I should not need to send out e-mails like this:

Several issues have come up in the cell culture room lately that need to be addressed:

• Dirty hoods: The working surface inside of the hood must be sprayed down with 70% ethanol and wiped both *BEFORE* and *AFTER* use.
  • I have noticed that the working surface of one of the hoods has consistently been left dirty with dried media spots and the UV light turned on.  The UV light alone is not sufficient the decontaminate the hood.  Most recently, the surface of the hood actually looked even worse under normal fluorescent light.
  • Bleach left on the metal surfaces of the hood will lead to corrosion.  This is not a reversible process, and the parts are expensive to replace.  Clean spills immediately.
• Open hoods: The sash on the hoods need to be fully closed for our safety once the UV light has been turned on.
  • I want to preserve my vision and also not grow tumors.
• Vacuum traps/waste flasks: Bleach must be added to these flasks to neutralize any organisms within, *especially* before being emptied (down the drain with copious amounts of water).
• Unlabeled PBS & media bottles: If you open a bottle, you are responsible for it.  Unlabeled bottles are effectively a waste of valuable and expensive lab supplies.
  • I do not have confidence in any bottle that has been opened but was not labeled with someone’s initials and dated, and therefore will not use them.  I also cannot tell if anything has been added to the media or not, and again, will not use it.
• Empty serological pipet holders: It is everyone’s responsibility to refill these when the pipets are running low.
  • With the exception of the 1mL and 2mL pipets, an entire bag of pipets will fit in each compartment.  Please don’t just refill with only enough for you to continue working.
• Empty 70% ethanol spray bottles: It is also everyone’s responsibility to refill these.
  • Matt and I have made up many bottles of 70% ethanol, ready to be used to refill the spray bottles.  Please use them.

The cell culture room should be kept as clean and orderly as possible in order to minimize the risk of contamination, and to make cell culture work as fast and efficient as possible.  It is therefore the responsibility of every member of the lab who uses the culture rooms to maintain the space, regardless of rank and position in the lab.

- Daniel

I might not be yet, but maybe someday soon.  It’s now really easy for me to do this, and I can’t figure out if it’s just having had more experience or whether I did some magic to the slides that is making them cooperate with me.  I’ll post some sample images later.  For now, here’s a cell I took a picture of an could have sworn it was 3D on the screen.

Things haven’t been going particularly well for most of the summer, at least with regard to work in the lab, and I had been fairly annoyed by it all. Some of it was likely due to the fact that I was exhausted from moving from Alexandria to Pentagon City gradually and without the melp of movers, but most of it was the direct result of inefficiencies in the lab finally becoming apparent.

Luckily, I wasn’t alone in my frustration, and consequently, had help from my intern in trying to address some of the issues we were having.

Oddly enough, as inappropriate as venting my frustrations about work at work probably is, it helped a lot, not only to sort o my feelings about it and finding a solution, but I think also made me a little less scary and distant to my intern.

Since then, things in the lab have actually been working pretty well — well, at least until today, when I discovered a problem with the protocol I was using. I can still use some of the data that I generated; just not all of it.

What actually prompted me to write this post was actually what happened to me on the way home — a “no passengers” train pulled into the Gallery Place station and turned into the train I needed, saving me the 10 minute wait for the next train home since it was 8:30 pm.

Most of my responsibilities at work in the lab as far as actual scientific work has involved finishing up projects and experiments for papers submitted for publication but never completed by postdoctoral fellows and graduate students before they left the lab.

At this moment, I’m working on two such projects; one of which I am working on with the help of an undergraduate intern who had worked on this same project last year. It would be perfectly fine if the graduate student who had worked on this project as part of their dissertaition had actually made it possible to repeat their experiments, but they didn’t, and I can only describe this behavior as completely selfish douchebaggery.

Proper scientific protocol requires that your work be as well documented as possible such that your results can be independently verified. Independently as in a completely different lab. The expectation of acceptable documentation within the *same* lab, however, extends to the proper documentation and storage of reagents, especially those which are extremely expensive.

This graduate student completely and utterly failed in this. Nothing was documented in enough detail for anyone to exactly dupilicate their experiments, the reagent list was incomplete, and worst of all, very few of the reagents they used could be found. Those that could e found had been improperly stored
And had therefore expired or degraded.

This is beyond frustrating not only because it makes repeating experiments dificult, but because it results in a massive expenditure of time and energy for and experiment that won’t work due to bad reagents. These failed experiments brought my intern to tears today after having worked all of this past weekend and also digging around in the -80 degree freezers last week.

My intern has done an amazing job, and it’s extremely unfair that all of this hard work has been thrown away because this grad student was too lazy to not only properly document their experiments but also properly store their reagents so as not to waste everyone else’s time and significant amount of the lab’s money.

I don’t understand how they got away with it, and I wish there were something I could do about it.