Posts | Felix Schweigkofler

Fulfilling a childhood dream

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Me, on a research ship, on the Atlantic

Ever since I read about the research vessel Polarstern in the children’s magazine Geolino I wanted to do research on such a ship. I still remember how 12 year old me was sitting in on the sunny floor and imagined myself into the freezing arctic on an important research mission.

But I was little and it was just a dream, unachieveable, nearly forgotten over the years. That is, until one day towards the end of my Bachelor’s, I came to talk about childhood dreams with a friend of mine, who had a seafaring friend with some good advice. Once I knew where to look it was easy to find lead scientists going on cruises but this wasn’t a normal year, this was spring 2020 … cruises were put on ice, travel was restricted, and I instead turned to fundraising for the Red Cross and preparing for my Master’s in Utrecht.

In the following years I tried again and again, but Covid measures made planning difficult, administrative hurdles were raised, and cruises clashed with important dates from my study. Finally, in 2023, I started again in earnest and searched for dozens of cruises and tracked down the lead scientists. It was the work of days. Answers began to trickle in, but spots are hard sought-after and cruises filled for many months in advance, so mail after mail was a no. I was almost ready to expand my search to international ships, when I opened one more mail, expecting yet another friendly rejection and best wishes, but it wasn’t. That time, it was an offer.

An assistant had cancelled and they could do with a helping hand. Just weeks after I began this last search, but more than a decade after a boy began to dream, I headed to the port and got onto a ship. A large research vessel. To do science on the ocean. It was geophysics instead of biology and the Atlantic instead of the Arctic, but that didn’t matter. I made it. After all the effort and failures. Achieving this dream had become so important to me that finally setting foot on the ship felt more like the end of a journey, rather than the beginning. It felt a bit unreal.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Therefore, I feared that during the single-minded effort to secure a spot on a cruise, my expectations for the journey might have grown too much, but luckily they hadn’t. We were putting out measuring devices and monitoring the ship’s own ongoing measurements of the seafloor and it all felt properly exciting and significant. The topic was far off my expertise, but I learned quickly about the intent behind our research and got interested in the preliminary results we were seeing. To do all this on the ocean was a very peculiar feeling. Surrounded by just water, confined to a ship, it feels as if the world has become very small. It is just the ship now, and just these people. Everything else feels like a vague possibily in the distance. The day is dominated by the routine of the ship. The outside world is far. The usual worries of life diminish. As if the ship was in its own dimension. A subtle, but very curious experience.

I want to believe that even this last part is something my 12-year-old self intuitively felt, when he dreamed himself on this ship.

An attemtp to convey the feeling of the ocean-dimension

Video project 'Backpacking Sweden'

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Storytelling has always been fascinating to me. As a child and teenager I loved books and was an avid reader and even attempted to write books myself. At some point I hope to find the time to complete them, bt in the meantime I wanted to try something nore manageable: Learning how to tell a story in a video.

Not a particular story, just how to make a story out of an event. A hiking trip in Sweden with a friend of mine was the perfect opportunity for me to explore the world of motion picture storytelling. Fixed chronology, clear start end end, lots of small issues to be solved, lots of material to cut, combine, and arrange. And photos by my friend that I also used to express our child-like joy at all the red houses.

But boy had I underestimated how much work cutting and editing the main video would be … I ended up working 50+ hours for one hour of playtime. Especially, because I wasn’t certain what the pace of the story should be. The travel Youtuber Shiey was a big inspiration, already while recording the material, but it was still difficult to translate that inspiration to a consistent narration and find my own style; which level of details to show when in service of what.

With feedback from friends and family I tuned and polished, until I felt like additional effort wasn’t justified anymore, especially given the limits of the source material. Cutting and editing is powerful, but there is only so much one can do with a given source material. Even though if I would do this today, I would make different choices, I am still fairly content with the fruits of my labour. The videos have barely a dozen views, mostly from friends, but for me, the most important part was to actually make them and turn the disjointed Go-Pro clips into a real story.

Student research competition - iGEM 2019

Sun, 02 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Rewritten in 2025. The original was influenced too much by a wannabe start-up mindest that had befallen me in 2019-2021

In 2019, towards the end of my Bachelor’s, I led an undergrad student research team for the iGEM competition. iGEM stands for international genetically engineered machine and aims to further biological research among students. I think it is a pretty great idea and it was a significant experience for me, both scientifically and personally.

In short

Our team iGEM NAWI Graz 2019 decided to a method for the early detection of American foulbrood (AFB), a severe bee disease. We delived the proof of principle for our project Beeosensor - a biosensor based on detection of the fouldbrood spores through highly specific binding by bacteriophages. We performed quite well, winning two awards and even being nominated for the Grand Prize. For scientific details, please go here; this post is dedicated to my personal experience.

iGEM NAWI Graz 2019 Logo, designed by Nikola Vinko and me

The beginning

Science is great, especially when looking at it from outside. But since my mind had been set on doing science since about a decade at that point, just learning at some point wasn’t enough anymore. I wanted to do. And so I joined the iGEM team at my universities. In 2018 it didn’t work out because I took on a full time summer job, but in 2019 I had the time and comittment to make it work. I even became so comitted that I became team leader when the original team leader dropped out after the first months. That made the experience extra intense, as I took the job very seriously. Maybe even too seriously, but I had made a promise to my team and I would keep it.

My team

Some of my colleagues were especially eager to make a team video and so after a long time of planning and shooting scenes, we had produced this masterpiece:

You can find other teams' videos on youtube. In the end, they were shown at the conference in Boston and for me that moment felt quite significant. Many of the videos tell about the same difficulties that out team went through and with all the energy and emotions I had put into making this project succeed, I was rushed by a sudden feeling of community and shared experience.

The research

When I announced that I would be ready to undertake the task of the team leader, we were were still full of naive optimism and envisioned the prototype of the Beeosensor, fully functional, tested and ready until the end of the summer. The sky seemed blue, the roadmap clear. We were quite wrong. Tough lessons were taugth this summer.

It was difficult to hold the team together, as formed relatively late, were very interdisciplinary, worked in three different labs (molecular, chemical, engineering) and not all members wanted to work full-time on our project. Problems creeped out of every corner, the tasks accumulated, and the optimism started to wear off, a core of members remained and others all but dropped out. An insufficient desinfection method led to contaminations of our bacterial cultures for weeks, the phages (bacteria-viruses) would not replicate and when they did, we had issues isolating them with the proposed method, necessary criteria for the competition almost were not met, and the financing was lacking behind the expectations.

It was tough.

However, our project did progress, in painfully slow steps and with much reduced goals. Proof of principle for the method instead of a fully functional prototype. But still. Proof of principle it was. We got our final and long-awaited results two days before the deadline. Talking to other groups we learned that many shared a similar story. Lab is hard. Especially for undergrads on a crammed timeline.

The congress

Our sole hope for the congress in Boston was a gold rating, essentially the best out of three ‘grades’. Half of the 80 other overgrads achieved that as well (some of our team were overgrad, but most were still umdergrad). The awards however are the real deal at iGEM. But with better financed teams from universities like MIT and Harvard, what chance did we have?

The following 30 minutes were some of the most unreal in my life.

We were first nominated for the best diagnostics project and we cheered … when we were announced the winners of the best diagnostics project we jumped up from our seats and celebrated and joked and laughed. We were nominated for best human practices. At that point it felt dreamy already. And then we won best human practices. There were no more sounds I could make to express my feelings appropriataly. We were shouting our lungs out. Very untypical for me, but there I did.

Months of hard work getting honored in such an umexpected way was an incredible experience. It was surreal, it felt a bit as if anything could become true with a snap of my fingers, manic, for a few minutes. We were then nominated for the best presentation, the best poster, and even for the Grand Prize, the actual winners of the competition. In that moment those nominations felt only logical, but of course, they were decent achivements in their own right (Proof).

We are the champions!

Acknowledgements

Last, I want to thank the people who supported our team and helped us to make all of our achivements possible:

Hannes Beims and Wolfgang Schühly, who were the main “intellectual contributors” and provided us with phages and bacteria.
Peter Macheroux and Eda Mehmeti, who gave us access to two labs and access to the equipment necessary for our project.
Marina Toplak, Julia Messenlehner, and the other members of the institute, who supported us troughout the project.

Without you, Beeosensor would not have been possible