It’s crunch time.
I’ve cleared my desk for the final assault. No more distractions, no more experiments: I’ve even thrown away all my cell cultures so that they can’t tempt me with their gossamer lamellipodial embraces, with their scandalously promiscuous ability to take up inhibitory RNAs. Nine months after agreeing to “just quickly make three constructs” for someone else’s project, I have submitted what is hopefully the final revision of a paper that more or less ended up entirely in my lap and went three rounds with various journals. Nine months: rather symbolic, isn’t it? Those three constructs turned into several figures once the first author moved on, and my name moved up on the author list, and eventually I was responsible for all the myriad minutiae that birthing multiple versions of a paper requires.
Was it worth it for a second authorship? I honestly have no idea. But it felt good, after having addressed the lion’s share of the major revisions, to press that beautiful blue button marked “submit”.
Did you press the button yet? my boss emailed me, midway through the afternoon.
Not only did I press the button, I emailed back, but I stuck a wooden stake in it for good measure.
My own projects have lain fallow for several months now as I wrangled this paper to what I hope will be its final resting place. But now, things are going to change around here. No more Dr Nice Girl. Allow me to introduce you to my new Universe:
Until further notice, I will be eating, drinking and sleeping with my final gene list. We’ve done the screen in duplicate now, and my colleague and I have scored all the data visually, and now I’m in the process of arriving at a Venn decision about the entire dataset: does this gene affect cell morphology robustly, reproducibly and with the majority of four non-overlapping inhibitory reagents, or does it not? And if so, each visual phenotype must be described by a controlled vocabulary of over fifty descriptions.
There is a shocking amount of noise in our system. We knock down every gene with four different siRNA oligos, but many of these oligos have different effects even though they are meant to target the same gene – although thankfully, this is entirely reproducible. I am tracking these problem cases down now, eliminating the genes whose oligos just can’t agree on an overarching morphological effect. I am being ruthless, and it feels good. My longlist was over 300 genes, and the boss won’t be happy with more than 100. So out they go, left and right. I don’t care how beautiful the phenotypes are: star-shaped, sharply triangular, wispy and neuronal: if the oligos don’t agree, it’s sayonara.
I can’t stare at these images and enter their data into spreadsheets all day, though: I’d go mad. And it’s not just mentally difficult: my neck and head eventually start to ache, and the chronic repetitive strain condition in both of my hands is nearing critical. So for light relief, I get ahead on much-loathed chores, like tidying the tissue culture room or consolidating and alphabetizing the lab’s chaotic individual stashes of restriction enzymes. When people ask for my help I leap to their aid desperately: yes, I’d love to watch you develop your ECL on the new ImageQuant machine, or to share my recipe for the perfect SDS-PAGE running buffer! If you’re too busy, I’ll even make it for you!
I’d forgotten how lovely and cold Tris/Glycine running buffer goes when you prepare it, the reaction sucking the heat out of water until the entire bottle is frigid. At times like this, when research gets far too abstract, it’s a relief to experience the mysterious laws of nature up close and personal, reminding me of why I’m here in the first place.
A. Good luck with the submitted paper (just hit ‘submit’ myself about 5 min ago – always a slightly nervy moment).
B. Good luck with the cellular cull!
C. Glad to hear you still thrill to the wonders of the 2nd law of thermodynamics!
Thanks, Stephen. It was two referees for and one against, and we did a lot of new experiments, so I have a good feeling about it. I just wish it were my own paper, for all the effort I’ve put into it.
It’s not just thermodynamics. What’s the Law that says that when you pour your spent chemiluminescent reaction into the bleach bucket when cleaning up your bench from a Western blot, it goes fluorescent green? I like that one too.
One of the great wonders of early school years Chemistry, solutions getting hotter or colder when solutes are dissolved in them. Well cool.
I’ve given up handling “paper-wrangling” (which oddly used to be one of the things I was best at in research), so now I just get to smile sympathetically when my friends and collaborators are having birthing pangs.
And good luck, of course…
How did you swing that, Elliott? First-born child?
I prefer endothermic reactions – they seem a lot more mysterious, reminding me that the universe is cooling, dying, that’s we’re all heading for oblivion –
no, that’s just the aftermath of the paper talking.
What’s the Law that says that when you pour your spent chemiluminescent reaction into the bleach bucket when cleaning up your bench from a Western blot, it goes fluorescent green?
Um, sounds like the law of radioactive contamination…
Run!
You crystallographers are missing out on all the fun.
If a crystallographer thinks that chemiluminescence has anything to do with radioactivity, then Imperial has dropped off a bit since I were a blotter.
Don’t you worry – we get plenty of radiation! It’s just that it’s focused down into a hair-like beam of immense power. In a lead-lined room. That’s locked so we can’t get it. We sit outside looking at computers all night…
Oh, I see what you mean.
‘Light of a thousand suns’ I think is the phrase you’re looking for…
My own projects have lain fallow for several months now as I wrangled this paper to what I hope will be its final resting place. […] So for light relief, I get ahead on much-loathed chores […]. When people ask for my help I leap to their aid desperately
Are you spying on me, or something? How do you describe my life quite so precisely, otherwise? (Aside from the good cellular uptake of your RNAi; we can’t get our cells or our chicken embryos to swallow the DNA we want to make them ingest. And I turned down not one but two requests to edit colleagues’ papers for English language and other errors; there is some procrastination to which I will no longer stoop.)
Hey, you even make proper posts to your blog and all. I am highly impressed. It looks like you are making progress on all fronts. Well done.
No distractions? Yeah, right… See you at Eastercon…
Heather, your post reminds me of how quickly my resolve actually shattered. After I wrote the post, I told myself I would say a firm ‘no’ to any sort of editorial or other chores that my boss might request of me. (The sorts of things that aren’t quick welcome distractions, but actually hard work.) Not five minutes later he came into the office and asked me to help peer-review a manuscripts — and I caved.
“they can’t tempt me with their gossamer lamellipodial embraces, with their scandalously promiscuous ability to take up inhibitory RNAs”
Beautiful! And it sounds like you work on something more visually interesting than I did (this a rod-shaped bacterium. There’s another 109 ones. Oh look, a slightly rounded rod!).
I actually have submitted a paper “recently” as well, but I haven’t heard from the Editor so far, and I am too chicken to email her in case she replies along the lines of “oh I forgot to tell you, it’s rejected”! Instead I fool myself in believing there is a raging argument between referees about the ground-breakingness of the paper (there isn’t any).
About doing free “freelance” editing, I have done a bit for my dad, whose English is quite atrocious! I ended doing a “quick” clean up of one of his papers, that took us only until 2 a.m. to finish and submit… Holidays, don’t you love ’em!
Do Eskimo microbiologists have a thousand words for ‘rod’?
I think emailing an editor is a good idea. It often can prompt the journal to prod the referees again, if they’re late. It certainly does no harm.
Microbiologists actually tend to use “standard” language to describe bacteria and colonies, see Bergey’s manual (all good libraries) or the IJSEM website. You get stuff like “wrinkly, with an undefined border”, which could perfectly apply to an old doily.
Thanks for the advice, I’ll give them a prod when I come back from a little Belgian escapade next week (hmmmm chocolate!).
I was just teasing, Nicolas – I actually have a PhD in Microbiology, for all that’s worth. Used to have to teach Micro lab to undergraduates, the highlight of which was diagnosing one of my own student’s cases of strep throat.
The Sheep’s Blood Agar was decimated.
I didn’t realise you were a fellow bug-botherer Jenny, sorry if I came over all professory!
My Micro lab teaching highlight (apart from entertaining incidents with ethanol and red-hot inoculating loops) was student arguing whether they really needed to learn how to use logarithms. Yes you do!!!!
Did they really?
Haven’t used a logarithm, ever, in my entire lab career.
But then, I can’t even get Excel to add up numbers, so that tells you where I am, maths wise.
Hm. My problem is getting Excel to not add up numbers, when all I want is a nice orderly list.
Good luck with the manuscript… evil things. I am expecting one of mine to come back from somebody or other with a comment to the effect of “chop it by 50%, it’s too wordy”. Argh.
I quite like chopping – writing freelance science news is a good way to hone your brevity skills. But chopping figures is another matter – especially with journals that limit your supplementary data to a specific megabyte limit (boo, and the general hurling of rotten Brassica).