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.