Apparently, a "laboratory assistant" at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, in an effort to reverse her "bad karma", pulled $500,000 worth of protein crystal samples from cryogenic storage and deliberately left them out on a counter to thaw over the weekend, destroying the samples. She even left a couple of smiley face containing notes.
Faced with some extended bad lab mojo I have resorted to discarding previously made starting materials and beginning again from scratch, but never anything that would be difficult to replace. This actually worked for me a month or so ago after I wasted six weeks trying to get some material, made by one of my students, to work in my current chemistry.
I once got into a argument with my postdoc mentor over a project I had worked on for a year. He was calling me to task over my inability to make the chemistry happen even though he was sure it would work. I was the sixth person on the project which he had once described as "consuming" the first five. As the comments about my future got more pointed I angrily observed that in science when a hypothesis "consumes" five people one must ask if the problem is the hypothesis or the people. I walked out and went back to the lab and back to work. After a month of being ignored I was summoned to my mentor's office and given a new project. He noted that every other student would have disappeared after our previous meeting for at least a week, yet I was continuing to try new ideas. To which I could only reply that Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying, "I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I have." The new project was finished in short order and resulted in my only postdoc pub.
How we face frustration is one of the telling qualities of developing research scientists. Clearly the SLAC case is an extreme one.
T.S. Hall
Great story about your post-doc mentor. Anybody I know?
ReplyDelete