In the middle of January I gave lab meeting - which just means that I presented all my data in front of the whole lab - and it went positively well, I met one on one with my mentor shortly after that and we made a plan as to how I should go about finishing up one of the projects I have been working on the most in the past year and a half. I made a list of a few focused and more or less simple experiments that I needed to do and I have been working on those for a few weeks now. I always work better - I am sure most people do - when I have a definite plan and I have also been feeling really productive even when I was running into some technical difficulties. In general, things have been going a bit slower because I haven't had the extra time to put in during the weekends, mostly because of fencing, and the brief vacation in Miami. However, I felt that it was making me more productive on the days I was actually in lab. Also, while refereeing is pretty hard work, it's completely different from science, and I felt that taking those couple of days off every week has been good for me.
I think most problems in lab right now are a direct consequence of the financial crisis. I didn't think that it would have such a profound effect on my every day life: after all, I am a poor graduate student who has absolutely nothing to lose financially, not having any money. Well, I was wrong. A couple of weeks ago, at lab meeting, my mentor announced that 2 post docs will have to be let go by the summer because of downsizing in general and more directly because one of our big grants that was up for renewal at the NIH - National Institutes of Health - got rejected. We're talking about million dollar grants for 5 years that fund several researchers' salaries as well as supplies and all kinds of related costs. Having lost one of those big grants was a big hit to the lab. In general, it'd been very difficult getting money from the NIH due to budget cuts during the Bush administration and I know of several labs that had shut down over the past few years due to lack of funding. I didn't imagine we would be affected this soon. The lab publishes very well and in very good journals and that counts for a lot when it comes to getting grants. I can't even imagine what other, smaller labs are going through at this time.
Thankfully, the grad school takes care of us unfortunate souls - I guess in this case, rather fortunate to be a student - and I also have my own fellowship that covers most of my stipend so I cost almost nothing to my boss.
To cut to the chase, again today at lab meeting, my mentor was talking about how to save money and how we're going to have to start prioritizing experiments - which I think really means that some people and some projects have priority - and making a lot of the supplies, that we are ordering from companies now, ourselves, which will take a significant amount of time away from the actual research. But all of this I guess is understandable in the face of the crisis.
My mentor must have a real scattered mind: random ideas occur to him, he says, on the subway or at the gym - I can relate at some level - and he has a habit of sending emails to people at those random times - usually on weekends or late nights. He usually puts several people on those emails who all work in the same general area of interest. About 5 people, including myself, got one of these emails a couple of weeks ago, on a late Friday night. He got a new idea about putting a new spin on one of the grant proposals he'd been working on with the hope of having a better chance of getting the grant if he adds this extra little bit to it. Of course, this extra little bit in his mind - probably no more than a paragraph in the proposal - is weeks if not months of hard work in the lab for us. He mentioned something in this email about some samples I had collected throughout the past year or so from a bunch of mice. I was testing these samples for a variety of genes I am interested in for my project. Now he is really interested in these particular mice in terms of another set of genes, not directly related to my project. He wasn't clear about what he wanted me or the other people on this email to do. I asked the postdoc who's project this really pertained to and she said that she wasn't sure either and that I should just do it whenever I had some time.
I had been totally swamped in the past 2 weeks, and so I just started thinking about these samples again. I asked one of our techs to locate some of them for me in the mess that is our freezer and he immediately assumed that I was testing the samples right now, and he told our boss sometime earlier in the week. So when I went to our usual weekly one-on-one meeting today, he was looking forward to hearing about these results, which of course, I didn't have. Instead, I had data from 4 other experiments I had crammed in the past 2 weeks, which we had discussed in our last meeting 2 weeks ago. After I showed him some of these data, he said, "Why have you been doing these experiments? I don't understand." WHAT??? Apparently, he really wanted me to go back to my old samples and do what he had mentioned in his email. This, though, he did not tell me. I tried to explain to him why I did what I did in the past 2 weeks, but he didn't really care.
All right, I understand that this is tough times with the grants and financial issues, but really, it's a little too much to expect people to read his mind and interpret his sporadic and random emails and pseudo-requests. Besides, none of this has much to do with the project I am supposed to be tying up, which he wants to publish in the near future - or so he had told me 2 weeks ago.
So here I am, rummaging through our freezers looking for boxes buried deep, and preparing them for a technique called PCR, which involves pipetting small volumes of these DNA's into 96 tiny wells on a plate, which looks like this,
and then doing this over and over again until my thumb aches and I have tested all of my mentor's 5 favorite genes on all my 80 samples, all in triplicates! It's gonna be a long night...
No comments:
Post a Comment