I hate it when you're right

Paramed  and I got into a not-so-little tiff last night. We were supposed to be enjoying a relaxing dinner. He was stressed from several insanely busy weeks, at both school and work. I was frustrated because of a number of things going on at work. During the course of conversation, I commented that I realized I needed to start thinking about a backup plan to the tenure track. Things went downhill from there.

That statement surprised Paramed because he'd never heard me express any doubt about where I would end up in my career. It was also not an easy thing for me to say aloud because, as irrational as it may seem, it felt like I was giving up a little bit--though when Paramed voiced that same sentiment, I denied it. He asked what I would do, if not what I've been working toward for years. I responded, "I don't know. There are a lot of options. But I do know that I don't want to stay at the bench if I'm just going to be treated like a set of hands the rest of my life."

"Do you feel that you're treated that way here?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied. "Guru has told me exactly what experiments to do. Before I can even finish a set of experiments and think about where to go from there, he's telling me the next set of experiments that I should do. I don't even know what the big picture is; I've asked and all I got was a bullshit answer." I should note here that as a grad student, I was expected to design my own experiments, to take ownership of my project. Bear still had a hand in guiding the project, but he did this largely by asking questions to get me thinking about it, recommending priority order for experiments that I designed, and sometimes suggesting experiments but in a more abstract manner, leaving the design and interpretation to me for the most part. Perhaps I am idealizing my past experiences, but I have always been more committed to and excited about projects that requires critical thinking (outside of technical troubleshooting) and interpretation. I thought that's similar to what I would get here, but it turns out Guru is a micromanager--and I don't respond well to micromanagement. Anyway, back to the story at hand...

The ensuing argument revolved around the following main points:

• Paramed was pissed that Guru was making me doubt myself.
• Paramed was pissed that I was not being assertive and implied that I should stand up for myself and call Guru out when he's spouting bullshit.
• I was pissed that Paramed was telling me that I was doubting myself and that he was telling me what I should do.
• I was pissed also pissed that he was not accepting my excuses for me not being assertive.
• There was back and forth about the correlation coefficient between amount of listening vs. amount of ranting on both sides.
  

Now only if said argument had taken as little time to fizzle as it did to write out those points. Eventually we called a truce and we got over it.

Of course, after I had calmed down and started thinking about what was said, I realized what had really pissed me off so much: the fact that Paramed was right. Or rather that what he said was true. It kills me that I've fallen back into being so polite and diminutive that I don't take a stand, that I've allowed that monstrous self-doubt to creep back in. I felt that I left grad school as a confident scientist, but I no longer feel that. And it was tough to be forced to admit it. Paramed can be brutally honest--which is a great trait and yet often painful at the same time. I am reminded of an insightful post and am now at the point where I "sack the fuck up and feele extremely grateful for his penetrating insights". Next to decide what to do about it.

Please standby

I had plans for tackling some lab work, house work, and blog posts yesterday. Said plans fizzled out after I started feeling like crap, thanks to Paramed's bug, which also zapped all higher brain function. Sleeping 12 hours helped a great deal.

This morning I get an email from Guru wanting some data for a grant... due next week. I just started working on the project last month. Some of the data requires a little more processing and analysis but can be ready within a day. The other data is more problematic. The experiment has been done, but the data doesn't look great. No one in our lab has worked on this particular model, and it was my first time doing it, so things are far from perfect. I can try to salvage something from it, but it's not really grant quality material, in my opinion. As an aside, I explained the problem to Guru and received a response that there is an art to technique that is an integral part of the experiment, and I should talk to Jack and Jill who have experience with it. He couldn't mention that before I had already done the entire experiment.

Anyway, a critical element for repeating the experiment has been unavailable and was just ordered Friday. I think I'll be able to start the experiment about midweek, and then it will take 3 to 4 long days to crank through. I had already planned to repeat the experiment. Now I'm just doing it on a compressed timetable. So if I disappear from the blogosphere for the next week or two, it's not that I've fallen off the face of the planet. I'm just chained to my bench or sequestered in a dark windowless room, trying to hang on to my sanity.

Best of luck to everyone else this week!

What the hell did I do to you?!?!

I think I have expressed previously that I am one of those strange people that absolutely loves science. The process, the work, the discoveries... Science is an integral part of my life. I often speak of science in anthropomorphic terms.

And now I'm trying to figure out what the hell I did to her. Why does she hate me now? Why is there so much general suckitude when it comes to research and science these days?

When I started my postdoc, I took on two somewhat related projects. The person who previously worked on one of them (we'll call project A) had been gone for over 6 months. The other project (B) didn't even have preliminary data.

I came to realize as I tried to get project A off the ground, that the supporting data for it was almost nonexistent for the in vitro system. And that data from the in vivo system was notoriously difficult with regard to quantification and reproducibility--this from the people who actually did the work. So I tried a different approach, which kind of worked the first time, worked beautifully the second time (early this summer), utterly failed the third time (a few weeks ago), and provided a negative result in a different cell line (sometime last week).

Project B had to basically be started from scratch. It took a couple of months to get the in vitro model system up and going, thanks to one crucial detail left out of the methods section of one group's papers. After that problem was solved, I had to get the Western blots to work, dealing with trying to get efficient transfer of proteins of interest and the fact that the commercially available antibodies are crap (one band my ass, Santa Cruz). This finally started to show some promising results this summer as well. But I again ran into the problem of reproducibility, trying to figure out whether it's the crap antibodies, differences in experimental conditions, or just something that I screwed up. And then there was writing and revising a protocol for the in vivo work, which I was looking forward to.

Other things I've worked on have either just not worked or have given wonky results that require additional troubleshooting/control experiments. The real-time PCR was screwing up intermittently, which in the end, required setting up every experiment twice to get usable results. Regarding one completely unrelated idea (which I felt was a good idea and a nice reflection/application of my previous training), the guy heading the core facility that I need to use is a butt munch--ignored me once, blew me off the second time, was curt the third time, and is ignoring me again.

So basically the past couple of months have sucked (even if you don't count the shit I've been dealing with outside of science).

Yesterday I'm perusing the RSS feeds for new PubMed entries on topics of research interest. And I find an 'early edition' PNAS paper that is basically describing my project B, with in vitro and in vivo data (using different but closely related model systems). I thought I might actually cry (when it comes to my life, it takes a lot to make cry). I still have to read the paper in detail. I might be able to salvage something of my work, but it definitely steals my thunder.

I realize that all of this is 'part of science'. But that doesn't really make me feel better. I've been having a very tough time this year, scientifically speaking. I keep telling myself that it's important to encounter adversity at this stage of my career, so I can (hopefully) deal with it better in my independent career. That it's "character building". But that doesn't make it any easier.

In recent weeks, I had decided that it was time to start considering alternative projects, for a myriad of reasons. In a way, this most recent development may just be another cutting of ties to current projects to push me into another one. It still doesn't entirely remove that feeling of science kicking me when I'm down.

Well, time to suck it up and get back to it.

I think my head is bleeding

Image by Zeetz Jones via Flickr

... from banging it against the friggin' wall the past two days.

I pontificated this morning regarding the massive and often last-minute time sinks that I've been finding myself in largely due to the actions--or perhaps better said inactions and delayed actions--of Guru.

And it just doesn't stop. Most of the current head banging is grant associated but Guru-catalyzed. On top of the whole timeline issue I described earlier, he either can't make up his mind about what I should be doing or hasn't thought things through in the context of my project that's actually progressing.

I sent my specific aims--key word SPECIFIC--saying essentially that I want to study kiwis in an established in vitro model system. Then I want to study the action of kiwis in another in vitro system, where kiwis have not been studied but maybe more relevant with reference to biology. And then I want to examine (with important collaborators) the possible involvement of kiwis in fruit tarts in vivo. Guru replies that all the in vitro kiwi studies should be one aim with each system as a subaim and then to just mention the in vivo fruit tart model as a possible future direction. This seemed odd so I wrote to clarify. Good thing, as he had decided that we should indeed talk about fruit tarts. Great.

Now we're getting into what should be used as markers when establishing the role of kiwis in our in vivo model. I have my ideas based on broadly accepted markers. They are further downstream and could be influenced at multiple points by kiwis. But they are accepted markers of fruit tarts and are fairly easy to measure.

He wants to use pluots. He is very partial to pluots (perhaps because he is literally invested in pluots). Now, I realize that pluots are associated with fruit tarts in our model. Kiwis are associated with similar models but haven't been studied in our model. But pluots are observed early on, and we're not sure what kiwis are doing. I didn't argue the point with him because I'm new to (a) in vivo models in general and (b) the fruit tart model.

Yet the more I thought about the less sense it made. There is absolutely no evidence at this point for a connection between kiwis and pluots. NONE. Pluots are not the only contributor to the fruti tart. Not to mention pluots are very difficult to quantify. And this isn't just my reasoning. This conclusion was met by our resident fruit tart expert, as well. There's no way of knowing a priori if kiwis will affect pluots and even if they do what that means for our fruit tart. However, if we look at the more broadly accepted, functional markers, then we can determine if kiwis have an effect on fruit tarts--which is of interest to a broader community and to me even in the absence of pluot involvement. If so, then we can step back and examine if there is also an effect on pluots--which is of interest to Guru.

Not long ago, I actually described an experiment to determine if there was an in vitro correlation between kiwis and pluots. Guru responded that he would love it if they were, but they very well might not be, so we should focus on kiwis. Stupid postdoc planting seeds of hope...

What this last bit comes down to is that I was cowed by Guru yet again. And I'm pissed me off. Not so much at him right now (although it would be helpful to have conversations with actual explanations), but at myself. Because I have spent a lot of time going through the literature and talking to the ones doing the work in our lab. They don't have particularly high confidence in some of the previous unpublished pluot work. I know the problems with finding and quantifying pluots.

I feel like I'm starting grad school again. That I don't know anything, and surely Guru must know what he's talking about. But I know better on both counts. I may have a lot to learn about this field, but I know a lot about my project and the related work. I learned how to think critically and solve problems. Plus I realize that many PIs, especially established PIs with larger labs, have their brainwaves scattered over many things, so that they may not think through all the implications and difficulties of what they suggested. Yet when it came down to it, I let Guru batter through my confidence and run me down. Now I have to arm myself and batter my way back. I need to step up and take ownership of this project. It's my career, and I guess it's high time I started acting like it.

*Paramed commented that the pluots and kiwis were giving him a headache. Hopefully they won't affect anyone else too adversely. It was the best I could do at the moment. I'm happy to take suggestions for other non-science metaphors for research.

Request: Please close the time abysses

Dear Guru,

You are a smart, successful scientist. This is one of the reasons that I applied for a position in your lab. There are many good scientists in your lab and interesting projects that are at advanced stages. I realize that at this precise moment, my project is not the highest priority, nor am I your pet trainee--I'm OK with that.

It seems to have not crossed your mind that I am effin busy right now.

My project was really just a glimmer of an idea in your mind with practically no experimental evidence when I started. This involved being cast into darkness where there was wailing and gnashing of teeth--and lots of literature searching. It took me a few months to get the (new-to-your-lab) model system up and running and to find a replicable positive control. A lot of tweaking and optimization was required, due to technical issues and omission of tiny details in the methods of the vast majority of papers in this area (which really isn't that many). Plus I was spending time trying to make your pet project work with your favorite cool and pretty technique (CPT)--and determined it's pretty much hopeless (at least under these conditions).

That was then, this is now. I applied old school technique (OST) to your pet project and have gotten reproducible results that not only provide useful information on your pet project but also provide a potential explanation for why CPT didn't work. That glimmer of an idea that I started is turning into a real research project. It has been producing interesting results for a couple of months that indicate this a project worth pursuing and has peculiar features we had not considered. This makes me happy. I am experiencing the joy of science again. But it also means a lot of work.

Plus you gave me an undergrad student this summer. I had forgotten how much time and work they required.

I know that with your vacation, meetings, company, grant and manuscript preparation, etc. that you haven't been doing as many walkthroughs the lab. Otherwise you might have realized that I am effin busy. Due to/on top of the reasons stated above, I am balls-to-the-wall trying to generate preliminary data so that I can put together a competitive fellowship app in a few months. And (in case you haven't really processed it) we soon have to shut down the lab for an entire week (possibly more) for the move down the street. Although I look forward to settling into our new home, I am effectively hamstringed for a few weeks until I can get my little bastards up and going and happy again--which is why I'm trying to bust out as much as I can right now so I won't be sitting around with my thumb up my ass for a month.

I tell you all this not so much to complain (ok, so maybe to complain a little) but to build the case against all the interruptions-largely of your doing-that are robbing me of my time actually doing science. Such as:

• lab meetings that take half a day
• 2 hr meetings with collaborators for which you give me ~48 hour notice of said event and that you'd like me to present
• after the half day lab meeting, requesting a meeting with the minion and me for that afternoon
• or my current favorite scenario: after the above meeting with minion, we discuss my project (the combination of which took over 1.5 hr) and you tell me you want to put my name in for a position on a training grant. You tell me I'll need to write a paragraph for it, and that it's due some in about a month or so. No problem, I'll take some of my weekend time to write said paragraph. After receiving a draft nine days later, I essentially get this response: 'btw, you need to write 2 pgs., it's due next week, and you really should get your grad advisor to write a recommendation.'

I am resigned to the fact that none of this will actually change. You have been operating this way for years. Still, a girl can always dream.

Your effin busy, slightly frazzled postdoc,

Belle

Oy

There are few things more disappointing than having an experimental plan that you're motivated and ready to get done, getting into lab early to get rolling on it, and then to find that supplies you need from the common stock are completely depleted. Grrr.

Because someone will steal the microwave, right?

Grrr.

As if it's not bad enough to be the only one in the building, I discover that someone decided to it would be fun to close and lock doors to common spaces, such as...

A lab equipment room...

And the lunch room.

The lab equipment room, I can handle. I can access similar equipment elsewhere in the lab, just not my favorite.

But the lunch room? Do they have any idea how dangerous it is to deprive a postdoc access to legal drug options? Looks like I'm going out for lunch and caffeine.

Update: Turns out someone got locked out accidentally with very important things (i.e. ID and passport) locked in. She is supposed to fly out of the country tomorrow. And evidently only one person has a key to the room. He is incommunicado--and has been for two days. So much for emergency contacts.