A good summer student, it is said, will only set you back a month.<\/p>\n
\nI was reminded of this rather pessimistic piece of advice when I commented on Jenny’s post about dark arts<\/a> this afternoon. <\/p>\n \nWhen I was at the LMB in Cambridge, we used to take on summer students if they came with a recommendation, if they could demonstrate at least that they knew one end of a Gilson from the other, and if some brainless monkey work<\/a> needed doing. It turned out, one summer, that I needed a shedload of protein growing so that I could solve its structure by NMR. We got a summer student, he spent all summer in the cold room, and we got enough of the 7 kDa fragment to solve it by natural abundance ( 1<\/sup> H) methods. This work was published in the then Nature Structural Biology<\/em> and we were very happy, and even happier when we realized that it was a complete work of fiction and published the correct<\/em> answer to our question a little bit later<\/a>)01474-2.<\/p>\n \ncough<\/em><\/p>\n \nAnyway, this was a good experience with summer students, and so we tried again a a couple of years later: again when I needed a lot of protein for NMR (although for this one<\/a> we’d managed to get the labelling working).<\/p>\n \nOh boy.<\/p>\n \nNow, to be scrupulously fair, it was the fault of the lab manager, who taught the chap how to grow up bacteria for protein preps. For ages (except for a couple of aberrant years when a \nSo after I trialled the method, and left the student with complete instructions under the care of the lab manager, we got one successful prep. But nothing afterwards — we weren’t getting any protein at all, and wasting the horribly expensive 13<\/sup> C and 15<\/sup> N while we were at it. One day I watched this chap set up a prep.<\/p>\n \nHe went to the freezer, took a frozen bacterial pellet, scraped some gunk from the top of the pellet with a pipette tip and dropped the tip into fresh media for his grow up.<\/p>\n \nAfter I had peeled myself off the ceiling, I asked him why.<\/p>\n \n“Zat ees how showed me,” he said.<\/p>\n \nOne culpable homicide later, we got back into business and made the protein and I solved the structure and I blogged<\/a> about it.<\/p>\n \nThis summer student was not completely harmless though. Before all this, I was showing him how to do certain things.<\/p>\n \n“Oh,” he used to say, “zat ees not how vee did eet in Germany!”<\/p>\n \nEveryone in the lab used to get this. It wore a tad thin after a while.<\/p>\n \nOne fine day, I was drying a protein gel between cellophane sheets.<\/p>\n \n“Oh,” he said, “zat ees not how vee did eet in Germany!”<\/p>\n \nI am sorry to report that I very nearly lost my temper. I turned around, poked him in the chest (he was bigger than me) and said,<\/p>\n \n“Well sunshine, you’re not in Germany now; you’re in the Army, and we do it my<\/em> way.”<\/p>\n \nHe was quiet after that.<\/p>\n \nFor the entire summer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A good summer student, it is said, will only set you back a month. I was reminded of this rather pessimistic piece of advice when I commented on Jenny’s post about dark arts this afternoon. When I was at the … Continue reading quitter<\/del> visiting post-doc from Australia got everyone except me using IPTG and GST-tags) we’d been doing transformations, taking single colonies into a litre of 2XTY in a 2 l flask, shaking overnight at 34°C and letting the little beauties auto-induce protein expression (long before Bill Studier published his impressive analysis of auto-induction, by the way. We just didn’t think it was worth publishing, which just goes to show, innit?)<\/p>\n