In the past few months I have had to ask for help from complete strangers, relying on their good will and accepting them at their word. Generally, this is not in my nature. Of the many reagents I have asked for and received from other labs, some have been a boon while others a bust. The problem is that more often than not, I have no way of verifying whether what I requested was indeed what I received. This is where trusting comes in.

A mislabeled tube or wrong vial grabbed is not a big deal to the sender but makes a world of difference to me, when I can’t for the life of me figure out why nothing is working the way it is meant to. The members of my dissertation committee could not stress enough that I need to sequence the plasmids I received in order to verify that they are what I hope them to be. Sequencing is a fast (and sometimes easy) approach to checking plasmids, but what about viral vectors and cell lines? Those take a lot longer to verify, and some cannot be verified at all if the lab is not equipped to carry out the necessary controls.

Most of the time, my trust in fellow researchers is warranted and rewarded. Occasionally, however, things get a little bumpy. One particular plasmid I received proved itself unsequenceable, while another produced precisely the opposite of the intended effect. I have enough faith in humanity (for better or for worse) to believe that there is no one malicious enough to knowingly send an incorrect or faulty reagent. I do, however, believe that people make mistakes… as I do. Frequently. As much as I would like to blindly accept kind gifts of reagents with no questions asked, I can’t help but look the gift horse in the mouth as thoroughly as I can. I am protecting myself and my work from other people’s errors. I only hope that future researchers using the reagents I have generated (should they ever be of any use to anyone) are not let down, as I have occasionally been.