How is it when I have a conversation with my mentor, I leave his office feeling that my project is going nowhere, and the reason is because I'm a terrible scientist? Also, it's (still) my fault that I don't meet with him enough, even though most times I have to knock on his door 3 days in a row before I can get his attention. It's not a problem for him that I only give lab meeting once every 6 months and discuss my results nearly exclusively with him (when we can find him that is) rather than in a group of peers. Once every six months, well "that's about right for a group this size", he says.
The trick is how I can convince myself that I'm still a good scientist even if I can't get an experiment to work. Ah there's the rub, if you care, then you can be effected by his jibes. The thing is not to care if you're a terrible scientist, because I don't want to be a scientist anymore. There. It's finally done. I'm completely "degouter" as they say in French which roughly translates to the whole Post Doc Experience has left a bad taste in my mouth.
Considering that my boss is the type of guy who catalogs seemingly endless amounts of scientific information in his head, he can't realize that continually repeating "I just don't understand why that experiment X isn't working!!???" while sighing and making that poopy face he does is not considered constructive criticism, and is not in the remotest way helpful. I don't even want to do science as a hobby anymore. I want to never see my smelly, dirty, little biting, shitting, peeing-all-over-me, jumping inside of my labcoat mice again. No more PCRs to genotype mice that I don't even give a shit what the phenotype of the crosses are anyway. No more comments from my boss about the only experiment he seems to care about, an incredibly complex xenografting scheme, which it took one year for me to have enough mice to even start the experiment.
Did I tell you what this grand thing entails? Well, I need female mutants first off, so if you remember your mendalian genetics, that's 25% that will be mutant if you start with heterozygous mice. Then only half of that 25% will be female, so you're talking 12-13% of mice that are conceived will be what I need. Next I need nude mice that have been ovary-ectomized on hand. I take out uterine tissue from the female mutants and put it inside the kidney capsule of the nude mice. Now that sounds all nice and simple, but this entails anesthetising a mouse, cutting open it's back, finding the kidney, then ever so gently lifting the skin that covers it and puncturing the teeny tiniest of holes in it while still holding the skin in the forceps because now you've gotta put the uterine tissue inside the hole you made. To do this you must transfer the tissue from the forceps of your right hand to a clean-looking part of the kidney (because the tissue is translucent and gets lost in the body cavity if you're not careful), then take the blunted glass rod out of your mouth while still looking in the microscope and holding the skin with forceps in your left hand. Now you take the glass rod and squash the little bit of tissue inside the hole, without puncturing the kidney by the way, or tearing the hole in the skin any bigger, or the tissue will fall out again after the surgery. Got all that? Well now you get to sew some stitches in skin of the IP cavity and find the kidney on the other side and do it again with WT uterine tissue. Are you having fun yet? It takes me the whole day to do this experiment.
But again, even though it's technically challenging and I'm not by nature a very meticulous or patient person, I still just have to keep doing this experiment until it works. I mean, former postdoc M. got it to work, so I must be able to make it work too. Mind you, Dr. M does heart surgery on mice now, and my future career aspirations are to type on a keyboard. Perhaps continuing to push me on this is a slight miscalculation on his part? Is a broken post-doc a useful person to have in the lab?
