DamnGoodTechnician

Update your links, folks!

2010-08-05T19:29:00.003-04:00

I'm moving this party over to LabSpaces! I'm way too lazy to keep posting here as well as there, so you might want to update sooner than later.

Here's the link to the RSS feed, btw -
http://www.labspaces.net/labspacesblogs.xml?blog=614

xoxo,
DGT

Journal club

2010-08-03T08:54:00.001-04:00

Scientists seem to find a great deal of value in journal clubs. It seems that the "purpose" of journal club is to dissect papers in great detail, and that this somehow teaches your trainees how to be analytical.

This scheme reminds me of the Underpants Gnomes of South Park:

Phase1: Journal club
Phase2: ?
Phase3: Smart & analytical trainees

Now, maybe this is a gradual process - you start being able to identify the weaknesses in terrible papers first, and then find weaknesses in better papers, increasingly up the scale until you can see what experimental holes people are hiding in very well crafted papers. I fail to see how this process is learned at journal club - journal clubs aren't a class; they're a rabble. There's no one leading the dissection - participants point out parts of the paper they liked or didn't like, or ask questions of each other on the nuts-and-bolts of the experiments, but there isn't a concerted effort to make sure people know or understand what the holes are and why they're important.

Perhaps the journal clubs I've been part of have been faulty in some way.

If you just attend enough journal club sessions, does this ability magically reveal itself to you?

Let's be honest.

2010-07-21T19:36:00.003-04:00

Being second co-first author is not as good as being first co-first author. The paper will always be "Postdoc et al", even if it's "Postdoc*, Otherpostdoc*, GradStudent* et al (*these authors contributed equally)".

On an amusing note, I came across a paper that had three co-third authors. As in, "Author1, Author2, Author3*, Author4*, Author5*, Author6, Author7". WTF is that about?

Talk talk talk, post-retreat analysis

2010-06-23T20:39:00.002-04:00

Woot! My talk went quite well - I felt very comfortable with my material (having practiced the slides a mess of times yesterday certainly helped), and think I handled the questions posed rather well.

I was tremendously impressed with the quality of the presentations by the other technicians. I guess that sounds kinda dickish - I don't mean that I expected anyone to be bad. I mean that I've seen a lot of presentations from a lot of technicians, and the overall quality of these talks was leagues higher than what I've seen in the past.

I thought it was a really great day's worth of talks - I wonder if this is what it's like to go to a scientific meeting?

Observation

2010-06-23T07:32:00.002-04:00

I feel that the difference between niceness of clothes you wear on any given day and niceness of clothes you wear on the day of your big presentation decreases with age.

Talk talk talk

2010-06-16T21:15:00.002-04:00

My department is having its first annual retreat (of course, held in our own auditorium, and not at some awesome beach-y place). I've been picked to be a speaker at said "retreat".

I am kinda freaking out about it.

It's probably less of a big deal than I'm making out of it. A lot of people are giving talks, so I'm clearly not special in that regard. This also isn't a review (at least not a formal one) of anyone's progress, so no one's project is going to be axed or prioritized based on their talk.

However - I've never given a 15-minute talk before. Come to think of it, I can't say that I've given a "talk" before. I've presented at lab meeting plenty of times, but talking about my stuff at lab meeting is a whole different beast. In that forum, I'm presenting warts-and-all data and looking for constructive criticism. In this instance, I've only got four slides (pretty much) to show as sexy of a story as I can.

How on earth do I do this? Hopefully someone on the internets will have a helpful idea...

Question

2010-06-08T08:34:00.002-04:00

Does your lab do a journal club?
How often is said journal club?
How often have you already read the paper that is being sent out for journal club?

My answers:

Yes.
The new schedule is once a week. I think this is grossly too often.
In my entire scientific life, there has been only one instance where I have received the "Paper for Journal Club" email and said, "Oh, I read this already." Does that mean I don't read enough papers? Or that journal club selections are often esoteric and unlikely to to be widely read outside of an individual scientist?

PE and AER

2010-06-05T11:45:00.002-04:00

FACS is a fucking pain in the ass. I am not referring to the infect-your-cells-with-something-green-then-sort-out-the-green-ones kind of FACS - that's pretty easy. I am referring to staining cells with fluorescent-tagged antibodies, and then generating complicated gates based upon size and positive or negative signal from umpteen different antibodies. All of this staining and sorting is preceded by a variety of treatments to the whole cell population that take a non-trivial amount of time. I should also mention this is all being done in a 96-well format, and the reading of said plate (equivalent to one clone's worth of cells) takes about two hours. I should also mention that there is always demand for an increasing number of clones to be run on any given day.

I have never, ever done an experiment where the perceived effort (let's call it PE) to accomplish the task is so tiny, where the actual effort required (AER) is so massive. Let me reiterate:

I have done chromatin IPs, mouse colony husbandry, immunocytochemistry, Southerns, qPCR, and nothing - nothing! - comes close to FACS in this equation above. Many experiments have a similar AER (chIP comes to mind), but the PE for those experiments is also much higher (e.g., "Oh, it would be nice if we had chIP data on X, but I don't know if you can get that much work done before [date needed]!"). Mouse colony husbandry (tagging, tailing, genotyping) is probably the closest (e.g., "Why are you spending so much time in the mouse room? How long can it take to tag all those mice?") but I'd say it's only two less-than signs.

Is there anything more horrible than FACS out there? ::shudder::

I never trusted that detergent...

2010-05-11T19:23:00.002-04:00

I'm sometimes surprised by the reagents we don't have in our labs - basic crap like PCR tubes, glycerol, etc. I think it's because we've only recently (relatively speaking) moved into our labs, and only buy the stuff we're actively using. As such, there isn't a stockpile of old, crusty bottles to fall back upon. I needed some NP-40 detergent, so I ordered it.

It came in today, and there is a typo in the datasheet. It says that NP-40 is a "colorless, clear vicious liquid".

I think they were going for viscous (as in "very sticky") rather than vicious (as in "mean and nasty"), but maybe I should be on the lookout for my NP-40 to stab me in the back.

A little surreal

2010-05-07T07:50:00.003-04:00

A small but growing cohort of my husband's PhD friends & classmates are now getting offers for tenure track positions. It's a little weird - no, scratch that - it's a lot weird. Does it ever get less weird to know your grad school friends are professors?

I remember getting shitfaced with these people at their thesis defense parties.
I remember dressing up in costume with them for Halloween parties (and subsequently getting hammered).
I remember the intrigue and excitement of their first significant others in grad school.
I remember their weddings (not to those inaugural significant others), and I know I'll remember their children's birthdays.

I was looking back at some photos from our first year here (holy fuck was that a long time ago - look how skinny everyone was! That was before PersonX and PersonY weren't speaking to one another!) and got super nostalgic about the whole thing. It's amazing that universities are giving these folks the keys to their own labs. Someday I'll get to regale their grad students with "I knew So-And-So when he was in grad school - and this one time..."

I'm sure they'll be wildly successful - and I wish them the best.

Why not me?

2010-05-05T00:04:00.000-04:00

I constantly read tales from the interwebs about the interaction between men and women in science. It would appear that the bulk of these anecdotes cover interactions wherein the guy acts like an asshat regarding the woman's boobs/ass/intellect.

There are certainly exceptions to these asshat-y stories: sometimes I read about guys acting like upstanding wonderful guys, or, even better, guys upbraiding other guys for acting like asshats. I will also obviously concede that the relative contribution of bad experiences to the blogosphere is well larger than that of good ones - I certainly write more about negative things that have happened to me than the boring old positive experiences.

Here's what I don't entirely understand: why has nothing like this ever happened to me? I mean - I've been a scientist for nearly a decade, and I've never had my ass groped, my hair petted, my ideas or suggestions ignored in favor of the ideas of another guy in my lab.

Maybe I'm not pretty enough to be threatening? Maybe this doesn't happen until you've "committed" to science, that is to say, entered a graduate program? Maybe I'm not smart enough to realize these things are actually happening to me?

Am I just lucky? Or is asshattery less widespread than I believe it to be?

Um....

2010-05-04T08:30:00.003-04:00

So I was reading through the abstract book for a large international meeting, and my eye was caught by this one:

Sertoli Cell Mediated-Targeted Drug Delivery To The Lungs

A. Kumar, N. El-Badri, R. F. Lockey, S. Mohapatra, D. F. Cameron
University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.

Drugs for treatment of asthma and COPD are commonly delivered to the lungs by inhalation but penetration can be impeded when airways are obstructed.

RATIONALE: The purpose of this study was to overcome the limitations of inhalational asthma drug therapy by a cell-mediated nanoparticle delivery method.

METHODS: Rat Sertoli cells (SCs) were isolated, labeled with a fluorescent tag and loaded with chitosan nanoparticles (CNPs). The CNPs were coupled with the anti-inflammatory compound curcumin and tested in a mouse model of ovalbumin-induced asthma by intravenous injection. Penetration was quantitated by imaging the fluorescence of SCs and CNPs in lung sections and the therapeutic effects of curcumin were measured in terms of preventing mucus formation, goblet cell hyperplasia and infiltration of immune system cells into the lungs.

RESULTS: SCs were observed in the lungs 15 min after i.v. injection, but intact SCs had largely disappeared by 1 hr as shown by absence of SC. Scans of healthy mice showed that i.v. SCs target inflamed lungs and not other organs about 80% of the curcumin was present in the lungs. as determined by UV spectrometry and fluorescence respectively. By 24 hr, positive therapeutic results were achieved.

CONCLUSION: Our results demonstrate that extra-testicular Sertoli cells can be used to effectively target and deliver drugs to diseased lungs.

This made me envision the following conversation in lab:

Scientist1: "You know, I've been thinking."
Scientist2: "About what?"
S1: "I've been trying to think of a way to make inhaled therapeutics more effective, and I think I may have come up with a great idea."
S2 (interest piqued): "Really? What'd you think of?"
S1 (face beaming): "Ok, ready? [pausing for dramatic effect] Ground-up testicles."
S2: .....

(Note - I was also sorely tempted to make a whole mess of bad puns regarding the "impeded penetration" that they mention in their introductory sentence.)

Gremlins in my office

2010-04-29T22:43:00.003-04:00

A nice perk of my new job is that I have an actual office (shared, true, but so what? It's got walls that go all the way to the ceiling and a door I can close). This comes in handy when I have a presentation to work on - it's relatively quiet and a nice place to work.

Except today.

Today, there was a small clicking noise coming from somewhere in my office. It presented itself at irregular intervals, at various volumes, and seemed to emanate from totally different locations each time. I would hear it, and then sit stock-still, staring menacingly in the direction I thought it was coming from, hoping I could validate its location so I could disassemble whatever god-forsaken-thing was making that fucking noise.

But then it was quiet.

And I would go back to power-pointing, dropping in data and making happy little bulleted lists.

....

AND THEN IT WOULD CLICK AGAIN!! WHAT THE HELL IS DOING THAT???

I suppose I should note that I have a moderately important talk to give tomorrow and I am probably a wee bit on edge. But seriously - I was about ready to take my laptop down to my car in the parking garage for some peace and quiet. Those little office gremlins must be able to link into my Outlook - they always seem to know when I have something important to work on.

Vikings draft so far

2010-04-23T20:01:00.002-04:00

I think I like Toby Gerhart - we needed another RB behind Peterson after dropping Chester Taylor.
I know nothing about Chris Cook, but it looks like he'll help the defense this season.
It would have been kind of nice if we had taken a QB in the early rounds, but there's still a lot of draft left. I swung wildly from desperately wanting Clausen, to thinking "meh" about Clausen.
It also would have been damn fine to get Pouncey as a center, but I guess it's not in the cards.

Ordering

2010-04-22T08:43:00.005-04:00

One of the most substantial differences I've found between pharma & academia is the process of acquiring reagents. In your average academic lab, a lab manager holds the keys to the ordering machine. You put in your requests with her, in a more or less organized fashion, and at some point she'll order them. In your average pharma unit, everyone has access to the ordering infrastructure and (generally) there is no one person who sees after everyone's orders. There may be a centralized group that keeps the gloves & tips stocked, but nobody's ordering your antibodies for you.

Upsides to the academic system:

Reduction of waste. There is one set of common restriction enzymes, tissue culture media, tips, gloves, etc, rather than everyone having their own set of stuff.
Centralization of knowledge. Only one person has to know how to deal with procurement, and resolving purchase orders, and the like.

Downsides to the academic system:

Centralization of power. If the lab manager is out, or too busy to order, your order will just have to wait until later.
Imposition of ideals. I've been in a lab where the lab manager decided that we were buying too many Qiagen maxiprep columns, and was only going to buy X amount per month. We always ran out. There were witch trials to figure out who had used extra, and which labs we could pilfer them from.

Upsides to the pharma system:

Familiarity with the product. I know if I need those ELISA kits ASAP, or if they can wait until later. I also know if Sigma is sold out of the 5g size of something, I'd be happy with a couple of the 1g size instead - lab managers can't know that information off the top of their head.
Immediacy. I can place an order right now - I don't need to remember which day of the week the orders go in, or if it's too late in the day to place it.

Downsides to the pharma system:

Decentralization of knowledge. Creating POs at both of the companies I've worked at means you get cryptic emails from the procurement group, hinting that some random purchase order has an 04FE1 error, and it needs to be fixed. What the hell does that mean? There isn't a good contact person to get help from - procurement often can't communicate what needs to be done in a way we can understand, and there often isn't one person in the lab who knows how to fix these errors.
Redundancy. All three labs on my floor have the same sets of TC media, enzymes, luciferase kits, etc.

There are certainly benefits on both sides. Right now, I am dealing with four different POs that have mysterious "faults" in them, and it's taking a lot of my time to try to fix them, and so I'd vastly prefer the academic system at this moment. (Granted, if I were in the academic system, I'd still be the one dealing with these POs, so I guess I don't really gain anything from wishing, do I?)

I think, overall, the way academia handles ordering is probably preferable. I feel like the benefits of having one knowledgeable person in lab & the potential to eliminate (or at least reduce) redundancy outweigh the advantages of immediate ordering.

What the fuck, NFL?

2010-04-17T10:44:00.003-04:00

Why on earth are you having the NFL draft broken up over three days, in random little chunks? The first round is Thursday night, then a couple rounds Friday, and then the scrub picks on Saturday? Seriously?? WTF! For the past I-don't-know-how-many-years, I have sat on the couch all weekend and watched the draft. The reality show/human drama is totally compelling, and some years I even get to see my Vikings not fuck everything up and draft somebody awesome (from recent memory - 2009, Percy Harvin (who I totally still believe in); 2007, Adrian Peterson (w00t w00t w00t!); etc, etc).

But what the fuck is this? Do they think the ratings will be better on Primetime Thursday, competing with regular television, playoff hockey and playoff basketball?

Bad Habits

2010-04-15T08:30:00.002-04:00

I'm beginning to see a repercussion for having worked for someone for five years who was, on pleasant days, happy with the work I was doing, and on unpleasant ones, angry with every decision I made, every result I produced, and everything, everywhere. I realized I developed something of a coping mechanism - running (nearly) every experimental decision past my PI before I set about an experiment. What concentration of X? How many hours? This cell type, or that one? It gave me a modicum of protection - whenever something didn't work (or did work, but not how she wanted it), I could very easily hide behind the fact that she had decided how the experiment ought to go.

Fast forward to now, and I think this instinct might be hurting me with the wholly different PI that I have now. It's not precisely the same - rather than asking fifty questions about what I'm doing, I'll say "I wanted to run this by you, to make sure we were on the same page" and then outline what my plans were. Most of the time, he says "Yeah, that's fine". But I worry - am I seeing a hint of eye-rolling from him? As in, "Yeah, DGT, obviously that's what you should be doing; why are you asking?"

I hope my CYA tendencies aren't making me look indecisive, or worse, incompetent. Am I overreacting here?

Kosher for Passover

2010-04-14T23:50:00.002-04:00

I am a giant fan of flavored seltzers, specifically from Polar Beverage. They're awesome (and I found out that if I move away, I can call their company and they'll ship me seltzer anywhere).

Unfortunately, my grocery store was out of my preferred brand this weekend and I was forced to purchase "Adirondack Seltzer". I noticed on the lid that the seltzer is "Kosher for Passover" - whaa? It's just water - what's to be kosher about it?

Dear Brain,

2010-04-13T08:39:00.003-04:00

Wow - you're amazing. I mean, really: you keep my heart pumping and my lungs breathing, even when I'm sleeping, or looking at cocktail recipes and shirts I want to buy on the interwebs. I'm truly in your debt, and I suppose that means I should cut you some slack when you want to think about something... random.

But seriously? You have been playing Roxette's "She's Got The Look" on a goddamn loop for the last two days. What. The. Fuck. I'm duly impressed with how many of the words you know to this song, but you know, that information could certainly have been set aside so that I could remember other things, like remembering to order that ELISA kit so I'll have it next week (dammit) or... or really anything else.

Thanks, brain.

Sincerely,
DGT

Advice for technicians

2010-04-06T22:10:00.000-04:00

If there's one thing in abundance in the science blogosphere, it's advice for junior faculty. Everyone with their own blog has advice based on their own experiences and how they think a young professor should set up and run a lab, write grants, get funded, etc etc etc. Running a close second to this mountain of verbiage is advice for postdocs. Some of the advice comes from postdocs who hate their current situation and say "Get out of the racket while you can!", but a whole lot more pixels are spent on discussions of how to best position ones-self to get a TT position, what else is out there, the two-body problem, learning independence, etc etc etc.

There isn't a whole lot of advice out there for technicians.

Now, obviously I understand that being a technician is not the kind of career that requires 5-7 years of post-baccalaureate education, plus 3-5 years of post-post-baccalaureate training. As such, there is a lot less wailing & gnashing of teeth with regards to one's career as a tech. In fact, I'm sure that some might argue that the vast majority of techs are not in it for a "career", but rather a stop-gap between undergrad and whatever post-baccalaureate career they're choosing to enter.

Regardless. To borrow from Mary Schmich, most of this advice has no basis more reliable than my own, meandering experience.

Above all, make sure that you and your PI have the same set of expectations for what you are doing. If your PI assumes that you, as a lab manager, are recruiting undergrads for the lab (for example), but you didn't know you were expected to do that, there's going to be a lot of unpleasantness to deal with. Nobody likes sitting down and outlining goals & expectations, and I understand that it's not something commonly done in academia. What I'm trying to emphasize here is that it is tremendously powerful to have an agreed-upon document with your PI that defines their broad expectations for you. This allows you to follow up with your PI and describe specifically how you've accomplished exactly what they wanted.
Always strive to go beyond those expectations laid out above.
Try not to agree to do things immediately after being asked. Many technicians (myself included) have a tendency to say "Sure, no problem" when they're already remarkably busy and honestly don't have the time. Once you've agreed to be the person in charge of something, it's nearly impossible to get out of it.
Don't get angry with the petty, small postdocs who try to assert their position and say "I wrote the grant that pays your salary, so you need to do X, Y and Z for me right now." Yes, it's frustrating (and verbatim happened to me), and yes, they're totally being dicks about whatever fraction of that R01 they wrote, but you gain nothing by being pissed at them.
Pay attention to how much you're talking when you're in lab. I'm not suggesting that you should behave like a monk and never speak to anyone, but the more you're chatting it up with your lab mates, the less work it will be perceived that you do. It is unfair, but true, that the perception of your work as a technician (most of the time) outweighs the actual work you do.
Being in charge of common ordering gives you a lot of power.
Keep your ears tuned for people to say things like, "It would be really great if..." or "You know what we need around here?" Sure, a lot of the time, those sentences end with "...we all had a million dollars" or "We should stock the coldroom with beer", but often they are small things that would make everyone's life easier. If you can be the provider of those things (e.g., organizing the common coldroom space, making a database of common antibodies in lab, etc), your perceived usefulness to the lab takes a big leap forward.
Remember that anything - and I mean anything - you type in an email (or on the internet!) can and likely will be forwarded to someone else, and you are totally on the hook for it. Implication #1: Write all your email slightly more formally than you think is probably necessary; as a corollary, it is probably worthwhile to keep a gmail.com account for personal email, and your university.edu account for work email alone. Implication #2: Don't be stupid. If you must talk shit about someone to someone else, do it in person.

Would anyone else like to add anything?

*Note: at this point I've been an industry tech for about 2x longer than I was in an academic lab. If that colors your opinion of my advice, then so be it.

Reading into it

2010-04-06T08:18:00.002-04:00

As a PI, you involve your trainees (postdocs/grad students) in various aspects of your career as a PI. Some trainees help you review papers. Some trainees help you write grants. You bring some trainees with you to invite-only meetings (HHMI has a bunch of these where PIs are allowed to bring along one lab member - I assume other societies have them as well).

Not being a PI, I can only assume what the rationale might be behind the decision to involve a certain trainee over another in a certain process: I would guess that you have the person with the best writing skills help you write your grants; the person with the most critical eye for data help you review papers; the person closest to going on the TT market with you to small, network-y meetings.

Or am I over-interpreting that? Do you just pick the person who happens to be closest to your office the day you need someone to review a paper?

Relatedly, should trainees interpret these decisions as referenda on their skills and abilities? If you never ask PostdocX to review papers for you, should PostdocX assume that you think they're not-so-hot at evaluating papers?

Forests

2010-04-02T08:39:00.001-04:00

It's a bitch to learn a new field. I'm finding that the perspectives I get from reading literature to be of two resolutions:

>Super high-level review articles that summarize decades worth of data into half a dozen pages,

or...

>Primary data articles with a meager paragraph of introduction, followed by burbling volumes of biochemistry and knockouts and pretty pictures and what-have-you.

I'm trying to become fluent (so to speak) in field, and I'm having a hard time moving from a solid grasp on my protein of interest and what happens immediately downstream of it, to thoroughly understanding the physiology of the system, how the players interact, and what tools are available and tractable to interrogate the system.

If I were simply content to be a good technician, the former option is clearly adequate. But, come on now - you know me. I'm not content with that.

If I can get my footing here - firmly demonstrate that I know wtf I'm talking about, come up with some ideas about new assays to investigate pathways involved in our disease of interest - I have a real chance to move up in this company. The next step up from where I'm at requires a PhD, but - there's a non-zero opportunity to do that while still at the company. I know it's been done before, and I believe I'm garnering the support to put myself in that position.

On a largely unrelated note - does anyone know of a good resource to figure out if a gene has been knocked out? It's not so simple as pubmedding "wnt 1 knockout" (or whatever gene you're interested in), and "wnt 1 required" or "wnt 1 deficient" don't necessarily return knockouts. Am I just missing something? I've largely been looking for big review articles to see if they include a discussion on the animal models in that gene family.

I guess I asked for that one, didn't I?

2010-03-16T21:42:00.004-04:00

My PI dropped into my office this afternoon, and asked if I planned to be at our lab meeting on Thursday morning. A wee befuddled, I said yes, I did plan to be there; why?

"Would you mind putting together some slides on [one of the projects I'm working on] and present your data then?"

Facepalm.

Dammit. I suppose I did say that I wanted to have more opportunity to present my data... I also suppose I know what I'm going to be doing tomorrow.

Performance reviews, lab meetings & technicians

2010-03-10T21:08:00.001-05:00

I suggested to my PI that it would probably be a good idea for me to present data at some of our lab/group/department meetings. This suggestion was relatively self-serving - presenting data increases my visibility, and there's a reasonably tight correlation between visibility & favorable reviews. Knowing how the review system works is critical to maneuvering through it - sure, you can happen to fall into a positive review, but your odds are pretty long with that strategy.

Moreover, I know full well that technicians get a disproportionate amount of credit for being able to give a passable lab meeting - seriously: the standards are low. If a tech can present their results from an experiment in front of a lab's worth of people, without (a) passing out from nerves, (b) stammering through the results, or (c) shrugging sheepishly in the direction of their PI whenever anyone asks a question, said technician is considered to have done an "awesome job" at lab meeting. (I'll grant that it's possible that I've managed to work in the only three labs in the world where techs are held to lower standards than grad students & postdocs vis-a-vis presentations, but I'm kinda guessing that's not the case.) Regardless of this low bar, I prefer to actually put some effort into my lab meetings - it's more informative for everyone listening, and there's no pride in tossing together a bunch of crappy slides and calling it 'lab meeting'.

I switched fields when I came to my new job, so I don't have a stack of prior lab meetings to steal introductory slides from. As such, I started building some, planning to include a bit of background on the disease and a bit about how the pathogenesis progresses... at which point I realized that I don't really understand anything about the pathogenesis of the disease or the mechanisms at play upstream of my immediate experiments. Crap, I thought, I'm so much dumber than I realized! How could I possibly not know how this goes together? This brought me to several hours of frustrated literature searching & reading, where I realized that there's a big difference between understanding how a signaling pathway in your cell type of interest works, and understanding how a disease affects an entire organ system and the person housing that organ system. I've been so focused on understanding the pathway I'm working on (because I'm a cell biologist, and that's how I approach new questions) that I didn't turn around to look at the massive hulking disease perched above that pathway.

Perhaps that's what happens when you switch fields - you grab a toehold into anything that's familiar, and then slowly learn your way around from that starting point. Or... maybe this is a decent example of why I'm better off being a tech and not an independent investigator.

On track

2010-03-05T09:00:00.001-05:00

One of the easiest things to do as a scientist is meander - you find some interesting new data and you want to investigate. So off you go, down a new little path, where you find - ooh! - a new thing! Let's investigate! This repeats itself, and pretty soon, you find yourself in a whole new part of the scientific forest (so to speak), having left all those initial plans sitting forlorn, uncompleted.

That's why I think that the formal review process in pharma (which is largely absent from academia) is really a great thing. I knew a lot of people where I worked before who railed against the system ("This is stupid! What am I supposed to do, say that my goal is to clone ten plasmids by the summer?") but I firmly believe that the system can work for you. Having a formal review process (and it's more formal at my new company, with quarterly goals as part of the yearly goals) with manageable deadlines is a tremendously useful mechanism for keeping yourself focused. I might also add that once you figure out how the review system is weighted (do they give more value to input by many different people familiar with your work, or more value to the depth of involvement in one or two projects?), you can make strategic choices that improve your yearly reviews.

I just had my year-end review for 2009 (which only covered a few months) and was told that my drive, ability to deliver above expectations on a project, and enthusiasm for the biology behind the projects was putting me in the top tier of technicians in my class. I'm pretty psyched about that - it's my first review here and until I had it under my belt, I couldn't really be sure how my performance was perceived.

Evidently, pretty darn good.

Easily the coolest thing I've seen in months

2010-03-02T22:29:00.004-05:00

I love OK GO. I saw them in a teeny little bar when they came to my town; I even paid for all of their albums! There's also a making-of series that goes along with this video - after watching the making-of, I had to watch this one again. It just rules.

RSS-ing

2010-02-25T08:28:00.003-05:00

Among all the random things I have in my google reader (science blogs, food blogs, webcomics, etc), I also have a few feeds for scientific literature. I get updates on several things by RSS - TOCs from some journals in my field, a couple selected keyword searches of my proteins-of-interest, etc. Recently, I added a big fat one from Pubmed - a keyword search for Disease X, the grand, over-arching disease that all my projects are aimed at treating. This feed drops anywhere from 25-100 citations into my reader each morning. I'm obviously not reading all 25-100 of those papers, but I can pretty quickly scan through the titles & look at a few abstracts and maybe read one or two papers.

I think this is a moderately good strategy for staying on top of the literature in my field. I just need to figure out a way to actually read more of the papers that I download...

(As an aside, I noticed today that there are several papers at the bottom of that "new" list that are from 2009, and a couple from 2008. How do those just pop up into my feed today? They're not new journals, or journals that were recently indexed in Pubmed. They're listed as being ePub'd in 2008 or 2009…. Strange.)

Small world

2010-02-22T18:37:00.004-05:00

When I was in high school and had to go out to do something with my parents (a travesty that such a massively cool highschooler should be seen with her parents), I was always amazed at how many people my dad knew. He's lived in the same town his whole life (where I grew up, and where he and my mom still live) and has been working in sales since he finished high school. We couldn't go anywhere - the supermarket, local dining establishments, walking to the car in the Target parking lot, etc - without Dad stopping and talking to someone he knew somehow from work. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at Dad's huge circle of contacts - it's bound to happen when you have the same career in the same medium-sized Midwestern city for forty years.

Surprisingly, I've noticed this same thing is happening to me. I've been a scientist in the same city for about a decade. More than just being a scientist, I've been the lab manager for almost that long. I'm the one who works with the sales reps and repair technicians, and it's not surprising that those folks have a "territory" that they manage. Now that I'm at a new job, I've run into many of the same people doing the same job here (the guy who does pipette calibration, the guy who repairs Heracell incubators, the sales rep for Invitrogen, etc) and they recognize me and we have a friendly little chat about my new job. There are parts of being a scientist that make you feel like a nomad, but knowing you can always call the same people to fix your equipment makes a new lab feel a little more like home.

(Hey, look at that! The Scientiae this month is "Continuity". How serindipitous.)

Off-kilter

2010-02-21T11:33:00.002-05:00

I woke up from a dream this morning, in which I was getting ready to go to bed. I've been tremendously disoriented all morning.

Journal accountability

2010-02-19T08:18:00.002-05:00

A small discussion arose about the nature of retracted manuscripts. Can/should the journal be held accountable in some way for publishing this data?

As much as there is intense competition to publish in top-tier research journals, there is a similar competition among these journals for the highest profile papers. More high profile papers = more citations = better impact factor = more prestige/advertising revenue for the journal. Having worked at one of the GlamourMags, I know the editors actively recruited papers based on work they saw at conferences, or heard about from the authors themselves.

We've all heard stories about retracted papers where the scientist involved just "magically" acquired data overnight, and while some labmates may have thought it odd, nobody came forward and said "Hey - how the hell did you get this x/y/z data so damn fast?" In a similar fashion, is it possible that such competition among journals breeds a similar attitude for the review process? Maybe these papers are sent to reviewers who are very likely to be complimentary. Perhaps the editor overrides the negative review of one or more of the referees. The editor might not scrutinize the paper as carefully as it should be scrutinized, and a fraudulent paper slips out into the public record. (Or, more accurately, if it's high profile, "A fraudulent paper is trumpeted as the next big breakthrough in cancer/autism/obesity.")

So, I reiterate: can a journal be held accountable? Should they?

Far afield

2010-02-17T08:19:00.003-05:00

I've seen advice for academic job seekers to apply for job openings that are loosely related to their specialty. The reasoning goes (I assume) that a candidate review board can't expect to find someone who is a 100% match to their job description, and moreover, might be pleased to find someone with a different set of credentials than they were looking for but who would make an excellent addition to the faculty.

But how far afield is "loosely related"? I assume that if a department is looking for an ecologist, that an electrophysiologist ought not to apply. (Unless you're to believe the movie Avatar, where everything is connected by electrical signals, and therefore an electrophysiologist is an ecologist - but I digress.) Taking the electrophysiologist as an example, said postdoc would obviously apply for an opening advertising for an electrophysiologist. But what if the opening was for a "broadly trained neuroscientist"? What about a "developmental neuroscientist"? What about a "neuropharmacologist"? There's a line between "worthwhile to apply to the opening" and "seriously unrelated to one's training", but I'm not sure it's as black and white as it seems.

Roads diverging

2010-02-13T11:18:00.004-05:00

I remember hearing an anecdote along the lines of, "If you wait until you're 100% sure that you want to do something, you'll never do anything," and I wonder if that applies to tenure-track faculty jobs.

How enthusiastic does one have to be about becoming a tenure-track faculty member in order to set about applying for tenure-track jobs? It seems like a pretty long, ugly road to travel down if you're less than 100% certain it's the career for you*. Postdocs are highly analytical, intelligent folks, and a whole host of other job options are out there for people with those qualifications. Are people chosing the well-worn path because it's the most obvious one, even though they're not sure it's where they want to end up?

(*Relatedly - how can a postdoc be certain that the tenure-track is the job for them? I've seen dozens of blog posts from faculty that describe how dissimilar it is to be a postdoc than it is to be a faculty member. Are postdocs who are dead-set on academic science blissfully ignorant of the route they're taking?)

A mission through Hyrule

2010-02-12T00:45:00.001-05:00

With my new position at Pharmland, I've got the opportunity to run a bigger chunk of my project. Wait - that sounds weird. Let me rephrase: previously, my PI and I came up with the direction of my project and then I'd carry out ~ 90% of the experiments on my project. Now, my PI and I are coming up with the direction of my project and I'm carrying out way less than 90% of the experiments. Why? Well, a lot of reasons. Much of our animal work is outsourced. A lot of the parts of my project involve working with other core groups who have expertise in a specific technique. Other outposts of Pharmland have the reagents/skills we need, and there's no point in reinventing the wheel. I do a lot of coordinating, emailing, setting up of meetings, paperwork-filling-out, and occasionally I do some science myself.

I can't help but thinking, "This must be what it feels like to be a PI!"

But then, I realized there's an even more accurate comparison:

Oh yes - hear me out. The hero, DGT, needs to rescue the Promised Data from the Depths of the Unknown. First, she must present her Piteous Plea to the Gorgons of Sourcing. If the Gorgons are satisfied with DGT's Piteous Plea, they will give her the Email of Approving:

DGT forges onward, into the evil black heart of the IACUC Labyrinth, where she must shoot this Email of Approving into the maw of the Purchasing Dragon. The Email of Approving slays the Purchasing Dragon! The Purchasing Dragon yields its bounty, the Mythril Purchaseorder! Triumphant, DGT uses the Mythril Purchaseorder to wrest the Promised Data from the Dwarven Hordes at the Contract Research Organization! (Everyone knows dwarves love mythril.) DGT and her Promised Data live happily ever after! Hooray!

Err... yeah. It's totally like that. Totally.

Recommended by DGT, part 3

2010-02-09T20:33:00.000-05:00

I've been working with blood samples a lot since I started my new job. Working with blood is equally as annoying as working with radioactivity - the amount of safeguards required are disproportionate to the threat presented. I have found a couple new products to cope with these safeguards:

RedZ biohazard control powder (fisher/no vwr link). This stuff is frigging cool - it's a crystalline absorbent powder that turns liquid waste into solid waste. It absorbs the liquid (e.g., extra blood, contaminated buffers, etc) and expands massively, morphing it into a non-spillable blodge of fatter crystals. Our safety regulations indicate that no liquids can go into the biohazard trash, so this also comes in very handy for sopping up leftover wash buffer or whathaveyou. The funnest part is when you have different colored liquid wastes (let's say, blue-dyed ELISA reagent, red tissue culture media, and PBS) and can make a big fun pastiche with the RedZ. How often is biosafety fun?

Absorbent orange pads (fisher/no vwr again - WTF VWR?). They're called BloodBloc and they come in a whole mess of sizes. I use two - the 4x4" size are good for opening VacuTainer tubes without splatting blood everywhere, and the 14x16" size for laying down in the hood to catch any drips. They have a ever-so-slightly tacky orange plastic backing (and I mean "tacky" in the "adhesive-y" sense, not that "OMG I can't believe they picked that color" sense) that prevents liquid from passing through, and a very thick absorbent front side. Nothing comes through these things. They're awesome - like the pale blue bench pads on steroids.

Previously recommended by DGT
(Recommendation #1: KimberlyClark Sterling Nitrile gloves, fisher/vwr)
(Recommendation #2: Novagen KOD polymerase, fisher/vwr)

In which I realize who my readers really are

2010-02-05T08:38:00.004-05:00

All the labs I've worked in have had tissue culture rooms. These rooms have been stocked with common reagents that everyone using the space would likely need (including tips, pipettes, plates, etc etc). These reagents have been set off to the side, in either a big wire shelf or in a series of nesting bins. I wager that everyone's tissue culture room looks pretty much the same.

If I'm culturing cells, and I use up the last of something from one of the bins, what do I do? First, I restock it from the bigger hoarde of lab supplies that exist somewhere else in lab. If that backup stock is out, I have either added it to the common order log, or I order it myself. Both actions take a very small amount of time, and they ensure that the reagents necessary for tissue culture will be there when I come back to use the room again.

Now, why this long preamble? Well, it would appear that I am in the vast, vast minority of scientists who comprehend this very difficult set of actions. I can't really say why it's so impossibly complicated, but perhaps I am just an exceptionally gifted individual and I have woefully underestimated how amazing my reordering skills are.

But let's extrapolate for a minute here: I would wager that the vast majority of people who read my blog are scientists - either currently or formerly. Based on my observed rate of restockers vs piggish-out-for-myself-ers, this math indicates that the vast majority of scientists reading my blog ARE THESE VERY SAME ASSHATS WHO CAN'T MANAGE TO LET ANYONE KNOW THEY USED UP THE LAST 96 WELL PLATE!

J'accuse!! Go ahead, defend your actions! (Of course, I also anticipate the same reaction here that I've always seen in labs - "Oh, no - it's not me. I always write 5mL pipettes on the order board.")

Levels of losing

2010-01-30T09:53:00.002-05:00

It sucks to see the NFL belatedly admit that they missed calling roughing the passer on Bobby McCray for that disabling hit he put on Favre, and it super-sucks to hear that they're even fining McCray for it. If it was such a vicious hit, why didn't you throw the flag when it frigging happened?? On top of all of that, it super-duper sucks to see my favorite sports columnist put the Vikings as the #2 all time "Most Tortured Teams", coming in only behind the Cubbies.

Damn. I mean, I knew in my heart of hearts that it's true, but it stings a little differently when someone spells it out like that.

Percentages

2010-01-28T20:40:00.000-05:00

I've had a lot (n=3) of people ask me what I do as a scientist in industry. At the risk of generalizing my experiences to all industry tech positions ('cause hey - that's what blogs are for), these are my approximations for my current position.

Meetings: 40% of my day. Meetings run the gamut from small (~6 people, making up my immediate group, where our group leader gives announcements & one or two people present a 5-slide update on their progress; it happens twice a month) to large (~150 people, from all departments across the site, where one to three group leaders present a 30-slide update on their group's progress; it happens once a week). I also have weekly meetings with my supervisor to go over what I've been doing over the week. There are meetings between biologists and chemists (where I painfully regret how poorly I did in organic chemistry in college) as well as just us biologists. There are stockroom committee meetings, tissue culture committee meetings, meetings with core facility directors, meetings with animal welfare committee people, meetings with outside contractors, etc etc. Toss in a few seminars and that's about 40%.

Reading stuff: 20% of my day. The meetings I attend bring up a lot of questions - did we think about the role of Y in X? Does protein Z play a role in this type of cells? I figure out what's known in the literature about these questions. I also get moved around a bit onto new projects, and need to do a lot of background reading on those projects.

Writing: 15% of my day. This subsumes writing email (getting things from people, setting up meetings, etc), putting together slide decks on the results of my work and my literature search, writing up the protocols for what I'm going to do at the bench, and formalizing those protocols to go into my official notebook

Working at the bench: 15% of my day. I don't spend a remarkable amount of time at the bench. Reason 1: the programs I'm working on are at a relatively late stage, and more chemistry is happening than biology. Reason 2: our group is relatively new in our floor, and a lot of the space isn't entirely outfitted for immediate use. Many people (myself included) have been trying to get the right equipment, the right consumables, and the right miscellaneous stuff into the rooms in order to make them functional. This takes time (and I've included it here).

"Other": 10% of my day. Hey - I'm not perfect.

Over a month?

2010-01-27T09:14:00.000-05:00

Gee, you'd think I'd been doing something interesting.

Part of my quietness has come from knowing that I can't speak with as authoritatively on something I thought I could - namely, "what it's like to work in industry". See, when I was at Massive Pharma, it was the only industrial location I'd been at, and I had somehow convinced myself that how things worked there (and more specifically, how things worked in the department I was in) could be generalized across all pharma. Probably in my heart of hearts, I knew that wasn't the case, but that confidence in my own knowledge made me much more loquacious.

Now, my n has increased to two, and I can see how wrong my impressions of "industry" actually are. I feel less equipped to talk about what's going on. (I mentioned the beginnings of this sense of disconnectedness before.) Compounded on this was the feeling that I was flailing in my new position because it was so far afield from what I'm comfortable with and know well. I think like CE said, it's hard to want to talk about shit when you feel like it's all not working.

The good news is that I am finally starting to feel like I know what I'm doing in my new job. I've gotten a bunch of feedback from my supervisor, and some of the other PhDs that I work for, to tell me that I'm exceeding expectations. It's weird to get validation that you're doing a good job when you don't feel like you can possibly learn fast enough. I'm making my way through the jargon (I kind of startled myself when I started using the jargon like a normal language) and I think I'm making the right impressions on the people I need to impress. Phew. Getting through the woods is hard, but I think I'm coming out the other side.

Oh, XKCD...

2009-12-21T08:28:00.002-05:00

...how brilliant you are:

You cannot stop this.

2009-12-08T00:09:00.002-05:00

You can only hope to contain it.

Yeah, baby!! While I am terribly disappointed that the Vikings lost this week (in true Brett Favre fashion) and that Green Bay won, I will accept this victory on behalf of my picks.

One of my favorite maps

2009-12-06T21:04:00.002-05:00

I grew up in one of the dark blue "pop" counties, and now I live in one of the dark yellow "soda" counties. So where are you from?

Similarly of interest is the Harvard Linguistics Survey, which generates a myriad of maps to questions like "What do you call the activity of driving around in circles in a car?" I will note that my answer, and obviously the only right answer, falls outside the 80.7% majority. I don't know what the rest of you are talking about.

Week 12 NFL wrapup

2009-12-01T08:28:00.002-05:00

A week for high scores in pick'em! There was a tie at the top between Candid Engineer and Chall, and the tiebreaker gods have found favor in the Engineers. Congrats, CE! Proudly display the trophy:

BTW, the tiebreaker rules are listed on the main page of the pool - here is the link. This narrows the gap on my season lead (92 overall points) to a measly three points - three! There's a big cluster on the leaderboard, starting with the Doritos Dream Team in second at 89, followed by Nat at 88, the Tight Ends at 87 and Chall at 86.

What fortune!

2009-11-27T20:03:00.003-05:00

DrDGT & I are having a fantastic Thanksgiving vacation. We have not traveled to the hinterlands of this country to visit family, which makes it infinitely more relaxing than whatever unpleasant amount of time we'd be spending at the airport.

Tonight, we ordered Chinese take-out for dinner, which came with a giant bag of fortune cookies. DrDGT's fortune was something lame about not speaking ill of people. When I saw my fortune, I said "SQUEEEE!!" All right, perhaps not, but I think it may have been more like "Holy SHIT." Why? Well...

Figure 1: Yeah, I told you so.

Baby got back

2009-11-21T17:02:00.001-05:00

One of the grand traditions in all the labs I've been in is the Going-Away Party. This festive event takes place (generally) on the final Friday that the departing lab member is in lab, and (generally) involves dinner at a place within walking distance of lab, where someone will order a far more expensive entree than anyone else but yet think splitting the check evenly is the best plan. The evening wraps up with a group activity - perhaps bowling? perhaps pool? but certainly somewhere with a bar - wherein many people drink many drinks, and something embarrassing happens that remains in lab lore forever.

Last night, that contribution to lab lore came from me.

A postdoc was leaving DrDGT's lab for a faculty position, and the formula I outlined above was filled by sushi and karaoke. At dinner, there was much discussion about whether or not their PI would make an appearance at dinner. Odds were placed at ~ 3:1 against, as he had hemmed and hawed about other things he needed to do, and gave various vague excuses but promised that "he'd try" to make it. (Pssshht. I've made that excuse before. I know what it means.) An hour later, we were waiting in the lobby of the karaoke place (not a bar, but a seedy variety with "private rooms" where you sing with just your friends) and wondering what the odds were that the PI would make an appearance at karaoke. Then we all laughed, because we knew it wasn't going to happen.

So, we start into karaoke. A few ABBA classics, Don't Stop Believin', some Jack Daniels snuck in under a coat, a lovely rendition of New York, New York, and then... and then someone handed me the microphone, and Baby Got Back came up on screen.

People, let me confess something to you: I love this song. I know all the words to this song. I sing this song whenever I have a chance. I jumped into that mother with a vengeance, and the assembled audience went nuts. It was awesome. I was having a great time. Everyone was having a great time.

And then...

[sigh]

And then, people, what happened was that DrDGT's very senior, very tenured, very conservative PI steps into our room, his lovely wife gingerly trailing behind, while I'm enthusiastically belting out "I want 'em real thick and juicy/So find that juicy double/Mix-a-Lot's in trouble/Beggin' for a piece of that bubble".

So what's a girl to do? Keep on singing, naturally - I finished that song to riotous applause, hysterical laughter and knowing winks from the party, plus thin-lipped smiles and polite clapping from the PI & MrsPI. Awesome. At least it wasn't my PI, I suppose.

And how was your Friday?

Thirty

2009-11-16T21:51:00.004-05:00

It was my birthday this weekend, and I'm now thirty years old. So who am I, at thirty? Well:

I've been a technician for ~ 8 years, across three labs, in academia and industry.
I've been with DrDGT for 13 years, across three states, from high school through postdoc.
I have a bachelor's degree and despite being fascinated by and passionate about science, have no real intention to ever get a PhD and run my own research group.

Is this who I planned on being when I was little? I can't say it was - in fact, my career aspiration when I was small was to train killer whales at Sea World - but I do like where it's brought me.

Questions

2009-11-05T20:36:00.003-05:00

Sometimes I feel like the only person in the world without a PhD. I know, I know, I know - I have a job I really really like that pays me really well, and I've been around the PhD process (see "Cohort" for a lengthier description) enough to know that it mostly sucks, job prospects afterward blow, yada yada yada. Sure. That doesn't stop me from occasionally entertaining the delusion that one day I'll go to grad school.

As such, the polls at FSP & Isis's places are making me think of my own question. I'm wondering the following - why did you decide to go to grad school? Did you pick grad school over med school? Getting a salaried job? Did you really put much thought into it?

How about this: "I am a [postdoc/grad student/professor/what-have-you] and I went to grad school because ..."

Data ownership

2009-11-03T20:42:00.004-05:00

I remember an instance from a very long time ago, when a professor was trying to explain to a grad student's parents (decidedly non-scientists) what the process of academic science is like. He made the analogy that working in science was not so dissimilar from working in a factory: you produce something as either a scientist or as a factory worker. The quality of what you've produced is judged by someone else, and your advancement can be largely based on what those people think of your work. It's not a perfect analogy, but I think the point is sound: we make stuff.

Labs produce all kinds of reagents: vectors, cell lines, mice, strains of yeast/flies/worms, etc etc. These reagents are tangible items that exist in one place - our labs, where we made them. If another lab wants to use these reagents, there's often paperwork involved in transferring them into that second lab, or at least a period of delay while the first lab looks for the vector in the freezer, or while the mice sit in quarantine.

But a lot of the data generated by a lot of labs isn't physical - it's data. These data sets (often massive) come from deep sequencing or microarrays or genome-wide association studies. Producing this emphemeral data can be just as pain-staking and time-consuming as a strain of worms or a knockout mouse, but the transfer of this data from lab to lab is very easy, and the provenance of the data then becomes less clear-cut than "Professor T's lab made this mouse".

Let's say Lab A does a genome-wide association study looking for differential binding of a transcription factor: they treat a cell type +/- a signaling molecule, set up an enormous chIP experiment, purify the DNA, send it off for sequencing, and get gigs of data back. What they get back is an enormous spreadsheet that, on its own, is meaningless - just columns and columns of numbers. Let's say they collaborate with Lab B, a computational lab who runs a ton of data analysis. Lab A gives this massive file to someone in Lab B, who analyzes it and comes up with a list of genomic locations where this factor binds. Here's where it's a muddy issue: who has ownership over these results? Without lab A, there's no DNA - but without lab B, there's only a massive Excel file. Should Lab A be able to share the results of the analysis with anyone they want? Does Lab A have a right to get pissy if Lab B shared those results with other labs? What if Lab A shared the results of the analysis - is it reasonable for Lab B to raise a stink? Do both labs need to agree to share the results of the analysis before it's kosher?

Or am I wholly wrong, and issues of 'data ownership' were always cantankerous?

SciBlogs Pick'Em: Week 8

2009-11-03T08:40:00.003-05:00

How exciting that I get to recap the bestest, awesomest week of the season thus far! Why was this week awesome? Part 1: despite having a doucheweasel-cockmonkey for a quarterback (a talented doucheweaselcockmonkey, but a doucheweaselcockmonkey nonetheless), my Vikings kicked some Packer ass at Lambeau. Hooray! Part 2: my eight points was enough for the victory this week. Hooray again!!

This leaves PLS ahead (by a skinny little point), followed by PiT and then yours truly. Looks like a rough week, with the low scores from Chall, Odyssey, Alyssa, TomJoe, and PLS.

And now I shall sigh and be happy with next week, as the Vikings are on the bye, giving Brett a chance to rest his weary carcass.

Completely weird

2009-11-01T18:04:00.002-05:00

I'm seeing a bunch of trailers for Avatar, James Cameron's new movie, during the football games this afternoon. Am I the only one who is completely weirded out at how much Giovanni Ribisi sounds like Jeremy Piven from Entourage? It's just bizarre - they're exactly the same voice. I keep looking up when I hear the voice, expecting to see that the fooball game has cut to an episode of Ari yelling at Lloyd.

Also: SUCK IT, PACKERS FANS!!

Cohort

2009-10-31T10:36:00.003-04:00

I have a relatively close-knit group of friends who all started in the same grad school class as DrDGT. We've gone through prelims, lab drama, thesis defenses, drinking related to thesis defenses, hangovers related to thesis defenses, marriages and babies together.

The first of this group has just accepted a job offer after having done a postdoc. He's going to be managing projects in a pseudo-academic institute, connecting local grad students & postdocs to the expertise and capabilities of his new workplace to move their projects along. The position sounds like a perfect match for him, and I'll admit I'm tremendously excited that he's tethered to the same city as me for the forseeable future. I think he's reading this, so: congratulations, J.

The rest of the group covers a broad range of postdoc phenotypes: (1) committed to the tenure track, no matter where that may take them, (2) theoretically interested in the tenure track, but not sure how willing they are to move all over hell, but also not sure they're willing to jump into grants/teaching/service/research snakepit, and (3) thoroughly done with being an academic scientist, and probably a scientist all together, but without a clear direction of what else they may want to do. I think all of them are applying for jobs (or will be within 6-9 months) and I'll be watching to see how this distribution finally falls out.

I know that being a tech alongside these PhDs doesn't qualify me to completely understand what they're going through. My job prospects have never been dependent on my own ideas and directions, and being good at what I do has always been enough to guarantee me job security. This isn't their situation. I'm doing my best to provide some kind of perspective into pharma, which I hope is a helpful perspective for them. I do hope they all find an opportunity that'll click well with who they are.

Pot Luck

2009-10-26T23:25:00.003-04:00

Our department is fairly small (~30 people) and at a department meeting, our fearless leader announced that we were going to have a department soiree at his home, as a welcoming party for all the new hires and the transfers from other sites. Said soiree will be a pot luck event, beginning immediately after work; he is providing the beverages.

My pressing question to the science/cooking blogosphere at large: What should I make that will (1) feed 30-some people, (2) is sufficiently portable to be brought into work that morning and driven over to Fearless Leader's home, and (3) will suffer little ill effect of sitting all day? I am considering this gumbo, which I have made many times and is wonderful. I am also considering the chocolate-pear cake I made last weekend, but it might be difficult to scale up. Hmmm. I also have the tried-and-true, complete-opposite-of-food-snob recipe from my mother-in-law for "Dairy Potato Bake" (basically cheese and the small, square species of hashbrowns, baked into a casserole dish and sublimated into amazingness), but I don't know if that would be appropriate for such an event.

Why yes, I do see this as a competition that I need to win. Is it that obvious?

Pretty little bugs

2009-10-24T19:08:00.005-04:00

I stumbled upon this art gallery of bacterial cultures and thought they were beautiful.

Creepy

2009-10-23T08:41:00.003-04:00

The layout of my new building is much less "open floor plan" than my last lab. My old lab was one very long room with benches down the length of it, with a walkway at the end of the benches. Here, my floor is laid out in a standard lab orientiation - the lab rooms are off a long corridor, and the corridor contains equipment, lockers, empty cardboard boxes, etc. Both the labs and this corridor have motion sensor lights. It's mostly a great idea, keeping the lights off when nobody's around.

There are two downsides to this - first, the sensors are mounted fairly high on the wall. I've had to hop around near doors to get the light to flick on, which makes me feel a bit like a midget. I've also had the lights turn off on me while I'm at the bench, which is probably a symptom of #1 (the height of the sensors, not me being a midget).

Downside #2: since the division I'm in is very new (nearly half of our department has been hired since the summer), and we also just moved into this floor not long ago, very few people are doing much in lab. Most people are still trying to get their reagents transferred from wherever they were before, or wrestling with getting equipment moved from its former location to where we are now. This lack of bodies in labs means the hallway motion lights are off most of the time, and weird shadows come in from the open lab rooms, so it kinda feels like this:

Wait, was that a ghost?

Weekend

2009-10-18T14:27:00.003-04:00

I haven't been into lab on the weekend since... since probably around the time I gave my two weeks notice at MassivePharma. I guess that puts that date somewhere around the end of August. Prior to then, the only time I was not in lab on a weekend was a weekend where I was out of town.

Yep. I'm serious.

Part of the reason I'm not in lab on the weekend at PharmLand is because, well, I've only been there four weeks and don't have a million things going on. Part of the reason is because my projects aren't tissue culture-heavy so there isn't a built-in reason to be in lab. Part of the reason is that the atmosphere of the lab is very 9-to-5, e.g., when I'm still at my desk as people are leaving at 5-5:15pm, I get a barrage of "Oh, working late, eh?" and "What time are you getting out of here?" It's definitely not the kind of place where you'd run into a bunch of people at their bench on Saturday. In fact, I get the impression that if I mentioned to anyone in my lab (my boss or otherwise) that I was in lab on Saturday doing x, y, or z, they'd tilt their head 90 degrees counter-clockwise and say, "Why??" rather than, "Oh good, so that means you got x, y and z finished then?"

It's weird. I'm not used to having all day, both Saturday and Sunday, to do things like errands, baking (like this and this and this, because we bought a ton of pears at Costco), random chores around the house, and yet still have time to watch football all day on Sunday. It's so strange. I constantly have this feeling that I forgot to do something, and dammit, what was it? I'm sure there was something I had to do... didn't I need to go into lab for something?

I'm going to try to hold on to this for as long as I possibly can. Hey: I may be a little uneasy with the setup, but I'm not stupid.

Disconnect

2009-10-12T08:45:00.003-04:00

Things have changed. I've been feeling rather out-of-sorts every time I open up Blogger to write a new post, but I haven't been able to pinpoint what the problem is. I still love reading the blogs I've always loved to read, so I've been mulling over what could possibly be going on in the recesses of my brain.

I finally put it together last night (in fact, I woke up with a start and scared the hell out of our cat). There are two principal components to my malaise:

Component 1: While I may have thought that where I worked before was very different from academic science, I can see now that it really wasn't. The goal of my projects at MassivePharma was to publish papers in peer reviewed journals. I worked on a very basic biological question. I worried about getting scooped by bigger labs. The thought of bringing a drug to market really didn't enter into what I did, perhaps only in a "These data could shed light on process X, which may underlie certain types of cancers"-kind of way. What I'm doing now is actually the process of bringing a drug to market. The goal of my project is to bring a drug to clinical trials. I'm working on a complex physiological problem. The thought of publication hasn't crossed my mind in any way. It's very obvious now how academic my old work actually was.

Component 2: After a whole lot of deliberation, DrDGT has decided he's not going to pursue a tenure track position, and will instead seek out non-bench alternatives. While there's an ugly, selfish, troll-ish part of me that yowls "WHAT ABOUT MY BIG PLANS TO BE YOUR TECH??", I know it's been years since he's been happy with what he's doing, and I do not, cannot, begrude this decision. In my heart of hearts, I know this is the best thing for him to do.

The combination of these two things have left me feeling terribly disconnected from the academic community at large, and specifically from the academic blogging community. (These things are compounded by a system-wide block on Google accounts from work, meaning I cannot comment or blog from there.)

I don't know that I really have a place here, and I'm trying to figure out how to write in a way that's (1) interesting, (2) science-y, but (3) won't get me in trouble, and (4) has some relevance for anyone else. (Hopefully) stay tuned.

Title change

2009-10-06T07:21:00.000-04:00

There was a small part of changing jobs about which I was not enthusiastic. At my old company, my job title was "Scientist". Not "Scientific Associate" or "Research Assistant" or "Biology Technician", but Scientist. I really liked that. I know that being a tech is pretty much being a tech no matter what my title might be, and that being a "scientist" doesn't change what I do on a daily basis. Somehow, that title made me feel like I had a voice, like I was part of the discussion. (Plus, I get to use the excellent line from Ghostbusters: "Back off, man - I'm a scientist.")

As a research associate (or scientific assistant or whatever the heck my title is now), I can't help but feel less like a scientist and more like a pair of hands. I can see that's stupid, and I should know better than to get so wrapped up in my title... but knowing those things isn't doing anything to dispel that thought. Hopefully that'll get better once my projects are moving at full speed. What do they call techs where you work?

D.A.R.E. (or I guess F.A.R.E.)

2009-09-26T00:25:00.002-04:00

In my life, I have received approximately 100x more peer pressure to join Facebook than I ever have to do drugs. Suck on that, D.A.R.E. people.

All sorts of new-ness

2009-09-25T18:49:00.002-04:00

My first week went by pretty quickly at Pharmland. There are already a lot of differences between the two places (restricted internet access which includes blocking gmail access is probably the biggest difference), and there are a lot of things I'd like to talk about.

My new PI is great. When I tell people that I'm working for him, they say, "Oh, he's great! You're going to like working for him." A good sign! I'm also coming into a project that is much further along in the process than my old projects. As such, I wanted to make sure that my new PI knew that even though I had worked at a big pharma company before, I haven't worked with the liquid handling robots or done anything with PK/PD analysis. I expected he'd be a little dismayed, but he laughed and said "That's fun - you'll be learning something new, right?" A huge sigh of relief on my part! I made sure to point out that I'll be working my ass off to learn all this stuff as quickly as I can - I hope I got that point across clearly.

The department is fairly small and has grown very quickly, so most people there are similarly new. There's a very powerful sense of common purpose within the group - and yes, I know that sounds really corny, and I know I've only been here a week so I'm still honeymooning and yes, my objectivity should be called into quesiton - but it's amazingly motivating. As in, I feel bad for being stuck in my office, not because taking all these online training things is boring (it is) but because I'm not contributing anything to the project yet. It's striking.

I'm sure it's not all a Carebears tea party, and I'll figure those parts out once I get into the lab. But for now, I'll pretty happy with the switch.

A thought while watching the Indy/Dolphins game

2009-09-21T20:42:00.003-04:00

THE WILDCAT IS NOT A FUCKING "OFFENSE". IT IS A FUCKING TRICK PLAY.

[ahem]

Day one at PharmLand went "well", or at least as well as sitting in a conference room and hearing about insurance and IT policies and safety policies all day could possibly go. I already have two science-related meetings on my calendar for tomorrow and I don't even have a computer yet. I guess this is how you define "hit the ground running".

First day of school

2009-09-20T18:41:00.002-04:00

I'm a little surprised that I'm nervous about starting work tomorrow. I have a neat little folder with all my information, the reviews (that I hoped would sink in a bit more before I started) tucked into that folder, my identification documents proving both my identity and my ability to work in the US, and I realize that I feel tremendously similar to how I did when I started school: I don't know who I'll have lunch with. What should I wear? I hope everyone likes me. Am I going to the right room for this meeting?

My new commute takes me right past where I used to work. I think there's a metaphor in there somewhere.

Also, fwiw, I decided to make a change to my header, reflecting my new start at PharmLand (the new moniker for my new work). Here's hoping I've learned something.

Internets

2009-09-17T08:04:00.002-04:00

The roadtrip is boomeranging back home - we have been as far south as we had planned and are now returning to the north. I had gone without internet for our trip to Atlanta, as our host didn't have internet at his apartment, and I was beginning to twitch from the withdrawals. Now that I've got my fix & the jitters are subsiding, I'll dispense some additional bits from our trip:

I was in a bar in Atlanta watching both MNF and tennis. Also at the bar was a very very pregnant woman, smoking Kools and drinking Miller High Life. She was very enthusiastically rooting for Roger Federer. All together, a very unreal scene.

Some awesome food in Atlanta - Top Flr was great (the group of us had a whole mess of small plates for dinner; I highly recommend the white bean hummus or the duck confit pizza). We also ate fantastic burgers at Flip (DrDGT had a steak tartar "burger" and I had a shrimp "burger"), and had some amazing BBQ at Big Daddy D'z BBQ Joynt. We also had a lot of beer, scotch and other adult beverages.

Stopped in Chapel Hill for a night to visit our friend the young professor & his family. We knew them when he was a postdoc, and were happy to see his lab is growing (hooray for a first R01!) and that they're doing well. It was an interesting change listening to him talk about the lab - the last time we had visited, ~ 5 years ago, was about a year after he had started his lab. Things looked bleak - only cobbled-together funding from little grants, one grad student who was just starting, no postdoc prospects.. things are much happier now.

Now we're visiting friends from grad school who are postdoc'ing. I suspect there will be much conversation about job prospects, the nature of academic science, why people get PhDs, etc etc.

This vacation is a little bit surreal. In my five years at MassivePharma, I went on many vacations. Prior to said vacations, I'd organize all my projects and present them to my PI. This way, if she wanted to work on any of it while I was away, everything was well laid-out and easy to find. Of course, I did this very same thing just before I left MassivePharma for this vacation, but I obviously won't be returning to finish those projects. I know that I'm starting a new job when we get back, but I don't think it's entirely sunk in for me.

More tidbits from yesterday

2009-09-12T08:58:00.002-04:00

Breakfast yesterday at the Old Ebbitt Grille - excellent.

Large collection of protestors with bullhorns in front of the Capitol? Check.

Last night at dinner, I overheard this statement from the table next to us: "Why do you think I'm not classy? Is it because I have wine on my shirt?"

Did I mention how amazing Millie's was? It's not a diner; it's an amazing restaurant. Seriously. If you are within 100 miles of Richmond, you should eat there.

We drove through Dunwiddie county, NC, whose name provided at least twenty minutes of hilarity: DUN-WIDDY. How awesome is that name? Go ahead - say it a bunch of times. Dunwiddie Dunwiddie Dunwiddie. Yeah. It was a long time on the road.

En route

2009-09-12T00:50:00.002-04:00

Dinner on Thursday night was at Corduroy in DC. Very good food, strange restaurant - rather brightly lit for such a nice place. The presentation of the dinners was also nearly identical for the two different entrees we had. Overall, I'd say a 7/10.

Driving south today we had dinner at Millie's Diner in Richmond, VA. Let me tell you all this: IF YOU ARE ANYWHERE NEAR RICHMOND, STOP AND HAVE DINNER HERE. It is amazing, awesome food. The grits that came with my dinner (stuffed pork chops) were transcendent - delicious with marscapone and cream. Wow.

Now we're in Greensboro NC, and will drive further south tomorrow.

(And now I'm really tired & going to bed.)

Onward & upward

2009-09-09T22:21:00.002-04:00

I finished my tenure at MassivePharma today. I was happy to get more than a few emails saying essentially that people were sad to see me go, that I had a reputation as a good scientist and friendly person, and that people wished their best wishes upon me. There was lunch, then cake, and then beer, and now I am packing for vacation.

I'll start at MassivePharma #2 after our road trip and plan to compare and contrast my little heart out. "MassivePharma #2" sounds super lame though - seems like I'll need a new pseudonym for my new job. Suggestions?

On moving

2009-09-04T07:50:00.004-04:00

Being outside of academia, the only true reminder I have of the academic season comes in September with moving day. Summer here is wonderful - it's easy to drive anywhere you want to go, easy to find parking (well, relatively anyway), and everything just seems so nice. Then, without warning, the traffic becomes horrible. "What the hell?", you think, "There's not usually this much traffic on BigGiant Ave at 7pm." Then you start seeing the Budget vans, and the Uhaul trucks, and you remember - ohhhhhh. The students are back. On my walk to work September 1st, I counted 11 different houses actively in the process of moving, and going past the Uhaul return center on September 2nd I counted 14 returned trucks/vans. I've happily forgetten what a giant pain it is to move, since we bought a condo a few years ago.

Now that I'm moving to a new lab, I am remembering. Oh, am I remembering.

The first thing to be "packed" was the stuff I have in LN2. My boxes were largely in one location, but not in any kind of obvious order. I mostly had all of one kind of cell in one box (was that in tower four? or tower 3 - no, I think it was tower 3) and other cells in other boxes. But what would people do in the future, without simply asking, "Hey DGT, can I have some bla-bla cells?" Now they are neatly arranged, with a handy-dandy binder explaining which cells are in which box, in which position.

I've got dozens of boxes of things stuffed in our -80 and -20 freezers, and since I wasn't the first person to join our department five years ago, there wasn't a neat empty shelf for me to store all of my things in. No. My things are strewn about, in locations perfectly well known to me, but in no intelligible order to any other person. I'm packing those up, consolidating, and putting them all together in one space so anyone else could have a chance to find them again. I'm now at the point where I have offered up my bottles of solutions on my bench for general plundering. I expect that I'll have them mostly auctioned off by this afternoon.

And my desk - oh, my desk! If printing a paper meant the same thing as reading & absorbing a paper, I think I'd have a Nobel by now. I filled up a couple recycle bins with old papers & old notes. I did have a moment of nostalgia when I came across a hand-written page with gel images taped to it. One of the bands was circled, and there was a line from the circle off to the edge of the paper where I had written "!!!!" I remember that day quite well - the first day all my troubleshooting on one experiment came to fruition, and the assay finally worked. I remember the months prior to that, being convinced I had no idea what I was doing, that I was never going to get this protocol to work, and that I was so getting fired for my obvious gross incompetence. That day... that day was a good day.

You know, I think it's going to work out pretty well for me in my new position. I'm going to remember that piece of paper with that circled band, and remember what I was able to accomplish from square one here.

You are very "hip", Sigma

2009-09-03T08:09:00.006-04:00

I was perusing some chemical stocks at Sigma, purveyor of fine chemicals to labs everywhere, and noticed a "totally rad" option that they have added to their website. This cool option is over there on the right side:

Twitter? StumbleUpon? Really? Perhaps Sigma is trying to reach a new demographic of scientist, those web-savvy teenage scientists who totally put up NaCl on their wall, dude, because it's like, so awesome. Having used StumbleUpon, I can say that I'd be rather confused to come across some Sigma chemicals in between all the random funny things I usually find - HA! Tris! That's hysterical!

Perhaps instead of installing this little Web 2.0 widget, Sigma could get their website to actually remember which country I picked on their first page, so my pricing options were accurate.

Let me hit you with some knowledge

2009-09-01T21:51:00.005-04:00

Learning a new subfield is hard. I guess I hadn't realized how much of a cell biologist I am until I started trying to learn disease physiology - it's really slow going, and just getting a handle on the basic literature has been tough. Heck, even getting through some of the textbook stuff hasn't been straightforward. I don't have a college background in physiology to draw upon, so I'm starting from square one with this. There's nothing like slogging through a textbook (& having it not sink in) to make you feel like a giant moron.

If you were to ask me straight up, I would tell you that I know it will take time for me to absorb and assimilate all this background information and current research. If you were to sneak into the back of my mind, however, you'd find me convinced that I really ought to be picking this stuff up quicker, and everyone else around you knows this stuff inside and out, DGT, so what's your problem?

Well, back to the book. I'm sure glad there isn't a test on my first day.

......wait. Shit. There isn't a test, is there?

A brilliant plan, and a request for suggestions

2009-08-28T07:30:00.002-04:00

Thanks, everybody, for the congrats. There are occasional moments where I wince when I look at my life as a non-PhD: I'm surrounded by people celebrating successful thesis defenses, new postdoc positions at high-powered labs, and exciting new faculty positions. Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one in the world who isn't a PhD, and it's really cool to hear "Congratulations" for my non-PhD triumph. [wipe away a little tear that I hope nobody saw]

On the topic of congratulations: everyone's gone over and welcomed the new addition to the Jekyll/Hyde family, right?

So, my request: I have a bit of time off between my current & future employment, and DrDGT & I were debating what we ought to do with said time. DrDGT came up with the brilliant idea that we should make a giant road trip down the eastern seaboard, and visit several sets of friends along the way. In the words of those Guinness commercials: Brilliant!

Our itinerary includes a stop in DC for a couple days, and I was hoping to solicit suggestions for places to eat - breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinking; I'd appreciate any suggestions. I'm sure there's been enough SfN meetings in DC that someone has eaten/drank somewhere excellent.

So?

News

2009-08-26T20:15:00.003-04:00

So remember how I had said before how I had some news (no, Mom, still not pregnant)? Well, here it is. [ahem]

I've got a new job.

Was that too much buildup? Sorry - I know it's not as exciting as getting a doctorate, or starting a new job as a postdoc or as a new faculty. But hey: it's what I've got to work with here.

I'm moving to another MassivePharma company, and will be starting there soon. I wanted to talk about the whole experience of looking for a job, and interviewing, and going through the background checks and the drug screen and all the negotiations... but that just didn't seem like a good idea, given what happened before. I will say that the process of interviewing was superbly flattering, and I've never felt so damn smart in my whole life. Everyone I spoke to seemed remarkably impressed with what I've accomplished and how well I was able to explain & extend upon what I published. I didn't think it was that big of a deal to be able to talk about my science, how we came to the conclusions we did, and what open questions I think remain on the topic, but evidently other people do. Was this just another cause of lowered expectations for a tech, being surprised that said technician could actually explain the science in the papers ~~they're on~~ they're first author on? I don't know - I guess I should just get over that.

Regardless: it'll be a new, awesome challenge with more responsibility and independence. I'm looking forward to it.

A year?

2009-08-23T21:32:00.003-04:00

Jeez, I've been at this more than a year? I guess I missed my blog-o-versary when I was on vacation. Well then.

A lot has changed for me since I first started blogging - the teeny little department that I joined at MassivePharma five years ago has since been absorbed by a much larger department, and I'm now working on an entirely different set of questions than I was when I started. My count of first-author papers increased to three, up from a total of zero pre-blog. Obvious conclusion = blogging increases your paper count! Maybe if I start a bunch more blogs I'll end up with a professorship!

I also learned (the hard way) a little something about pseudonymity, and I feel like I've gained perspective (and friends) from the painfulness.

In case there's anyone new here (Hi new people!), I'll provide a little perspective and link back to my interview from the interview meme, and one of my first posts, with my best explanation as to why I became (and why I stay) a tech.

Lastly, I think I will have some news for y'all later this week. (No, Mom, I'm not pregnant.)

The war on science hits home

2009-08-19T23:31:00.000-04:00

How timely. Just after DrDGT and I came back from our visit to our families in July, FSP posted about how easy it is to take for granted that everyone around you has a similar set of experiences & behavior patterns because they're likely to be scientists/academics. This has been the case for me for a while - we've been in an environment of a grad program/a postdoc for almost a decade, and I just assume that all the friends of friends I meet are likely scientists, likely voted Democrat, and at the very least, understand that all life on the planet evolved from a common ancestor billions of years ago.

This is not something that I have in common with all of my family - not the scientist part, not the Democrat part, and sadly, not the understanding of evolution part.

Let me back up and explain. This story is about my in-laws. My father-in-law has worked in a paper mill since he was just out of high school. My mother-in-law has cleaned houses since she was just out of high school. They are big fans of nature shows on the Discovery Channel - they like the panoramic shots, the imagery, the voiceover explaining the cool way a Venus flytrap eats bugs. (Or at least that's what I like about Discovery Channel shows.) They are both enthusiastically religious.

While we were there, the four of us were watching such a show. My mother-in-law sat up from the couch & said, "You know, I just don't understand how everything could have come from one thing." DrDGT & I look at each other, furrowing our respective eyebrows. "What do you mean?" he asked his mother. She went on to explain [I paraphrase here] how she she thought it was impossible that the diversity of life on Earth has all evolved from a long-long-ago ancestor, and that it was so much more plausible that God had simply created everything. DrDGT attempted to explain a bit, how it didn't all arise de novo, that one day there wasn't a cell just sitting there, but she kept insisting upon its unlikelyness. We agreed - the whole process of how we've arisen has remarkably long odds against it, and yet somehow we're still here - but this only reinforced her convictions.

In the midst of our attempts at explanation, my father-in-law became upset with the direction of the discussion: "Just stop it. You scientists, you think you're all so smart. You think you understand how things work, but you can't accept that some things are just beyond your understanding." I clenched my teeth & glared straight ahead, but DrDGT came back at his dad - "Well, yeah, Dad - that's what I'm trying to do! I'm trying to figure out how things work! That's why we do science!" My father-in-law chuckled, in that patronizing way you might chuckle at a little kid who's trying to insist that they can run all the way from here to Alaska ("Sure you can, kiddo, sure you can."). "Yeah, but [DrDGT], just remember you aren't as smart as you might think you are."

It's maybe a month later, and this whole conversation still makes me angry. I'm angry, first off, that his family seems to have so little regard for the immense amount of hard work that he's put into getting where he is today (and, frankly, where I am - there are two scientists in this household). By disrespecting the fact that we can - and should, I think - try to understand things that are bigger than we are, they disrespect who we are. Moreover, I can't stomach their attitude that being a scientist and trying to understand the mechanisms behind how life develops and sustains itself is a silly undertaking: after all, why bother trying to figure out the mystery of how God works? We should just accept that it's unknowable, and quit trying to be so smart already.

[Insert deep breath here. And here. ... And here.]

I guess DrDGT had a more civil conversation with his mom later in the trip, where he was better able to get across the vastness of geologic time, how slight improvements in an animal's ability to survive would increase the number of offspring it had, but he didn't think it really helped answer her original question of "how everything could have come from one thing".

Did I mean to imply earlier that I had some useful advice about dealing with how family often doesn't understand science? Well. Sorry about that. I don't have any kind of prescription for how to handle it. I suppose the moral of my little story is that you can assume an awful lot about how you think people think, even people in your own family, but until you ask (or try to answer) the right question, you really won't know.

I refuse to admit that this is happening.

2009-08-18T21:08:00.003-04:00

Were I not at work when the whole thing went down, this is what I would have posted at about 10:30 this morning:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

But now it is much later, and I have had much more to drink. I still can't see how this helps the Vikings in the long run, or even really that much in the short run (despite the 30,000+ people who responded positively to him showing up in the Star Tribune poll). He's got tears in his rotator cuff, pain in his knees & ankles.. for the love of crap, he's a decade older than me, and I feel old!

Well then. [Clink!] I'll drink to the Vikings season, over before it even began.

A victory for me

2009-08-14T07:51:00.000-04:00

The decision was made yesterday - or at least communicated to me yesterday - that the screening core here has decided to pick up the assay I've been working on, and move forward with a full screen in their group!

Hooray!

I guess this might not seem like a huge victory, but I've had to do an awful lot of troubleshooting on this project, and it was starting to seem like it was never, ever going to get off my desk. Thank goodness for small victories - I'm excited to see what comes out of this.

Math

2009-08-08T18:37:00.003-04:00

Weight differential between today's starting Yankee pitcher (CC Sabathia) & Red Sox pitcher (Clay Buchholz) = 100 pounds. Of course, I will eat my hat if Sabathia is only 290, and if Buchholz weighs 190 soaking wet.

Oregano

2009-08-06T20:15:00.002-04:00

When we were visiting our families, DrDGT & I were discussing some vaguely scientific topic & used the term "good scientist" - or perhaps "bad scientist", I'm not sure. I do know that my mom then asked, "What does it mean to be a good scientist?"

Wow. Good question, Mom.

How I explained what I meant to my mother was this: Let's say you have a recipe, and you want to make it tastier. You think, "You know what? I think this recipe would be improved with some oregano." So, you make up two different batches of your recipe - one the way you normally make it, and one as you normally make it, plus oregano. You test them both out. At this point, you make a decision - has the oregano made the recipe tastier? Yes or no? There is another way to approach this, however - you could make up your mind ahead of time that your recipe will be improved, dammit, with the addition of oregano. When you try the cooking experiment outlined above, and your oregano-infused dish tastes terrible, you decide, "I need to try different amounts of oregano - one teaspoon, two teaspoons, and four teaspoons - and I also need to try adding oregano at the beginning of the cooking, and then also at the end of the cooking, and perhaps also both at the beginning and end of cooking, at all three concentrations of oregano." At this point, you have lost sight of the fact that you are making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and it will not be improved with any amount of oregano, in any permutation.

Yes, it is conceivable you didn't find the right conditions under which oregano improves a PB&J. Regardless, I imagine you see my point here.

Dear Well-Meaning-People-With-PhDs,

2009-08-06T20:13:00.001-04:00

I know when you ask me, "Why don't you get a PhD?", it sounds like you're paying me a compliment, but what I hear is something along the lines of, "Why don't you dress nicer?"

In case it wasn't horrendously obvious

2009-08-02T18:26:00.002-04:00

This is how I feel about Brett Favre deciding not to join my Vikings:

Yes, yes, I know - my QBs are now guys named Tavaris and Sage. [shakes head] Sigh. Mostly I want JD Booty to make a run for QB, so that I can buy a jersey that says "BOOTY" on the back.

Seeing data

2009-07-31T18:52:00.005-04:00

Despite my intention to write about science & my science-less family, I have been thinking about data & how we show it to those we work with & work for. Janus Professor was frustrated with her trainees & their tendency to only show her "good" data. She wants to see all the data - good, bad, or otherwise.

I know I have a tendency to do this. The "bad" data, the experiments with weird results, the data that looks different from the last time I did the experiment - it sucks. I am sufficiently confident in my ability to troubleshoot that I set those results aside, with the intention of repeating the experiment with the utmost double-check-itude (just in case I happened to transpose some reagent, or some equally obvious explanation), with every expectation that the second run-through will clear up these little issues. Why hassle my PI with results that are clearly tainted by some small mistake? We can just talk about it when it's working, I think.

From the perspective of a PI, I can see how this is frustrating. You have discussions with your data-generator (postdoc, grad student, tech) about what they're going to do, and you think you're both on the same page. Data will be coming shortly. And then... you wait. ... And wait. ... What's going on, you think? Shouldn't they be finishing that up? That's when the "hey - quick question" emails start, which transform into the "pls send me the results of X", which take a nasty turn into "we need to talk about this", and then nobody's happy.

Where's the median here? Clearly you don't want your data-generators coming to you with every single smeary PCR they run, but you want more frequent updates than a draft of a paper dropped on your desk. Do a professor's expectations for the frequency of visible data vary with the position of the data-generator? I'm guessing you'd probably expect young grad students & techs to show what they've been working on more often/more in depth than you'd expect from a senior grad student or a postdoc, as their abilities to analyze & move forward with weird data aren't as advanced. But is there some minimum amount of show-n-tell/discussion you expect from all your data-generators? And how does that change (or does it) as the professor gets further along in their own career & has more data-generators*? Might the professoriate care to comment?

*Now I have this image in my mind of the "DataGen 2100" as something you can buy from Fisher, where you feed plasmids and antibodies into one end, and POOF data comes out the other end.

back.

2009-07-30T00:26:00.002-04:00

Got in from our trip to the homeland earlier this evening. All my clothes smell like (1) bonfire, (2) dogs, or (3) both. In short - a successful trip.

On the docket for tomorrow (if I am ambitious as I think I am): a post about dealing with the scientific uneducatedness of one's family.

Out the door

2009-07-18T00:05:00.003-04:00

Having just finished my last bit of data analysis & sent it off to my PI, I think I should probably pack for my morning flight. There will certainly be fishing, bonfires, and mosquitoes in this trip to my place of birth. Perhaps if y'all are lucky I will post some pictures of the exotic, exciting, enthralling Midwest!

Parkinson's Law

2009-07-15T07:34:00.000-04:00

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
-CN Parkinson, The Economist, 1955

The past week has been trying. I'm leaving on Saturday for the annual family visit, and somehow the number of things that need to be started/working/finished by then expands exponentially every day. I'm doing my best to keep up, but it feels like drowning. No matter what time I leave work, I think "You really should have stayed another hour and finished that thing/started that thing.." I'm planning what needs to be done tomorrow as soon as I walk out the door. I'm waking up with a bullet-point list in my brain of what's on the docket for today.

To some extent, I always do this (and I think most people do). This past week, however, it feels less like planning, and more like frantically trying to keep the wolves at bay.

The League of Extraordinary Biologists

2009-07-10T20:17:00.003-04:00

I came across this article in Boston Magazine, and was so flabbergasted by the adoration therein, I needed to share it as broadly as I knew how.

Some of my favorite lines -

"at the epicenter of a movement that proponents believe will be no less transformative than the Renaissance."

"Konrad Hochedlinger, 33 and arguably even more handsome—high cheekbones, gray-blue eyes, and an olive complexion that belies his Austrian roots—skis the Alps when he's home."

Also the article goes on to say that while the iPS stuff was coming to a head in December of last year, Hochedlinger told his students to stay around the clock, and one student even brought their sleeping bag into lab.

Wow. Just wow. I will grant you that the potential of these three new labs is pretty remarkable. I'm not sure if this level of hero-worship is exactly healthy, however.. it does go further than the GQ spread about Rockstars of Science in making science sound sexy & exciting. Maybe I'm being a cynical stick-in-the-mud about this? Maybe somebody's gonna read this article & think that science sounds awesome - except maybe that sleeping bag part.

The transformation

2009-07-06T19:41:00.001-04:00

We all get older, & with this comes change. I was flipping through some old pictures taken at a party from the first year of graduate school, and marveling at the changes in my friends & in myself as well. I like to think we're wiser now, and know more about the nuts and bolts of biomedical research (& everything else!). At the same time, I feel like I've forgotten so many things - there's pictures where people are happily chatting who have since fostered a profound dislike for one another. I had forgotten that they were great friends once upon a time. People who are now married with kids are newly-minted couples in these photographs, still grinning stupidly at each other in the way that only newly-minted couples can. I had forgotten the drama and excitement that comes with a new relationship.

These are are personal examples, but I wonder if this same process of getting older and forgetting affects people at the professor level. Once you run a lab with a handful of postdocs, several graduate students, a technician and perhaps a lab manager, do you remember what it's like to be opening all the boxes with your new equipment? Do you remember waiting desperately for your one and only graduate student's film to develop, hoping that this one will be the missing piece of that first paper with you as the PI? What about digging on all corners of the internet, trying to find all the "young investigator" grants you can apply for to cobble together the money to run the lab?

This is a common thread among the young professor blogs that I read, where their grants come back with the "not enough preliminary data" stock critique. Do the professors doing the reviews remember what it's like to be new faculty? Perhaps they should be reminded of the heart-sinking terror of being the new prof, sick with worry that their grants are never going to get funded and their lab of one person won't ever make it off the ground. Didn't all professors start at that same point? Have a heart, grant reviewers. Think back - way back for some, waaaaay back for others - and remember what you put into these grants.

A new badge

2009-07-04T18:01:00.004-04:00

I propose a new badge for the Science Scouts collection:

"I Spent The Better Part of a Beautiful Saturday in Lab"

+1 for each hour spent beyond four
+5 for the Saturday in question being a national holiday
-1 for each experiment done that day that doesn't work
-eleventy for not knowing it's a Saturday

The Dividing Line

2009-06-29T22:25:00.008-04:00

There are iconic images of scientists in the media - the "scientist looking at the beaker of colored liquid":
...or the "scientists looking at vials of mysterious substances":

... but my personal favorite is the scientist (or pair of scientists, both in matching perfectly white lab coats) holding up a film, gazing intently into the dark & light spaces, divining meaning from their pattern.

Of course this is largely a farce. Sequencing (and I swear it's always a sequencing gel, never a Western or Southern blot) is nearly never done by autoradiography anymore. This is not to say it was never done this way - indeed, an entire generation of scientists learned how to do sequencing with paper-thin gels and giant films.

I wonder: what will be the next technology that draws a line between scientific generations? I remember hearing older profs sternly insist that they "used to purify their own restriction enzymes", and now I hear from those who have fond memories of running their own sequencing gels. What will *I* be saying in a decade? Remember when we used to do minipreps? "Gee, Grandma DGT, what's a miniprep?" say the little baby grad students I'll be mentoring, "Don't you just put your sequence into the DNA Machine and get the plasmid out the other side?"

And I'll sigh, and think about these sequencing gels.

It's OK to not get a PhD!

2009-06-25T19:02:00.004-04:00

There's an interesting discussion chez Dr Jekyll & Mrs Hyde, about a tech in her lab and his intention to go to grad school. Or business school. He's not sure. While he's improved a bit in his technical shortcomings, DJMH has reservations about his potential for his future success in grad school & beyond. She's trying to decide if she should more vociferously dissuade this tech from his ill-formed plan to attend grad school.

I think she should tell him to reconsider. Perhaps not directly, but instead through their PI, or through another person in the lab that the tech might be more receptive to. I certainly don't think grad school is for everyone and it doesn't sound like it's for him.

I'm pretty sure anyone reading my blog knows that I don't have a PhD. Despite this, I am rather familiar with the PhD environment - I worked for several years as a tech in an academic lab at a top-ten university, and watched dozens of my grad student friends (not to mention my grad student husband) go through the ups and downs of grad school. A lot of people who begin grad school.. well, they really shouldn't have. I don't need to have been a grad student to come to that conclusion. Many of these people probably enjoyed their college science classes, and were probably even quite good at them, but made the jump in logic that because they had succeeded in studying science that they would enjoy doing science. To a one, these people hated being grad students. They never managed to really own their projects, and largely dinked around in lab, waiting for.. their advisor to step in and tell them what to do? Inspiration to strike? Frankly, I don't know.

I've also noticed a tendency among many technicians (at least in my little corner of the world) to feel inadequate with their lowly bachelor's degrees, being completely surrounded by people who are in graduate school or who have already earned their PhDs. It seems that a lot of techs are somehow compelled to get at least a Masters degree, or try for a PhD, since not having one seemed to make them the odd scientist out. (And fwiw, I personally think that a Master's means diddly-squat for being a tech, but maybe I'm missing something.) It's not so much about wanting to further their education and go down that particular path, but keeping up with the Joneses in the lab by getting some extra letters after their name.

DJMH has pretty concisely summed up her reservations about this tech going to grad school, and based on her description of the whole situation, I'd say she's trying to save him from walking headlong into a big pit of mistake. By the time someone gets part way through their postdoc, they've spent nearly a decade in the day-to-day of doing science, and as such have plenty enough experience and analytical ability to make an educated opinion of someone's chances in grad school. Will this person like to hear that their odds are shitty? Of course not. Could the postdoc be wrong about this potential grad student? Sure - but my money's on the postdoc's opinion. If I were equally interested in business school or graduate school, and a PI/postdoc/someone with an educated point of view told me that I probably ought to reconsider grad school.. well.. I'd certainly put a bit more thought into business school.

Accepted

2009-06-24T22:13:00.000-04:00

We received the awesome fantastic news that our paper was accepted at Subspecialty Journal of Choiceness! This is my third and, for the foreseeable future, final first-author paper.

Hence: drinkification for DGT! Yippeee!

DGT is wicked smaht

2009-06-18T23:02:00.000-04:00

Here are the thorough, intellectual notes I made during a seminar earlier this week. I have annotated them so that you can see the deep, deep thoughts I was having.

PCR Win!

2009-06-18T19:11:00.000-04:00

My general strategy for troubleshooting PCR begins with two basic steps.

1. Repeat the PCR, exactly the same way I set it up the first time. With about 50% frequency, this will produce the band I'm looking for. This brings to mind an old quote about the definition of insanity, and how it involves repeating something over & over again and expecting different results.

2. If #1 fails, frighten the PCR into submitting by setting up several (3-5) different input concentrations and use the gradient PCR block to run a range of annealing temperatures. With about 50% frequency, this will result in a band in every single reaction, making me wonder why the hell I bothered setting up so many PCRs.

In the meantime, I will obviously check my primers to make sure I haven't messed them up. Also, I suppose I should clarify what I had said previously: I am perfectly happy to discover that I messed up the primers, and have a clear and distinct reason why my PCR failed. It is a rather sad state of affairs, however, to be actively rooting for one's own dumbassedness, such that troubleshooting of the exceedingly-annoying variety can be avoided.

Update, from this afternoon: a band! Of the right size! Absent from the no-template control lane! Huzzah!

PCR madness

2009-06-17T20:55:00.001-04:00

It is sad when PCR does not work. Especially when it's a fairly straightforward PCR, with reasonably TM'd primers, from a cDNA pool that you know expresses your target. After a couple annoying rounds of troubleshooting this should-be-really-easy-why-aren't-you-working PCR, I asked myself, "I didn't do something stupid like forget to reverse the 3' primer, did I?" And then I realized that it's extra sad when I'm hoping that the answer is "I'm just stupid" as an explanation - hoping for one's own stupidity to be the reason something fails is terribly depressing.

It's just like the Discovery Channel around here

2009-06-16T18:39:00.004-04:00

The sandwiches suspected nothing, sitting quietly in their plastic tray on the countertop. They had no reason for concern, for after all, there were at least two dozen "Important People" (as judged by the number of laptops in use during the meeting, and the average caliber of clothing for all concerned) who were meeting in the conference room adjacent. The sandwiches were remnants, uneaten by the Important People at their lunchtime meeting.

The sandwiches had no idea what was lurking just beyond the countertop.

Lured by the scent of free food, a postdoc began to circle his prey. He made a cup of coffee in the kitchen, and leaned casually against the counter, peering around the corner to see if the Important People appeared to be finishing their meeting anytime soon. He glanced at his watch, and noticed that it was only 12:45 - this meeting was likely to run to 1pm. He furrowed his brow and slunk away.

Ten minutes later, this "scout" postdoc returned and had recruited additional members to his herd - three more postdocs plus a technician, all hungry for whatever delicious fillings might be contained within the Important People sandwiches. The group perched at a table in the kitchen, within sight of the conference room. They chatted aimlessly, periodically craning their necks toward the meeting - was there movement from the room? Are they leaving?

Hungry & anxious to get the good sandwiches while they were still there, the technician got up to check again. She snuck toward the counter, and started to reach for the weakest one - the veggie sandwich nudged toward the edge of the plate - when one of the Important People looked up. Her innate defensive response took over, and she jerked away her outstretched hand, pretending that she was just walking past the counter and hastily returned to her herd. They feverishly discussed her close call, all furtively looking back toward the meeting room to see if their plan had been foiled.

Minutes later, the meeting of the Important People dispersed. Laptops were closed up, Blackberries re-holstered, and the group sauntered off, leaving their sandwiches, broken-in-half cookies, wilting salad and assorted undesired beverages (ginger ale and apple juice) sitting defenseless on the counter.

The herd pounced - the carnage was unrelenting. Sandwiches were grabbed with one hand (veggie sandwiches promptly dropped) while the cookie tray was pilfered with the other. The herd arranged their spoils amongst several plates, and drug them back to the kitchen to divide among the group. Happily the herd dug in, and gloated over their speed to the kill - now the scavengers were coming out to the depleted sandwich table, poking at the soggy remnants and walking off muttering. Survival of the fittest, indeed.

A new paradigm for publication?

2009-06-14T23:02:00.003-04:00

I love the TV show Mythbusters (as does (evidently) XKCD). We were just watching an episode where Jamie and Adam were trying to test the story that during a car fire, a piston-loaded bumper could explode and ruinate someone's legs (or in this case, their test dummy). They tried dozens of different permutations, heating different parts of the piston, to different temperatures, at different rates, but were confounded by the safety features of the pistons that prevented exactly such an explosion. In the end, they decided to fabricate some solid steel pistons, ram them full of gunpowder & wet sand, and then blow them the hell up. (Note: the "blowing the hell up" is my favorite part of Mythbusters.)

I think this is an awesome precedent with two basic awesome parts. Part one: we should all together get rid of this whole process of writing boring-ass papers with their silly "introduction" and "discussion" sections, and instead replace these papers with just three categories: plausible, busted, or confirmed. Part two: we should only try something a couple times before calling it busted and resorting to either C4 or thermite.

That would be much awesomer.

And, hey, Mythbusters people? If you are ever looking for a molecular biologist for anything, well - my email's at the top of the page. xoxo DGT

The Invisible Ruler

2009-06-10T23:56:00.002-04:00

From where I stand, looking in the theoretical mirror, I can only see one thing - inadequate. Said with that same cadence that the Daleks use when they say "Ex-ter-min-ate!" I have always compared myself to others. I can't help it - there's nothing that comes more naturally to my overzealous, type-A personality than to evaluate how I stack up to others in every single way. I've realized I do this with my scientific abilities - measuring whether or not I make the same connections after a seminar as do other people in my lab, or if my results from technique X are as clean and reproducible as another person's, or what-have-you. Whenever someone connects the dots faster, or optimizes a technique I've struggled with, I feel like I've failed.

Am I being fair to myself in doing this? Of course not. But does anyone see themselves fairly? I can't imagine that they do. My problem here is that I never measure myself against my peers, and instead I find someone who's better at whatever-it-is, and set them as the bar for competency. My comparisons are always against the postdocs or lab heads, and never against another tech. Essentially, I've come up with an invisible ruler to measure myself against. I can't see this ruler, and neither can anyone else, but this doesn't stop me from authoritatively saying, "Nope, I fell short again. See? Can't you see this line here? I totally missed it."

A lot of the time, this attitude has been terribly destructive to my confidence & in-lab happiness. Earlier in my scientific career, when I was just a baby tech, it was my job to do the genotyping for the lab's mouse colony. As soon as I started work there, the genotyping promptly stopped working. Since it worked perfectly fine for the old tech who had just left the lab, I was utterly certain that it was my own gross incompetence that had caused the failure (and not the bad batch of proteinase K that it turned out to be). It also instills me with the belief that if anyone can do it, then I can do it - which ain't always the case.

Nonetheless, I can't say that this constant inadequatism (and yes I just invented that word) is entirely detrimental. It has been a driving force behind nearly everything I've ever done to improve myself as a scientist. I hate feeling like I don't measure up, no matter how stupidly high I have set the bar. Can I learn how to be as analytical as my brain can manage? Is there a way I can absorb more from papers that I read? Can I figure out how to do this protocol better than the person who gave it to me? Yes I can, I think, if I just work a little bit harder.

Recommended by DGT, part 2

2009-06-09T20:10:00.002-04:00

What molecular biologist doesn't do a lot of cloning? I've done a lot myself, the bulk of it PCR based. Most of my cloning involves adding some restriction sites into my oligos, and then amplifying the cDNA with these oligos, cutting it & the vector, ligating, transforming & miniprepping.

What polymerase do I use, you ask? Why, it's KOD polymerase, from EMD Biosciences. For all I know, it's the polymerase everyone uses. If it isn't, let me tell you the three basic reasons why you ought to use it. Reason 1: it has remarkable fidelity. I've never had a PCR-introduced base pair change in all the cloning I've done with it, and I've done quite a lot. Reason 2: it has blazing speed. My standard PCR extension times for a 3kb amplicon are around 30s, with annealing times of around 3-4s. If you don't pour your agarose gel to run your PCRs before you set up your PCR, it won't have solidified by the time your PCRs are done - it's that fast. Reason 3: it's very good with GC rich templates (specifically genomic templates), and also very long templates (also occasionally genomic templates).

Basically I love this polymerase. If I had to switch to a different kind, well.. I would be tremendously sad. Try it in your PCRs today!

(Why am I doing these advertising/posts? I don't know, frankly. I'm feeling a little muddled lately, and there's some things going on that are preoccupying my brain's capacity for doing more than one thing at a time, so.. I'm giving everyone some excellent product recommendations. I wouldn't steer you wrong!)

Recommended by DGT

2009-06-08T23:23:00.002-04:00

I can't stand nitrile gloves. It's like trying to do benchwork while your hands are encased in dishwashing gloves. They're thick. They're slippery. They make your hands sweat like.. well, like something unpleasantly sweaty. I hate needing to do work in the animal facility, because all the gloves in there are nitrile, and their slippery-ness is less than helpful when trying to read the ear tag of a squirming mouse.

The safety folks have declared war on latex gloves, and it's coming to the point where my orders for latex gloves are individually approved by some distant authority. The implication is clear: these things are contraband, and shall soon be viewed like Cuban cigars - a clearly superior product that is disallowed for shady political reasons. Will I need to switch? I really don't want to. I have tried the purple ones, the blue ones, the greenish ones, and the different-shade-of-blue ones. I have hated them, one and all.

I noticed a new variety of nitrile gloves in our stockroom, and peeked inside the box. Hmm, I thought, this one was different. They are Kimberly Clark's Sterling Nitrile gloves, and I must say... I like them. They are nearly as thin as my beloved EvOnes, and have little nubbies on the fingertips to help hold onto tubes. They breathe quite well, and are a reasonably attractive shade of silver. I used one pair throughout most of the afternoon without any little holes appearing in them, through several take-off-and-on's.

I'm sold. These are the nicest nitrile gloves I've ever used. In fact, I've [gasp!] switched over to using them exclusively. Try it! I think you'll like it.

A recipe, in lieu of anything substantive

2009-06-03T07:35:00.002-04:00

DrDGT & I made hamburgers for dinner last night, and in my modest opinion, THESE WERE THE BEST HAMBURGERS EVER, IN THE HISTORY OF TIME. Before I head to work, I am sharing this newly invented recipe with the internets:

1# hamburger
1 poblano, roasted and diced
1/4c shredded mozzerella cheese
Small handful bacon bits
1t salt
1t coarse ground pepper
Dash of cayenne
Diced Portobello mushrooms (maybe half a cup)
Egg

1. Roast poblano: cut poblano into quarters and put on cookie sheet with tin foil. Put under hot broiler for 3-5 minutes until blackened. Put pepper pieces into brown paper bag and leave shut for 10 minutes. Rub the blackened skins off and dice up the peppers into small bits
2. Mix together hamburger, chopped poblanos, cheese, bacon, salt, pepper, cayenne & mushrooms. Beat egg in a small bowl, and add about half into the hamburger mixture. Mash up until the egg has blended in well - you will think, "Oh noes! I put in too much egg and now I have hamburger batter!". Do not fear - it goes into "solution" eventually.
3. Shape into patties and cook on the grill. Makes four, plus a little runted half-burger. Or, you could be less piggy than yours truly and make five.

Seriously. Go to the grocery store after work and make these guys up. They are delicious.

No Good, Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Day

2009-05-28T20:55:00.002-04:00

There were so many parts of today that were sucky. Negative data. Confusing results. Technical problems (why no RNA, RNEasy kit? I know I put cells into you.). Reagents going missing. Super-secret backup reagents ALSO missing. The only good part of this remarkably long day came at the end, and I am mean and terrible for laughing about it but I will anyway:

The exit of my building goes into a courtyard, which has a locked gate leading to the street. The gate is locked at 7pm, but we can still leave that way by pressing a button to release the magnet holding the gate shut. As I was leaving at nearly 8, I was scrolling through my iPod to find some music for the walk home. As my finger was but centimeters away from the button I noticed a (very) young couple, enthusiastically making out while pressed up against the gate! Oh noes! But it was too late to turn back, and I hit the button, releasing the gate which swung powerfully inward. The couple yelped as they tumbled to the concrete, still largely sucking face.

I apologized repeatedly, and they shook it off with no harm done. Of course, I snickered the whole way home. Hee hee.

Three weeks isn't a lot of time

2009-05-28T07:53:00.002-04:00

I realized yesterday that one-third of my allocated time for re-revising my paper has already passed. Eeeep! Why do these cells take so fracking long to grow? I am hoping that the experiments I take down this weekend will give me some data I can be happy about. In the meantime, I leave you with an article from McSweeney's, explaining why Dr. Jones may not be teaching next year...

Lab meeting

2009-05-21T22:54:00.002-04:00

There are many parts of lab life that will never make sense to me: why can a protocol never work the first time? Who uses all but 1mL of the TBST stock and doesn't let me know we're out? Etc.

The one baffling me at the moment is this: why does the person who makes the lab meeting schedule always act like they have just moved a mountain to make the list of presenters over a few months? And why do they react as though you had suggested that they do something involving a donkey & a mess of ping-pong balls when you point out that you can't make that meeting they scheduled you for, since it's during that conference that you've said a hundred times you were attending?

Blast from the past

2009-05-20T15:51:00.002-04:00

Re-reviews just came back on my last first author paper. We added quite a bit of new data to address the concerns that the reviewers had. This, obviously, was a mistake - new data is blood in the water for refs. Two of the three (the third, love of my life, says that the paper is fine just the way it is. I love you, reviewer #3!) had all kinds of new concerns with our new data, and want us to address them. Based on their comments, I sort of assumed that the paper was rejected - this was the second round of review and they have a lot of issues with the data.

Better than rejected - we have three weeks to resubmit a re-revised version.

Even better than that - I'm not working on this project anymore! Wheee!! We're going to give it our best shot here, but three weeks is a pretty quick turn-around for the experiments they're looking for, and an especially quick turnaround when all these reagents have been forgotten in the freezer for the past five months.

Cross your collective fingers for me...