michael from Irvin's lab initially was helping out with the general core drug stuff.
But then he also started doing some RNA work because that's what Irving's lab are interested in.
And so when the sort of burden of the drug testing had gone down slightly,
people could use the hood to do their own work and get funding for themselves.
Eventually, the Nicole's its group, went through the approval process in the manual,
so they then moved out and took the two people they trained across with them, said the three people left.
And so that sort of relieved one of the hood slightly. One of I think, you know,
maybe because people they got some data for paper and then she left and then they decide that they wanted to do some more work.
So somebody else came along and had to be trained. So that was slightly bad timing.
It would have been better if they could have crossed over and trained themselves.
But so then another person came and she did some work and then she left. So we have had a few people that we've trained that have then then gone off.
We've trained two people from Jane Keating's group up in the Churchill.
They worked with us for a while again on things to do with RNA and uh,
what they were doing has to do with oxygen starvation that they were, that's what they kind of specialise on in hepatitis C virus.
So they were trying to look at that in the context of hepatitis SARS-CoV-2.
Um, and then they eventually converted, though they had quite a lot of issues up at the they want their category was based in the women.
They had issues with the the from it.
But no, it's the cat three facility up there works mainly on HIV.
And the people who use the room are reluctance to have SARS-CoV-2 in the room as well.
So they had some issues being getting approval. Eventually they did get approval to work on the Wuhan strain of the into the original strain.
And but then for a while in 2021, every time they wanted to work on a new variant, they had to come down here to do that.
So they were sort of split over two places. I felt sorry for them.
Myles Carroll from Public Health, England came to use the room and I'm not entirely sure what they were doing.
They were already sort of trained from their own work and the risk assessments that we had written,
covering generic techniques covered all the things they were doing.
So we didn't need to know this. I didn't know the specifics of exactly what they were doing, but they're still using the room because again,
they're having issues trying to get into the Cat three lab that's supposed to be set aside for them up in the main J Hospital site.
I'm not sure exactly where that Cat three is, but they're still waiting for it to become available.
So we have a few people who were using the room before I left who didn't need to be using the room,
but because their own Cat three facilities were being difficult, they couldn't move into them when they when they needed to.
He talks about going up to September. But then you just mentioned that people were still doing things all the way through 2021.
So. Yes. So you stayed busy all last year? Yes.
So, yeah. And from June onwards, in 2020, the department was slowly opened to two people per bay and lots of time restrictions.
And so it was still quite sort of light in terms of general work.
But then from September onwards things started to go a little bit more back to normal in terms of people.
We could have three per bay and there were less restrictions and more people were coming in.
But by that point the room was being used by labs for their own research on the virus.
So I wasn't involved in working in the room myself anymore and I wasn't training
anybody at that point because everybody who was working in the room had been trained.
So I was generally at that point doing just keeping the room running.
So trying to get hold of the PPE, which doesn't sound like a big job,
but it was there was a lot of balls juggling because it wasn't the case of placing an order and then it would arrive.
I had to place an order and then spend weeks chasing it in fun and always worrying about, you know,
is this going to run out and will I be able to get and trying to find alternative stocks of things?
So it was it was the by that point, the general day to day running.
And we had to go back to doing the research we've been doing before.
And Quentin's lap as well. I yes I had the 2020 that yes.
I had with we'd also by that time we'd also started doing a little covert project on protein because we're sort of more protein lab.
So I was doing stuff with the spike protein up in the main.
What were you trying to find out?
Well, so our HIV experience is looking at the the HIV spike is made out of three versions of the same protein, all come together a bit like a tulip.
And it opens and closes, so it adopts multiple conformations.
And so our expertise was in trying to fix that envelope of protein in one confirmation,
using antibodies that we know binds to good combinations to pull out those confirmations and use them as vaccine candidates.
And we had the idea that maybe we could try crosslinking the HIV sponge.
So the SARS-CoV-2 spike in such a way that the RBD, which is the receptor binding domain, that the antibodies can block virus entry,
if we cross-linked that in a version with the RBD sticking up, that would be good ammunition for as a potential vaccine.
So we were trying to do some preliminary data looking at that.
And so yes, I was doing doing this bit that I had an FHA student doing and she came in she came in October.
So she was I was looking after her as well. She was also doing it, helping a little bit with the COVID with a different project.
We also work on nanoparticles, which are small little balls that you can stick, proteins that you are interested in on the outside.
So she made a nanoparticle expressing the RBD only.
So it's a self-assembling.
So you make the little subunits and they all just form together and covered in your protein of interest as she was doing some of that.
So she was there for the last three months of 2020 because she was supposed to come in May 2020 and couldn't have a lockdown.
So she came later in the year. So I just trying to remember everything.
Yes. So I was sort of trying to do some of my own research.
But the managing of the Cats Ray Hands was still quite intensive and dealing into interacting
with all the other people who are involved in the building that the country was in.
And we'd also just before the lockdown, the Cat three facility, the building it was in,
had been had a fire at the end of 2020, there was a flood like felt like the plague flood, plague fire.
Some somebody had it in for us. So there were a lot of issues and things still ongoing at the end of 2020.
So that was yeah, it was, it was still taking up a lot of my time. And that continued 2021 did it?
Yes. It just I kind of I sort of naively thought that things would get back to normal and people would get
stopped wanting to work on the virus and go away and get back on with whatever they were doing before COVID.
And I thought that the workload would get back to normal and that the managing of it
would be the way it had been when it was just HIV and it was sort of maintenance.
I could check it, check the room once a month and not really have have that much involvement in it on a day to day basis.
But it didn't it still needed sort of daily monitoring.
And there were still issues and my inbox was still full constantly of emails relating to it.
And I yeah, there were because by that point we'd been working for nearly a year in the room.
I had to review all of the recipes that I had written. I think I'd written about 25 steps for the month, just the managing of the room.
And so we had to officially review all of the inactivation techniques because to bring the virus out of the room,
to do some of the techniques that people want to use outside of the CAS faces, you have to prove that you've inactivated it.
So for every inactivation protocol, we had to do proof that it had been inactivated and officially we should have done that again a year later.
And I just didn't have the energy to do it, so we didn't.
But it was there hanging over me. We haven't revalidated all the inactivation, so I knew that I had to do it and I hadn't.
Yeah, it was. There was just a lot still of day to day stuff,
and so it was taking me away from what I wanted to be doing, which was being in the lab, doing lab work.
And I found I was facilitating everybody else's research and not really getting to do much of my own at that point and idea of
carrying boxes of rate of consumables around because they get delivered up here and they have to be taken as I'm I'm a researcher,
but at the moment I'm general dogsbody to everybody else.
And so I was I was not super satisfied by that point with with the way things were going.
But. Yeah. So is that what led you to look around the other opportunities.
Yes. That Yeah.
As 2020 went on, I, I was at the end of the, the end of 2020 I contacted the it was the department were promoting it, it was called the um,
it was a counselling service for trying to keep people in work funded by the Government and I can't remember what it was called,
but I contacted them because I was very stressed and unhappy with the fact that my job wasn't what what it.
But it had been and didn't seem like it was going to get back to what it had been.
So I had monthly online phone calls with a lovely lady called Amelia in 2021.
From January to September 2021. And that did help a bit.
And I learnt to say no to people and then to tell people I couldn't do things and to pull out of committees that I didn't need to be in anymore.
So and that sort of took some of the work burden away, but I still didn't feel like I was getting to do the research that I wanted to do.
And so. In August, my husband spotted a job advert at the company I'm now with.
Who I had been aware of this company, Spy Biotech, because I knew one of the people who set it up.
This is an Oxford University is going to do this. Yes. Yes.
And I said to this person, we've met at various student events because he and I both supervise Wellcome Trust students over the years,
and they have their sort of student supervisor meals and things.
So we met at various meetings. And my husband happens to know his wife that we were at his wedding.
So I know him. And he mentioned he was setting up a company a few years ago now.
And I sort of semi-serious, he said, well, if I don't work for Quentin, I'll come work for you.
And then my husband spotted that they were hiring in the field of Adenoviruses as a senior scientist in that the viral vector development,
which is what I'd done during my Ph.D. and it was still in vaccines,
which because I had really enjoyed the work I've been doing with Quentin on HIV vaccines.
And it was so it was sort of combining what I knew from my Ph.D. with what I'd really
enjoyed doing with Quentin in a position that I only get about two emails a week.
So it's lovely. And I just thought I was so sort of exhausted from everything and it just didn't seem like it was ever going to go away.
And once you've taken on all these extra roles, it's very difficult to say, I don't want to do it anymore, but I want to stay in the department.
I couldn't have given it up without leaving.
So that's what made me think when when my husband pointed out that this job was available,
that was what made me think I should at least see if I could get it, because that's nothing is going to change here.
Now, they know I can do this. It's not going to go away.
So that was why I looked into it.
And if they offered me the job and I felt very, very guilty for abandoning Quentin because through all of that, he was very supportive.
And I've obviously I worked for him for 13 years. I've known him for many, many years before that, from when we were at Imperial together.
And I had to bring him up on his holiday and tell him because they wanted to get references and that he was on holiday for a couple more weeks.
So I had to bring him on holiday and tell him I got the job, which I felt bad about.
That was still he was very good. He was very supportive and we're still very much in contact.
And friends say there's no bad blood. So when did you start?
I started on the 1st of December, and so I tried to leave the country facility in such a way that it could cope without me.
I instigated the what's it called validating of all the inactivation techniques that have been hanging over me for 2021.
I sort of told everybody else that they had to do it.
I having learnt to say No, I delegate like you do this technique, so you have to prove that it works.
So I gave those jobs to the people who were doing the work and I tried to make sure all of
the paperwork was up to date and somebody from Miles Cowell's lab was willing to take on
some of the sort of routine checking of the room and coordinating things with the workshop
to make sure that you have to do monthly tests of the to make sure that the room is sealed.
And so some I gave that he he was willing to take over those jobs and they have advertised my position not as what I was,
that postdoc and everything, but as a sort of proper facility manager of the containment.
330 And so they'll hopefully find somebody who can do it as a full time position because it pretty much takes a long time.
DO Yeah. Yes. I forgot to mention actually that in 2021, when the schools went back into lockdown,
I did decide that I couldn't do again what I'd done the first lockdown, and I managed to get 80% furlough for that period.
So I could still keep on top of any paperwork and emails and disasters that needed to be dealt with.
I could do, but didn't have to go into the lab and train people and do experiments and things.
I could stay at home and focus on girls and that that made that lockdown much more manageable
because I knew that my focus was them and I just had to do keep on top of the paperwork.
Um, yeah. I mean, I just felt that you couldn't apply for key worker status.
The thing that I know, Cath Green did get to the status, for example, and she was working on the vaccine.
You know, she was working on the vaccine. We were.
Yeah, I was only I mean, everybody who was using the broom, they would just they were doing research.
It wasn't direct. It wasn't directly going to save a person's life, really.
I mean, maybe if Michelle Hill and Nicole Sexton swoop had found a drug, that might have been,
but it was just research because people didn't have anything else to do.
And so they thought, oh, let's work on COVID. It didn't really, in my mind, justify sending them to Cuba for school.
And the school did say he had to be a frontline health worker, and I wasn't the frontline health worker.
So and my daughters are at school where a large majority of the children have medical parents.
I think they already had quite a lot of kids in school, and it didn't seem fair to give them any more.
So you're one of the few people who've been knowingly going into an environment where there's live virus.
Yes. So to what extent did you feel personally threatened by the possibility of infection at any point?
Not at all. I think we were more at risk outside in the supermarket than in the lab.
I was countering that as well. I mean, did did you feel that at risk of catching it?
Did it. I mean, from anxious about it, from it, from anything I did in the lab or I mean,
I just I suppose what I'm wondering, I think is actually depends a lot on personality rather than anything else,
whether you because of your very high awareness of the risks and the need to take precautions,
that you actually felt more confident that you wouldn't yourself. Yeah, I didn't feel at risk from catching X.
We were getting all food delivered, so we weren't going to the supermarkets, really going into the lab.
There was almost nobody around. And obviously all the precautions we put in place in the containment vessel itself
meant that we were highly unlikely for the virus to actually come out of the cabinet.
And in fact, anyway, so I didn't feel at risk of catching it towards the middle of 2020.
To be honest, I would have quite liked to have caught it so I could justifiably tell everybody to leave me alone for two weeks.
And that thought did cross my mind a number of times because I just thought,
this is the only way to have a rest is to catch the virus and just a really shut myself away for two weeks.
But I didn't feel at risk of catching it, so no, I didn't.
Yes, it is a question about anybody else, but I think you've answered it in the negative already,
which is whether working on something that might contribute to a better understanding of the virus supported your own wellbeing.
It sounds as though it was. Yes.
I didn't feel like my wellbeing was being supported by the work I was doing.
Maybe if I'd actually been sort of doing some of the experiments myself, it might have done.
But after the sort of training process of showing people how to grow the virus, how to work out,
how much virus they'd got, and how to make sure they cleaned up after themselves and didn't infect themselves.
I didn't really do any experiments. I was very rarely experimenting.
And at the very end, just before I left the run school with the with the project,
we'd started up here looking at the spike being in fixed in the opposition.
We did a mouse study and got some serum.
So I did go into the lab in the last few weeks and do the microbe neutralisation.
I say that William set up looking at antibody inhibition and that was quite, you know, that was quite satisfying because again, the results were good,
but actually really good I think worked well and I was generating some data, so that was good, but that didn't happen throughout.
I was just facilitating other people's work. So in that regard, I didn't yeah, I didn't really feel simply happy.
And were you were you happy with the that the safe the way the safety regime within the department was run in the in
the intensity in the department as a whole in terms of who was allowed to come in and out and what we had to do.
And, yes, I think the department did all that very well.
They they had to get a good system. There was just lost my train of thought.
That's come. Who can't remember. Mhm.
Um. No, really we had.
But when I was training the students initially, I was a bit worried about that because how is that the rules for training people,
whether you had to do it from a distance, very difficult to train somebody when you're saying prepared and most of them believed you can't do that.
That getting closer. Quentin built me one of the first screens that the department of the department then subsequently bought official ones.
But Quentin had a piece of Perspex and some bits of old shelving, and it's still in the lab now.
They haven't taken it away. He built this screen so that I could train Amelia really close.
But with the screen between us, because at the point I at that point she was there.
It wasn't clear who was more of a risk to each other,
because she's obviously a student mixing with all of the other students and doing all the social things.
Whereas I've got two young children who are going to school of mixing and the virus is just going through the school.
It still is. And so it was like we weren't sure who was more dangerous to who, but we were both in environments where we had exposure risks.
So Quentin sort of erected this, this thing on the desk so we could train each other and that that was great.
That was quite good. And now the department have some official ones with wheels that people roll around.
And I did find other I remember I was going to say them because I was also a lab manager for Quentin's lab.
And there's five labs on this floor behind this this glass window here.
And some of them have official lab managers, and some of them just have people who sort of are postdocs who do a bit of lab managing on the side.
And there were there were mate Jane Sharpe's and Lindsey Simpson.
Simpson and able to riff to refer and we had meetings to try and implement the different rules
that the department were saying had to had to be done for the floor for for the whole department.
And we were trying to implement them on our floor. And I did feel as though the department didn't quite give us time to put things in place,
because they were obviously very conscious that up to the point of being allowed back in that the whole department,
apart from the people working on it, had been. At home with nothing to do for three months and desperately wants to get back.
So they announced on Monday or Friday, you can come back in on Monday.
But these are the things you have to do. Giving us no time to set up any of the processes.
And I was there for the whole of the the three months where everyone else was bored had barely stopped moving.
And I would have liked a bit of time to have been able to properly implement some of the things that they suggested.
But everything moved quite quickly because obviously they had other concerns that the other 300 people that couldn't do any work.
And so that was I found that a little bit stressful because it just felt like
everything was moving and they had a phased re-entry that went very quickly.
So it was one week, one thing and then and then a week later everything changed to something else and then something else.
And, and so there was a month where it was just sort of it felt like we couldn't keep
up with the changes that everyone else was desperately trying to get back in.
And we were like, but everything just managed to quickly like implement these things faster.
So that was a little bit difficult. I think it would have been nice.
I think if the department has included the land managers who would have to make these changes,
given that had given us a bit more notice or included us in the meetings so that we could have said, Well, yes, that's going to take us time to do.
And can we have a couple of days to to do that? But that that they didn't do that.
That would be my my one complaint. But that's made it really useful.
It's getting amazing insights. It's I haven't perhaps in any of the other interviews you've answered that already and.
So yeah, I mean, I think we'd more or less move to a conclusion.
So. So has the experience of working the way you got to given you ideas for things you'd
like to do in the future or the ways you think the way research is managed to change.
Hmm. It's taught its taught me what my limits are and how far I can be pushed in terms of work and how happy or not that makes that makes me, I think.
I think the university could benefit from.
Talking to the people who made it was my fault for staying in the university for so long and being given for so many different jobs.
It would be nice if the university. Acknowledge people like the lab managers who are who are doing multiple jobs a bit better
and maybe rewarded them a bit more financially because a lot of the people with love,
I mean, I'm quite lucky I was a postdoc. So I'm, I'm paid at a postdoc salary.
But some of the people who were doing the lab managing side of things are just technicians and they've taken
on a lot of extra work during the pandemic with all these regulations and implementations and things,
and they've not necessarily been rewarded with more salary as a result of all the extra work.
And now they've taken all the extra work. As I mentioned earlier, it's very difficult to then give that back.
And so their jobs are now got all these extra roles that are not being rewarded with anything.
I think the university could acknowledge the importance that people like that have for
facilitating everybody else's work at the university really talks about the research outputs,
but doesn't acknowledge the fact that there's a whole team of people,
not just lab managers, but all the workshop staff here and the wash up staff, you know,
all that sort of staff that are doing the things that keep the departments running so that the research output is good.
They don't necessarily get the recognition that they should get and their work
that their job burden has for two years now been considerably more than it was.
And as I said, I don't know how it will go back to what it was because this is difficult to give back jobs when you've taken them.
So I think that that would be a nice thing the university could do, not letting all the the work that the people that don't seem are doing.
I think that what was quite good about the 3%, it was the collaborative nature.
We we got lots of different labs all together working on the same goals for a while with the drug.
But the drug testing platform, people from about five or six different labs were all sort of helping out and collaborating.
And that was made a lot simpler because of the COVID money that William had.
There was no sort of issue of We've got to pay for this, and I was just spending his COVID money on all the consumables.
It was all pooled. There was no issues with with that. And then as that money ran out, we then had to implement some kind of cost structure.
So people had to pay for that time in the capsule. And that was another job I had to take on.
Last year was basically some of the finance person billing people for the hours they'd worked and going back to the calendar and working
out how many hours it worked and then multiplying it by some number that we'd worked out was the cost per hour for using the room,
and that added an extra level of annoyance in terms of jobs I had to do, but it sort of.
It took away from the collaborative nature, because now you're sort of billing people for that time in the room.
And so people aren't going to want to maybe be a buddy for somebody else if they're going to have to pay for being in the room to pay for the body,
because some some labs only train that one person.
So then if you want to be in the room, you have to pay for the person who's standing there helping you.
And so I did advise people last year that it's probably more cost effective for you to
train two people because they need to pay for somebody else to stand and hand you things.
So the sort of the communal COVID money made it all more of a communal process.
And running money out of that separated it all back out again a bit.
Yeah. So I'm glad you brought that up because that is a question I normally ask.
May have missed it in there, but I missed it. But that's again,
it's something other people have said to me that the collaborative nature of the work they did
on COVID and with people from other departments or even other groups within the same department,
was a revelation compared with the normal academic approach, which is tempting.
Yes, it might be. Yeah, I think I may be in competition.
Yes. First baseman or whatever. Yeah. Which, you know, you would hope might be a lesson.
Yeah, it would be. Yes, it was over. Got things got done quickly and efficiently and and everybody was very happy to share everything.
And yeah, it would be a shame if things slip back to this is my work and I'm not sharing it with you and we're not working together.
I think from William has written collaborative grants with people who were part of in the lab at the time,
but I don't know whether any of them been successful.
So but he certainly was trying to keep the collaborative work going with labs from from up the hill.
So yeah. Well, I think that's great.
And this is nothing that I hadn't brought up that you particularly like to mention.
No, I don't think so. Okay. Sorry if it was a bit dismal.
No, no. Miserable was interesting.
And.