Directly after my PhD I did two postdocs, one in the UK at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, and another one at the Department of Neurobiology in Amsterdam. At the ICRF I extended my expertise in cellular imaging using fluorescence, but also in molecular biology since we made the GFP constructs ourselves. The ICRF was also a very stimulating environment with top scientists from all over the world and provided me with more insight of how science is done. Next to the experience of living in London, very useful. The research itself did not go extremely well, not that the experiments failed, but I largely obtained negative results, which are not very suitable for publication. In the Netherlands, I did research on action potential transmission in living nerve cells, an area that I did not know very well and was thereful a very useful and interesting thing. Research stalled a little bit because here, the experiments didn't work that well and it was very difficult to get good measurements.In Amsterdam, I started to wonder if a normal scientific career was something for me. I did not find it intellectually stiulating anymore, because I only had to really use my brain a couple of times a month to think of new experiments and to analyze them, but most of the time was wasted by doing experiments. Also, science is socially-speaking out of this world and even the people that manage to get their own research group mainly have a desk job and interact hardly. Being a postdoc is difficult because you don't have your own group, and can hardly influence the type of research, while the outcome of the reseacrh is essential for the rest of your career. I hve seen many good graduate student and PhD who just didn't manage to get publishable results and ended up unemployed. Also, financially science is not rewarding, nor does it give esteem in society (on the contrary) or any power, so it lacks the main drivers that are common for ambitious people everywhere else in society.Not that I regret my postdoc years as a research scientist, it did deepen and broaden my scientific capabilities and enabled my later ventures back into science as an independent researcher.