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It was a Friday morning, and I had just emailed my department chair, along with the dean above him: “I will be sending my letter of resignation shortly, but you can take this as the informal notice.”

Who, in their right mind, would give up a tenured job at the prestigious University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in one of the higher-ranked Microbiology & Immunology departments in the country?

Me, that’s who.

There are many good reasons for that, but here’s the most important, related to a story from my father’s life.

My father was a very well known chemist in his day.  But he was also an outdoor adventurer.  He pioneered many first ascents of climbing routes in the 1950s, then moved onto the more chaotic sport of whitewater kayaking – trying to get down a frothing, churning river upright and intact.  He did many first descents of rivers around the Western USA, but that wasn’t enough.  He wanted to tackle something really big.

So, in 1974 he attempted to tackle the source of the Amazon: the Apurimac River in Peru.  This river starts in the high-altitude altiplano of the Andes mountains, descending hundreds of miles through several very remote gorges, parts of which had never been visited by anyone but the native populations.

His first attempt was a failure. He and his kayaking partner reached a point where they had to decide: do we plunge down into this gorge without looking at it (because there was no way to do so), or do we hike out? Having two young kids back at home, my father opted for the hike out.

But the Apurimac bug had bitten.  He could no better keep himself from thinking about the mystery of that river — wanting to “conquer” it — than kids can stay out of a candy jar placed in open view on the table.

He went back the next year, with a larger and more capable team.  They had better maps, and they were more prepared.  I’m not going to tell you what happened because it is far better described in my father’s book, “Demon River Apurimac,” than I could do justice to here.  Suffice to say, they had more than a few challenges.

So if I’m not going to tell you what happened, what is the point of this story?  The book. For twenty years after my father returned from the gorges of the Apurimac, he intended to finish his book about that expedition.  But, being a busy professor with a large lab to run, he never had the time.  There were always conferences to attend, students to help, committees to be on, personnel to manage, and proposals to write.

Then on a fateful day in 1994 he received some sobering news: he had cancer, and the doctors didn’t give him long to live.

After that diagnosis, he had a main priority: to finish the book that he’d put off for 20 years.  He outlasted doctors’ predictions for him, living two years more.  The book was published not long before his death in 1996, though by that time, he didn’t even have the strength or ability to sign a copy for me.

He wasn’t around to appreciate the book.  He wasn’t around to tell stories about it.  He wasn’t around to promote it.  He wasn’t around to give slideshows.  It went on to win second place in a competition for outdoor adventure books, but because the author was no longer around, it soon faded from view, and went out of print.

This story can have many interpretations, but the clearest one is this: life is very short, and if you wait too long to do the things that really matter to you, it may well be too late!

I have many things outside of running a lab that I’ve wanted to accomplish: writing books that deeply probe the meaning of being, writing science fiction stories, spending time with my kids as they grow up, spending time doing my own adventures on rivers and mountains, and helping other people.

Yet, if I were in my father’s day, I probably wouldn’t have stepped away from the job.  I would have been too scared to give up that kind of secure position.

But it was a lot easier to do in the modern day.  In my own tenure/employment letter, there was buried this little clause (I’m paraphrasing from memory here): “This is not a guarantee of a salary.” I’m not the only one with that phrase on my letter.

All faculty recruits to UNC’s medical school post 2002 have that nice little exception on them.  It is especially widespread in medical schools for tenure to be unhitched from any kind of salary guarantees.  “You don’t get the grants, we won’t give you a salary.” (Is it any wonder, then, that I felt some pressure to get really good at grant writing from the get go?)

So, what, then, does tenure mean if there is no guarantee of a salary?  It means I’d always have at least some closet office somewhere for as long as I cared to hang around.  Oh yeah, and a title to match.

I finally realized this: that I was exposed to the vagaries of funding, much like a business person is, but with one key distinction.  As in a business, income can go to zero if revenues are not sufficient (and I’ve talked to more than one faculty member who is working “for free”!).  But unlike a business, income cannot go above a certain tight ceiling, no matter how well you do.  I could have brought in $20 million per year in grants, and perhaps I would have received a slight pay increase.  But at most that would have been $10,000—only 0.05%.  In a business, if I help bring in $20 million in revenues, you can bet that I’d get a bigger pay increase than 0.05%.

So, in my “tenured” job, I was exposed to the same downside risk as a business, with little of the upside, except the “pleasure” of working for myself and bringing in all the funding — with all the stress that entails.

That made the decision a whole lot easier to just say “goodbye” when UNC did some things that were unacceptable.  When I said goodbye, I had no other firm job lined up, just some possibilities.  I really did jump into the abyss – and it has been great so far.

I’m not advocating that others go jump off into the abyss like I did.  It requires a particular kind of risk-taking personality to do something like this (which I seem to have).  But at the same time, I do highly recommend asking yourself periodically: Am I doing the really important things?  If not, why not, and how can I start doing more of those?  Don’t wait until you get a diagnosis like my father did to start working on the important things in your life!

People often ask me: why are you helping other people get grants, when it increases your competition?  That question has the presumptive world view that there is not enough money to go around.  I have a different world view. I think that there is not enough time to go around, and the story above shows why.  Besides, the Federal Reserve and its equivalents around the world create money at the press of a button, but nobody that I know of can create more time at the press of a button.  That would be magical, indeed.

I’ve observed many colleagues wasting 50% or more of their time writing proposal after proposal, most of which fail.  I believe that all of us as scientists would be better off if we were all writing less proposals, and getting more science done.  The only way to do that is to increase the quality of the proposals written, i.e. sacrifice quantity for quality.  That’s why I do things like this to help people improve the quality of their proposals – because life is too short.

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