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?
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Monday, May 07, 2007
Top 10 signs you're working for Dr. Evil, Ph.D.
Top 10 list
10. If you've looked into prices for having T-shirts printed that say "I'm the favorite", you might be working for Dr. Evil.
9. If you're staying in the lab until 11 pm most nights and working weekends and the boss still says you're not working hard enough, or aren't efficient (like Isabelle, the irreproachable postdoc), you just might possibly be working for Dr. Evil.
8. If you can't get enough mutant mice to do your experiments because there's not enough space for your mice in the animal facility, it's all your fault.
7. Likewise, if the technicians at our "state-of-the-art" mouse facility don't respond to your emails, the "communication problem" is clearly all your fault.
6. If we no longer have money to do experiments it's definitely not because the boss ordered to have mice shipped from New York (costing over 1000 Euros) which you didn't even use.
5. If your mice die because we work in a state-of-the-art Institute without air conditioning and you left the window open so sweat wouldn't run off your brow into the open wound of the mouse whose poor guts were exposed, it's all your fault that the mouse dies from an infection.
4. If you kindly suggest that genotyping compound heterozygous mice and analyzing embryos is not really your strong suit and in addition will take you away from studies that will actually contribute to you publishing a paper, you must just be a lazy, sucky, worthless post-doc who's not as good as Dr. M, or Dr. F.M., or any other previous lab member who now has their own lab (or Isabella).
3. If you leave your computer plugged in to make it look like you're working and a) go to the mall, b) go for a "French lunch" (2 hours minimum), c) call your mother. Yep it's Dr. Evil, who's your boss baby.
2. Rather than actually helping you troubleshoot your experiments, Dr. Evil instead spends thousands of Euros to send you to another lab (or to London).
1. Somehow, even though you've just discovered a new muscle stem cell marker that will cure muscle wasting diseases, you're STILL not as good as any other former lab member.
10. If you've looked into prices for having T-shirts printed that say "I'm the favorite", you might be working for Dr. Evil.
9. If you're staying in the lab until 11 pm most nights and working weekends and the boss still says you're not working hard enough, or aren't efficient (like Isabelle, the irreproachable postdoc), you just might possibly be working for Dr. Evil.
8. If you can't get enough mutant mice to do your experiments because there's not enough space for your mice in the animal facility, it's all your fault.
7. Likewise, if the technicians at our "state-of-the-art" mouse facility don't respond to your emails, the "communication problem" is clearly all your fault.
6. If we no longer have money to do experiments it's definitely not because the boss ordered to have mice shipped from New York (costing over 1000 Euros) which you didn't even use.
5. If your mice die because we work in a state-of-the-art Institute without air conditioning and you left the window open so sweat wouldn't run off your brow into the open wound of the mouse whose poor guts were exposed, it's all your fault that the mouse dies from an infection.
4. If you kindly suggest that genotyping compound heterozygous mice and analyzing embryos is not really your strong suit and in addition will take you away from studies that will actually contribute to you publishing a paper, you must just be a lazy, sucky, worthless post-doc who's not as good as Dr. M, or Dr. F.M., or any other previous lab member who now has their own lab (or Isabella).
3. If you leave your computer plugged in to make it look like you're working and a) go to the mall, b) go for a "French lunch" (2 hours minimum), c) call your mother. Yep it's Dr. Evil, who's your boss baby.
2. Rather than actually helping you troubleshoot your experiments, Dr. Evil instead spends thousands of Euros to send you to another lab (or to London).
1. Somehow, even though you've just discovered a new muscle stem cell marker that will cure muscle wasting diseases, you're STILL not as good as any other former lab member.
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