ASPB’s 2005 AAAS Mass Media Fellow Sarah Nell Davidson is sending a series of “postcards” back to the ASPB News as she spends the current academic year abroad doing research for her PhD thesis.

The Challenges of Research in Paradise

Heavily touristed as Thailand is, few travelers step off the bus between Bangkok and Laos long enough to experience Thailand’s largest region, the agricultural northeast. These 19 provinces, collectively known as Issan, are dominated by flat verdant rice fields where poor farmers struggle to carve out a living in Thailand’s forgotten backyard. The city of Nakhon Ratchasima—more commonly known as Khorat—is the gateway to Issan and home of Suranaree University of Technology (SUT). It is also the place that for the past 12 years ASPB member James Ketudat Cairns has called home.

Cairns, or “Dr. Jim,” as his students refer to him, begins his day around 5 a.m. with a run through the campus forest. Donning a cap he received after winning the Fun Run during Plant Biology 2005 in Seattle, he sets off early to avoid the oppressive sun, which inevitably rises before he reaches his morning finish line. Cairns grew up in rural eastern Oregon and headed south for a PhD in biology at the University of California San Diego, where he developed as a protein biochemist within a mammalian system. After finishing, he moved to Thailand with his wife Mariena Ketudat Cairns, who owed the Thai government four years of scholarship service. The couple landed in Khorat, and Jim switched fields to study the biochemistry of plants and is now an associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry at SUT, while his wife is a member of the Department of Biotechnology faculty on the same campus.

In a country where scientists are promoted and monetarily rewarded for pursuing administrative positions and where little research and infrastructure investment trickles out of Bangkok, maintaining a competitive research group is a huge challenge, especially for a non-Thai “outsider.” Fortunately, Jim was able to find support and encouragement from accomplished Thai researchers such as Professor Jisnuson Svasti, with whom he collaborates on much of his work.

Besides being faced with a new language (in which he is now fluent) and different educational and political systems, Jim has found more subtle challenges in the laboratory. For example, his department received funding from an international development program to get an HPLC-mass spectrometer. But by the time the funds squeezed through the bureaucratic red tape, the specified model was so out-of-date that they could not get the software to run it. And without the equipment and license to use radioactive isotopes, even something as “vanilla” as a Southern Blot can be a challenge. “You can’t order a chemical and get it the next day,” Jim points out. “If you are lucky, it takes three weeks; if you are unlucky, you wait three months.”

In “the middle of nowhere, Thailand,” you have to be especially stubborn to move your research program along and stay competitive internationally. “You have to be motivated enough to get past the hardships,” Jim says matter-of-factly. “Molecular biology and biochemistry are moving so fast that with our limited resources, by the time we get up to speed on something, it is often considered trivial.”

“As a foreigner, I have to work extra hard, because I want to be a part of the international community,” Jim says. He joined ASPB initially because he wanted access to the journals, and at the time the SUT library did not subscribe. But his membership with the Society also helps him feel connected internationally despite his relative isolation.

In spite of the hardships, Jim’s group is making significant progress characterizing the structure and function of their favorite proteins, the 35 b-glucosidases in rice. And in a recent ranking of universities by the Office of Higher Education Commission, SUT ranked third in research functions among universities in Thailand.

Jim seems most at ease when mentoring his students. In addition to teaching biochemistry to the medical and agriculture undergraduate students, Jim currently oversees five graduate students. As a part of his international approach to teaching and research, he encourages all of his students to seek out research experiences abroad during their PhD tenure, and so far all have done so. Two of his students have presented their work at annual ASPB meetings, and most are actively involved in collaborations with researchers in the United States or Australia.

But according to Jim’s former student and now colleague Rodjana Opassiri, graduating students will face additional hardship. “The government tries to recruit students to do a PhD, but they don’t have a plan regarding who is going to hire them,” she said. Referring to his most recent graduate’s fate, Jim said, with half a smile, “If your requirements are working as a researcher and living outside Bangkok, you have to move to Taiwan.”

Sarah Nell Davidson
snd2@cornell.edu