Revolution

I predict that within the next 10 years there is going to be a scientific revolution. And it's going to happen online.

Hear me out--(This is sort of like the time that I told my the dean of the med school that I thought that social media and online presence is going to start becoming an issue for faculty seeking tenure and grants. He may or may not now think I am a teenage moron, but I still go out of my way to say hi when I see him on campus.)

But here's the thing. Me, early-20's, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and all of my peers are online all the time.

And, as much as anyone would hate to admit, we're the future of science. Logic would follow then, that you would want to reach out to us. Grab our attention. Mold us into images of yourself.

I'm starting to look at grad schools and while that whole subject is deserving of a post of itself, here's what's really frustrating.

A lot of PIs don't update their websites regularly, and that's a problem. Sure I can find someone's most recent publications through PubMed, but what if I can't get to them because of access issues? (I know--this can also be turned into more of an open access discussion too.) One of the nicest lab's I've looked at, the PI had a list of publications and some of them had an asterisk at the beginning of certain citations, indicating that this paper had come from a graduate student in the lab. This is something that I think people need to, if they don't already, take note of. There are probably few better indicators of a productive and plentiful learning environment than if a lab is producing paper. Notice I said a lab. I've started to become wary of PIs that tend towards review papers, or ones where they're part of a larger collaboration and it's only them, and no one else from their lab. (Gosh I want to say something really mean here OHOKAY I'll just say it, those who can't do, review!!) (I'm also acutely aware of the fact that I know absolutely nothing about anything and may all instances of snark and judgment act karmicly against me in later life--there, I said it for you.)

It's all about the internet.

I'm painfully aware that I'm part of this generation-can't-I-just-look-it-up-on-wikipedia, and if I hear one more disgruntled post-doc telling me that when they were in grad school they had to walk to the library and request a journal, I'll write a blog entry about it, but this is the way it is. Let's not fight it, embrace it. It's so hard to grasp for people that didn't grow up with the internet that you can build substantial relationships and communities online. Yeah, the usual arguments of "impersonal" still exist, but more and more those arguments are vastly outweighed by the enormity of good things that come from the internet.

Take my most recent example of photobleaching. I photobleached my cells. I had one meaningful face to face conversation with someone about the fact that I was probably photobleaching my cells, and then I was depressed and went home and went on facebook, and this happened:

Edited for brevity, and in short, I got tons of comments from real live people, all with real live experiences, with their own labs or microscopy facilities. I learned about 'pseudo-live view' and about different types of fluorophores, all on facebook. facebook!. 

And here's the thing. I do know Wendy and Omar from real life, and hey uncle Ray!, and if I saw them at the grocery store I would definitely stop and say hello (if of course we weren't in different states), but my itty-bitty-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things-although-seemed-like-a-very-huge-deal-at-the-time photobleaching problem was not big enough that I would have thought to pick up the phone and call any one of these vastly-overqualified-to-be-answering-my-questions people. But facebook allowed them to do just that, on their own time. 

The internet is this amazingly powerful beast that I honestly predict is going to allow a lot more people's voices to be heard, scientifically and otherwise. Of course, we're going to have to learn to filter, but you know, you have to filter in real life too, it's not like the crazies only exist on the internet. 

But the advantages: an open access revolution, more transparency about authors on publications, PIs interacting with peers and students online and in real time? Scientific discourse over twitter? Tenure-seeking faculty might poo-poo this now, and half the people in my lab think I'm crazy for even having a blog, but these are really powerful things that the people in academia are going to start to realize are really important to my generation of budding scientists. 

We're young, we're excited. We like to think we're cool, but that's only because we think that being nerdy is cool. If academia can start having real online conversations outside of an ivory tower that I can watch, learn, and maybe even be a part of, well, you'll have my endorsement. Even if that endorsement is in the form of a tweet. And then a grad school application. 

Oh, and update your damn lab webpages more often. 

ETA: in retrospect, everyone in my lab thinks I'm crazy for having blog.

Adventures in photobleaching

There are a couple of ways to act when you make a Really Big Mistake in lab.

1) Correct it, tell no one, and pretend it didn't happen. This method is preferable when you do something small and stupid. Like one time some sequencing results didn't look very good. And I realized that I had completely diluted my primers to the wrong concentration. Like, mMols off. This would be an okay mistake not to tell anyone else around you in lab, just as long as you fix it and make sure never to make that mistake again. (And also that no one else will be using your primer stocks.) (This also isn't exactly how it went for me because it took someone else pointing out that I had made a blaring error in my primer dilutions, so everyone knew about it in the end.)

2) Admit you made a mistake, ask for help, correct it, and then pretend it didn't happen (but never make that mistake again.) This method is especially useful when something big is going wrong, and you can't figure it out on your own. This is when you just have to suck it up that you'll look like an idiot for about 5 minutes while someone is explaining what you did wrong (or as I prefer to see it, what you weren't doing right!) but in the end it's all for the best because a) hopefully you learned something, and b) you won't make that mistake ever again. And it's a win-win! Because when you come across another poor soul who's made the same mistake as you, after you help them figure out what they weren't doing right, you can choose whether or not to admit to them that you too made the same mistake.

3) Ask for help, figure out that you were a complete idiot about something, and laugh uproariously about it. This might include just yelling PHOTOBLEACHING every 20 minutes or so for the rest of the evening after you figured your problem out. 


So this may or may not have happened to me today.


I will start off by saying that my lab does not do fluorescent microscopy. No one in my lab has fluorescent microscopy experience, and so we're looking at some fluorescence in our cells (just to check transfection levels) and using a scope in a lab downstairs that we've never really been formally trained on. The one caveat is that I come from a family of fluorescent microscopists--so this what follows is sort of unforgivable.

Here is what happened.

We walked downstairs with our little flasks of cells, and we put them under the microscope. We turned on the light, turned on the laser, made sure we were on the right filter, opened the shutter, and looked at our cells.

"Ooh!" My post doc says, "Pretty glowing cells!"

"Awesome," I say, "Let's put it on the screen!"

(I am clearly paraphrasing here.)

So, with the fluorescence still on, we manually switch the scope from eye to camera, we press "Live", and we wait for the picture to come up on the screen.

(If you're keeping tally of time blasting cells with fluorescence, we're now clocking in at 2 minutes.)

It takes another few seconds for the image to come up, then of course we have to refocus slightly for the image to be in focus for the camera.

Then we take a picture.

(Fluorescence still open, in case you were wondering.)

Then we hmmm and hawww and write down the settings we used so we use the same settings for all the other flasks.

Then we go get another flask.

I will skip the rest of the nitty gritty details, because the short of it is, we kept looking from eye to camera and back again, and since apparently neither my post doc nor I were feeling incredibly competent today, we kept forgetting to manually change the scope from eye to camera, all with the fluorescence on. 


And then we wondered aloud to each other, "Why are all of these flasks getting progressively dimmer?" And of course, being scientists, we say, let's get that first flask out that was really bright!

So we get the first flask out and everything is really dim.

In retrospect:

It didn't even occur to me that this was the problem until later I was talking about what I was doing to someone who actually knows how to do microscopy, and they were just like, You focused with the fluorescence ON?? My post doc still isn't quite convinced that this is the problem, but I think she just doesn't want to admit that it's the problem because it makes us look like complete idiots.

And me?

I am perfectly ok with looking like a complete idiot. Because, you know, how else would you learn? (By actually listening carefully to what people tell you to do so you never make mistakes? Where's the fun in that?)

And for the rest of the evening, yes, I have yelled PHOTOBLEACHING aloud at odd intervals. Because, arrrghhh.....PHOTOBLEACHING!