Sarah Sawyer is from Edmonton, but she answers the phone in Swedish.
Like most Stockholm residents, she’s bilingual, but unlike most of her co-workers at the Centre for Genomics and Bioinformatics at the Karolinska Institute, English is her mother tongue—only natural, seeing as she’s a University of Alberta genetics grad. As the sun sank below the horizon at two o’clock on a December afternoon during Nobel Week, I spoke with Sarah about what it’s like to work as a Canadian abroad and how the scientific culture of Sweden—laden with undertones of Nobel excellence—stimulates her research.
“[Sweden has] an excellent reputation for science,” she proclaims. “[To be] internationally trained is a big plus, definitely.” Sarah takes me into her lab and shows me her workbench, dominated by complex automated machines rather than test tubes and chemicals. Computers and robotic systems are commonplace in labs that deal with DNA. In the post-genome-sequence age, where scientists routinely analyze huge amounts of genetic data, such high-tech tools are becoming a necessity. Sawyer, a Ph.D. student, analyzes single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). One of the findings of the Human Genome Project was that the DNA of every human is 99.9% identical. Most of the differences that make up the remaining 0.1%—which are the differences that make us all unique—exist as single changes in the three-billion-letter code that makes up a person’s genetic complement. Each of these changes counts as a single SNP. As we chat, she loads samples of DNA into an analyzer, which will compare the genes of individuals from different parts of the world with each other on the basis of SNP differences.
Following her graduation from U of A, Sawyer was lured to a graduate science program at Uppsala University, in the famed university town of Uppsala, a half-hour’s train ride north of Stockholm. Founded in 1477, the university is Scandinavia’s oldest and offers a program that passes over the Master’s degree and allows students to earn their Doctorates directly. Uppsala offers a unique social atmosphere for students that Sawyer speaks of fondly. The medieval town is peppered with 13 so-called “Nation Houses” that offer a home away from home for students who had migrated there from all over the country throughout history.
Each Hart House-sized club carries the regional flavour of a particular Swedish province and students are responsible for running club restaurants, bars and organizing events and festivals. As a foreign student, she got to pick which house she wanted to be a part of. Although Sawyer found the Nation House concept a “culture shock,” their rich regional histories, combined with Sweden’s policy of paying tuition fees for all students, including foreign ones, made a Nordic education sound too good to resist.
Sawyer has found that a Swedish education and her graduate work at the Karolinska Institute not only allow for a unique cultural experience, but also offer her unusual opportunities to do excellent science. “[Not only does] nobody pay tuition here,” she says, “but [Karolinska is] very focused on sending students to international conferences.”
Despite her successes and jet-set globe trotting, Sawyer is, at heart, a friendly and down-to-earth Albertan. “Swedes don’t make a big deal of things,” she explains. Even when the Backstreet Boys come to town to record albums, Stockholm residents don’t buy into celebrity fever. They have a bite of herring, a sip of vodka (so many flavours!) and just relax.
