There is nothing like coming back from an extended holiday to force you to take stock of your various research projects. This morning, after braving the iced pavements, flurries of snow and Underground carriages full of bewildered commuters who seemed, like me, to have lost their killer instinct after a few weeks of relaxation, I opened up my lab notebook and tried to remember just what it was that I had been so excited about on my last day. After a few minutes of desultory page-flipping, it was clear that I needed to collect my diffuse thoughts into one big List.
For me, list-making is a ritual event, but there is a definite activation energy barrier involved in getting down to it. So after morning coffee, I found myself engaging in what psychologists call redirected response behaviors. Like all the other cell biologists in the building, I made the new year’s pilgrimage to the kitchen and signed out a fresh bottle of medium, which I supplemented and filtered with great fanfare (after scraping a holiday’s worth of algae out of the suction traps). I thawed out cells. I cleaned off my bench and ethanol-wiped December’s orders from the white board. I chatted to people in the corridors who wanted to congratulate me about the effusive review)01571-7 of my novel in Cell. I took tea in the common room and listened to Martin Raff, our beloved professor emeritus, hold court in his characteristic Alan Alda drawl about the psychological motives of Bernard Madoff.
Finally, I could put it off no longer. The notebook was reopened and I doggedly wrote down headers for every minor project currently ongoing – about ten in all – before trying to scribble out exactly what remained to be done for each one. Although I’ve got plenty of loose ends to tie up for a manuscript, it was difficult to keep my mind from compassing in on the new exciting result. Soon I found myself faced with the need to shop: after a certain point, you need to know where your protein is expressed and what other protein partners it is flirting with. Although I am classed as a post-doc as far as the university is concerned, I am actually a Principal Investigator in the eyes of the Wellcome Trust, who have allotted me a generous consumables budget. The time had come: after a year of caution and frugality, I suddenly realized that the answer would come a lot more quickly if I finally got down to spending it.
Dear Reader, I did splash out on that antibody. What’s more, it felt damned good, and tomorrow, I sense that I will be spending even more.
Girls and shopping. The age-old story.
Oh, the adrenalin.
I hate shopping for antibodies — the stakes are so high. How do you know if it will actually work? Can you assume that a confirmed application for immunohistochemistry will work for immunofluorescence? Will the company’s Western results be reproducible in your own lab? I tried to Google Scholar my shortlist and not a sausage; people are so lax about reporting reagents in their materials and methods. Abcam was doing something interesting: giving people points towards future purchase if they’d review previous products they’d tried. But generally, it’s a crapshoot.
I do like Abcam antibodies. You’re right, it’s a lottery. We use so few it’s not actually worth reporting back for ‘points’, but yesh, somehting needs to be done.
We must take to the streets! We must fight! We must….
oh, wrong film.
There is probably a website somewhere where scientists swap this sort of information, but I never get invited to those sorts of parties.
{whispers} Web 2.0. I have a market report for you…
to have lost their killer instinct after a few weeks of relaxation
A few weeks?
Some people don’t know when they’re well off.
Two words: statutory rights. As in, they’re in my contract so I’m using as many as humanly possible. It makes me irate when people feel guilty about taking well-deserved annual leave.
What happened to your poetry?
Jenny Rohn saves us singlehandedly from the credit crunch!
Hurrah!
You will be buying your reagents from high street retailers, won’t you? 🙂
Abcam! I have been accused of only wanting their antibodies because they gave me cool sheep-swag at a lab supplies demo thing (sheep-shaped post-it notes!), but then I showed people my blots and confocal images (and post-it notes) and they were convinced. They’re also helpful, which is nice.
I never did send in my blots and reviews, though, because we couldn’t collect the points (we got our reagents through several layers of bureaucracy and the hospital would get my hard-earned points.)
(Incidentally, I just tried to pronounce “sheep-shaped” and failed. It comes out as “sheepchape” or even as “chipchip” – which is a totally different kind of thing.)
I’ve got a squidgy cow from Thermo Scientific which is just as good, I feel.
Eva, if it’s any consolation, although I can pronounce ‘Scheveningen’, I can’t do words like ‘huis’ and ‘muis’ properly without placing my palms on the sides of my mouth and pressing inward. Everyone used to laugh at me in the lab in Leiden. Or as they used to say, in English, “on the lab”.
(And send in your reviews anyway! Think of the poor consumer!)
I considered my submissions of reviews to Abcam part bribe and part community service – much like feedback to Affymetrix or Agilent or any other company. If you like to read other people’s reviews in the absence of detailed methods from authors in papers – and I do, when choosing expensive reagents – it’s just civic-minded to give back a little as well. It does not really take much time at all. It’s especially useful for a negative result, of course.
I don’t know about sheep
shagswag but I did have some penguins once. Remind me to find the webpage I made…There really ought to be a central place. There probably are places that I just don’t know about.
http://www.scienceboard.net has reviews and stuff, I should maybe have a word (I know the chap who runs it) and see if we can do something. plots
I worked for abcam briefly, doing data sheets. God it was boring. They make a lot of money, just by diluting and repackaging commercially available proteins. But then, perhaps that’s how lots of reagent catalogues work?
Two words: statutory rights … What happened to your poetry?
Two words: free verse.
Tom, did you have access to free sheep swag?
“I’ve got a squidgy cow from Thermo Scientific which is just as good, I feel.”
It’s possibly the same cow I have from Gibco, which advertises its own baby’s blood (It says “Buy Canadian FBS!” on the side, and it’s my favourite lab toy ever just for being so cute and macabre at the same time.) I actually have a blog post lined up about the cow! I took a few pictures of it months ago, but haven’t gotten around to writing about it until now. And this doesn’t count.
I look forward to the Tale of the Squidgy Cannibalistic Bovine with great anticipation.
It turns out I had a lot of pictures of my cow
I forgot I took it on a trip a few years ago (as one does).
Ah ha! Found my penguins. I’ll… write about them.
I also have a squishy penguin. It came with a wine bottle. I gave it to the cat.
The wine bottle or the penguin?
Yes.
I’ve seen squishy polar bears too; I think they come from the same company as do the squishy penguins. Promega, maybe?
Our university central stores has fuzzy, fluorescent green chimpanzee clingies, with magnets in the feet and hands. Not sure what you have to buy, to get one, but I’ll find out.
The penguins were Thermo.
Thanks Eva. That clears everything up.
Just like mercury.
Squishy
Our university central stores has fuzzy, fluorescent green chimpanzee clingies, with magnets in the feet and hands.
If you collected an infinite number of them, could they recreate the complete works of Maniatis?