The idea-for-an-experiment generator

Yesterday, Scicurious wrote a very honest post about how she thought that she didn't have enough ideas to write grants and stay in academic science. This is something that I hear around me every now and then (mostly from women). I have given this some thought before: how brilliant do your ideas have to be? Because I think that is what people mean when they say they don't have enough ideas: that they don't have enough brilliant ideas. But honestly, I think that the percentage of brilliant ideas in science is maybe 1-2% of all the science that is done. I think that the bulk of science is to repeat something with a slight modification to come up with something 'new'. For example instead of looking at the dopamine system in behavior A, you now study the opioid system and you have another grant proposal. Of course nobody admits that this is how they come up with new experiments, but I have a sneaking suspicion that most PIs will have a variation of the machine below in their office somewhere. 

The optogenetics experiment generator: pick your opsin, roll the bingo wheel for brain region A, spin the wheel of fortune for brain region B and roll the dice for your behavior of choice. This generator can be modified for experiments in any field of life science and beyond.

Who pays for your laptop in the lab?

My graduate advisor did not like desktop computers. Ze was under the impression that people don’t really care for their desktop computers and they quickly get filled up with crap and then become slow. The lab only had desktop computers that were designated for things like the qPCR machine. So we all needed to have laptops. I think this is nice, because then you automatically have a computer if you need to work from home. However, my graduate advisor only paid for 150 euros a year (~$180) towards the purchase of a laptop (and mind you, this came from someone who hirself used laptops like lab notebooks: when one was full, ze would just buy a new one). Considering a graduate project in my homecountry takes 4 years that meant that you got $720 for a laptop (unless you worked on your own laptop for a year, and only then needed a new one, then you only got 3 years worth of money…). Given that I worked in a lab where we did a lot of “big data” type stuff, it basically meant that if you wanted to be able to still process data in your fourth year, you needed a laptop that was more expensive then what our graduate advisor would pay for.

Currently, I am in a lab where most people have desktop computers but some (including me) prefer get a laptop instead. I like to have all my stuff in one place and be able to work from more than one spot without having to remember to put my files on a hard drive or in a dropbox. My current PI paid for my laptop, and for some (but not all) people’s laptops in the lab. The rule was that if you got your own fellowship, you could get a laptop (however, as you might know I did not get a fellowship, but did get a laptop). But after nearly 3.5 years of daily use (to work in the lab and at home but also to watch TV at home) my laptop broke. I don’t have a fellowship yet to pay my own new laptop, and since I will only be in the lab for 5 more months, I decided that I didn’t want to ask my PI for another new laptop. So now I am working on a laptop that I paid for myself. And I know of more labs where people are required to bring a laptop to do work, but have to pay for those themselves. And I understand money is tight and all that, but if lab equipment and consumables are so much more costly than computers, why don’t some PIs equip the people in their lab with decent computers?

On motivation in the lab

Without going into too much detail about the state that our lab is in due to the economy and sequestration, there is a great lack in motivation in some people in the lab. This is not new, as I have written about this before, but it does make me wonder what PIs do to motivate people in their lab. How do you make sure people stay enthusiastic about doing experiments and if they’re not, how do you try to help them? Personally, I find that it helps to associate with people that are working hard and are trying to be productive rather than to hang with the people that seem to have given up hope to get experiments done and papers written. But other than that, when I am in the position to mentor someone (like an undergrad, summer student or tech) I find it hard to find a balance between giving someone the freedom to schedule their experiments and plan their time for them for example. How do you go about motivating the people in your lab? Or do you feel that’s not necessary as people should come with enough intrinsic motivation?

The importance of side projects

I’m in my fourth year as a post-doc (well technically I’mnot a post-doc anymore, but it does feel that way) and yesterday I submitted my first first-author paper as a post-doc. Is that a little late? Perhaps, but in my defense: I had to learn slice electrophysiology first, and then I got sucked into a bunch of collaborative projects (one can argue about how smart that is, but it did leave me with 2 published (2^nd author) papers and at least one (shared 1^st author) paper in the making). 

What I want to tell you about is how this paper came into the world. It started when the collaborator I consulted about my main project asked me to do a control experiment. That control experiment showed something interesting to me, and even though the collaborator was not super interested, I pursued this and got a bunch of rather interesting data. Then I got an invitation to submit a paper to an okay, but not very high-impact journal. I figured that this could be a fast and relatively easy way to get a first author paper out, where I could show the world the things that I can do. So I did some slice electrophysiology to make my side project a bit more interesting and when I sent this to the collaborator he was pretty enthusiastic about it. Without really realizing it (because, shame on me, I wasn’t aware enough of the literature) I had discovered something new and interesting! So something tiny, that no one was really enthusiastic about at first, turned into something cool!

And my main project? That turned out to be way too ambitious and technically challenging (read: impossible). And thanks to my mentor’s “hands-off” mentoring style and my own stubbornness, I realized this only this year… It was a good lesson in project design, that I hope I will be able to use in the future.

How science is like classical ballet

When you watch classical ballet, you see dancers that appear to be flying through the air. You see women who seem to weight only 2 pounds, as the men can easily lift them up. You don’t see sweat, you don’t see hard work, and you don’t see feet that hurt. If you’ve ever attempted doing classical ballet, you know that it takes every inch of your strength to jump up, and then it probably looks only 1% as gracious as on stage.

I often think about this when I see someone present their science. It looks like they happily walked into the lab, thought of their hypothesis first, then did one Western blot, one immuno staining, and one behavioral experiment, and took the data to make beautiful figures. When I was an undergrad I honestly thought that the experiments you saw in a paper were the only experiments that people had done. Ha! Was I wrong! In reality, scientists sometimes just play around in the lab, do some experiments, and then think about how to streamline it into a paper. And my first experience in the lab was 6 months of doing a zillion Western blots, just to get a publication quality figure, which we then called a “representative” example. 

Now these processes are for everyone to be seen on twitter under the hashtag #overlyhonestmethods, created by @dr_leigh. It’s awesome!

The ongoing debate about the control group

So we’re almost ready to submit a manuscript but there’s one more experiment that needs to be done. It will be the experiment many people asked for when I presented my poster at a meeting, so if it shows what we hope it does it will be a crucial figure in the paper. This was the discussion I had yesterday with my PI:

PI:”I don’t think we need to run the control animals, just the [disease model] group and the treatment group.”

Me:”I think it’s wrong not to include the control group, because people will want to see if the [disease model] group performs worse than the controls”.

PI:”We have shown that multiple times, I don’t need to see the control group again”.

Me:”I think reviewers will disagree”.

--rinse and repeat, have this discussion five times over, PI still not convinced, but said that we would do the control group “but only because I wanted to”. Fine.

Today: PI comes into our office and says:”If we do the control group I don’t want you to include it in the paper or do stats on it because then we’ll have to increase our n.”

Me: repeat all arguments from yesterday, now with steam coming out of my ears because I don’t understand how we shouldn’t include the control group. PI doesn’t want to give in and makes me feel like we only run the group because I want to.

Me:”I think that’s wrong. Also, I think people would want to compare to what extend the treatment improves the behavior in the [disease model] group.”

PI:”Oh okay, I guess that makes some sense. You’re lucky I’m so easy to convince.”

I almost gave in because it made me so angry I couldn't convince my PI but I'm glad I stuck to what I thought was right. But this was almost another post about crying in science.