The NIH deadline looms near,

Yet my Research Plan remains unclear.

My Biosketch is mundane,

And my Project Goals cause chest pain,

I’d be better off drinking a beer.

This is about all I have time to post. Blogging, unfortunately, takes a back seat to writing the F32 fellowship, my thesis, two manuscripts and finishing two research projects. Possibly more limericks to come as frustration provides me a muse.

The interviews, follow-up emails and phone calls are all over with. I’ve signed my name on a great number of forms and waivers. I’ve traveled back and forth from the midwest to boston three times (which, by the way, there are no direct flights and some of the planes still had propellers). The end result…I HAVE A POSTDOC!

( source )

I’m really excited about my new lab and the research I’ll be doing. I can’t wait to go out there and start the projects we’ve discussed, they’re exactly what I hoped to go into for my postdoc (host cell-pathogen interactions). I am also looking forward to moving to Boston and city-life. Sure, it’ll be 100x more expensive than living in Central Illinois, there will actually be traffic, crime is higher, and there’s that accent…but I’m still incredibly excited.

Of course, now reality sets in:

1) I need to unravel the new instructions for NRSA individual fellowships and come up with specific aims for my postdoc project by the end of the week, not to mention write the grant proposal in the next month (eek! independence is scary).

2) I have to finish Chapter 1, the introduction, of my thesis by Tuesday, to qualify to go up for my “pre-defense meeting” with my committee. Pass my pre-defense meeting, and start writing the rest of my thesis.

3) And most importantly, successfully finish my three current projects in a timely manner and write up the manuscripts.

Let the craziness begin.

We have been invaded by an enemy no bigger than the tip of your ballpoint pen.
Its numbers are staggering and its ability for annoyance unprecedented.
Shield your eyes! Make sure your doors and windows are closed!
Its the WINGED SOYBEAN APHID

Apparently this is the price we pay in Central Illinois for an absolutely gorgeous summer and fall of mild nights and warm, but not hot, days. Add a late soybean planting season this year and the conditions are optimal for the soybean aphid population to explode (think doubling in population size every 1.2 days).
Walking outside is currently gross. Biking is just masochistic.
Some students have resorted to looking like mass murders just to making moving outside tolerable

The soybean aphid’s predator, the multicolored Asian lady beetle, appears to not be up to the job

Our only chance at salvation…a very early frost.
Until then, I contemplate wearing the lab’s UV face shield for my treks home

Have you ever smelled putrescine?

Looks innocent enough…
But really it smells like a couple of uncooked steaks left in your garbage can for 5 days to rot (I decided a picture would not be necessary here)
I’ve also smelled putrescine’s cousin cadaverine, which is equally noxious

A recent article brought to my attention by the Research Highlights section in Nature describes how researchers have engineered bacteria to produce up to 24.2 grams of putrescine per liter of culture! I can only imagine what it is like to work in that lab. Makes adding BME and DTT to my buffers seem benign.

I recently visited the bookstore to pick up the remaining books of a series a friend had recommended. Since the first two books had been lent to me I wasn’t positive which section to search, but due to the ever-evolving love triangles^n of the main character I assumed the romance section would be the logical place to go. I am always a little embarrassed to be spotted in the romance section of a bookstore for several shallow reasons:

1) Many (but of course not all)of the novels are the sort that I would feel slightly less intelligent after reading. Though maybe I would pick up some new adjectives…

2) At checkout I feel the clerk is judging my taste in novels and is probably wondering why I’m not putting the recent issue of People magazine on the counter too. Equally embarrassing is if the clerk is a romance novel fan and starts gushing to me about the male lead character. For these reasons, I many times buy a book to balance out my romance selection. Something like a James Joyce novel usually does the trick.

3) Romance novels have covers like this:

So it was my great relief to find that the series I was looking for was kept in the sci-fi section. This is probably due to the inordinate number of supernatural creatures that play important roles in the series. But then I wondered, would most people be just as chagrined about being spotted in the sci-fi section as the romance section of the bookstore?

Maybe I don’t mind browsing the sci-fi books because I’m a scientist and have already assumed the mantle of geek.

I don’t mind being thought of as weird but I do seem to be a tad defensive about my perceived intelligence level. Of course the sci-fi genre can be written just as poorly as some romance novels and do not always expand my mind in any constructive manner, but it seems to get a little more respect from the public than romance does. I think we have to thank Hollywood for this. The popularity of movies such as The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Napoleon Dynamite has brought nerds to a public high not seen since The Revenge of the Nerds and several other campy yet lovable 80’s geekish movies.

On NN, do any members feel squeamish about being seen in the sci-fi section or does it goes hand-in-hand with a love of science? And is there any section you find more embarrassing than the romance section?

By far, the worst part of my experience in trying to land a postdoc (see parts I , II and III ) has been scheduling the interviews. I have never been the kind of person that relishes scouring the web for reasonably priced flights, whether it be for vacation or work purposes. I’d rather just not be bothered. The same goes with picking dates to visit, where to stay, how to get from the airport to my lodging, how to get from my lodging to my interview, and so on. I vow, here on the blogosphere, that if some day I have enough money to pay for an assistant when I’m the boss somewhere, I will do it. I actually wondered through all this how much I would have to pay an undergrad to do my scheduling for me, but then decided that I couldn’t trust someone with my credit card info if I could only afford to give them 40 bucks.

What I did enjoy was taking up that old habit of over-studying. And what was I studying? Everything I could get my hands on concerning the labs and PIs for my interviews. Lab websites, write-ups from other institutions or funding agencies, research papers starting from several years back to the present. Of course I had gone over most of this before when I was choosing what labs to apply to for postdoc positions, but now I studied and retained every detail that I could so that I might enter my interviews aware of the progress made and with my ideas about where the research might be heading.

It felt great to study. I happily put on my collection of Beethoven’s Symphonies 1-9, propped my feet up and started reading the piles on my desk that I had organized by PI/lab with each pile sorted in chronological order…I also made up short summary sheets each time I finished a pile to facilitate any quick reviews I might feel I need right before the interviews. The end result? I over-studied…by a long shot. But I think just the act of studying helped calm me down, made me feel more prepared for what lay ahead even if most of it wasn’t neccessary. It’s something I’ve been doing since
the third grade, always with the same result. But why change now?

Well, I’ve already covered the decision to apply to labs in part I and whether or not to include your blog on your cv and my fretting over creating the perfect cover letter in part II. Now its time for me to turn my attention to that important element for grad students who still have a size-able chunk of their research unpublished and still in the works…the research summary.

I have been lucky in that my research has not strayed very far from the goals I first laid out in my advisory meeting and prelim exam. Determine A and B, which influence the directions of objective C, and throw in objective D for a more quest of knowledge sort-of project.

The challenge for writing my research summary is to condense each of my projects into a neat paragraph of 4-6 sentences and come up with a snazzy graphic/table/chart to go with each project.

I think I have succeeded and the architecture of my research summary goes like this:

Paragraph 1
Abstract of my entire graduate career’s research and its potential impact in less than 200 words (it all seems so neat and clear and straightforward when i read only this part…)

Paragraph 2 and Image 1
First project now completed and published with summary chart of results included (this part being a tad redundant)

Paragraph 3 and Image 2
Second project almost completed (manuscript in progress attached to instill hope that it will be finished soon!) and summary chart of results so far

Paragraph 4
Third project (the quest of knowledge one) that I found impossible to really make a figure for

Paragraph 5 and Image 3
Fourth project that if it succeeds will be soooooooo sweet and informative graphic included

Paragraph 6
Summary of what I just said. I’m wondering if this comes off as an insult to the reader, suggesting they can’t remember what they just finished reading?

Hmmm, somehow my research summary turned into your typical high-schooler’s 5-6 paragraph essay…

My PI is quite clear on how often we should write in our notebooks (every day). And everyone in our lab makes an effort to keep up their notebooks and strive for industry-quality entries. Chemists, especially, must make note of the little nuances they might change in a reaction from one day to the next and the same should be true for biologists. I think many of the superstitions graduate students create to have experiments work come back to small changes in their experimental setup that they failed to make note of the first time.

Now maybe some biologists have far superior memories than I, but I have to use my notebook like a notebook and record my observations in real time. I DO NOT see my notebook as a memoir, reflecting upon the experiments I have already performed and maybe only remembering the good ones…

I have a very hard time understanding why some scientists don’t think writing in their notebooks as their experiments are going is important. Of course we all might occasionally fall behind in keeping up a notebook, but usually when this happens a person feels that they should have done a better job at updating the notebook and will try very hard to catch up as soon as possible.

What sparked this post is that in the past several months of going to conferences and other universities I have met a number of grad students and postdocs who freely admit to writing in their notebooks 1-2 times a month or less. The reason I keep getting for this behavior…it takes too much time and they remember what they did anyway. And, apparently, the details aren’t important until the experiment works (i.e. setting up cloning reactions for a year, but only mentioning the time it finally worked).

I am unable to work like that and am constantly going back to my notebooks for details of past setups, but maybe that’s just me. And yes, I’m sure that by the time I graduate I will have hours upon hours of time spent writing in my notebook when others were setting up more experiments. Which way is better may depend a bit on the person, but I do know which way is required if you ever want to patent, license, or have someone else follow-up/repeat your work.

I also wonder what the notebooks of famous scientists of our time looked like, such as Marie Curie, Watson and Crick, Niels Bohr, Einstein, Alexander Fleming, Jonas Salk, the Leakeys, etc.

I’ll get off my soapbox now…

This Saturday my parents will be driving the 800+ miles to spend an eternity a week with me, my fiance and to see the sights of Central Illinois. My parents visited our home on the prairie 3 years ago as well and I’d like to go through what I believe has changed and not changed since the last time:

1) My parents still do not understand that I work on Saturdays and will not be home by 5pm and that not being at work during those times will require me to use “vacation time”

2) They also seem to still feel that Illinois is a dangerous place to live due to the occasional tornado, earthquake and hailstorm. And what safe haven do my parents hold Illinois up to in comparison…their home state of New Jersey

3) I brought my parents into lab last time to tour our space. It really wasn’t that exciting. I didn’t even have any gross bacterial liquid waste hanging around to impress them. I may take measures this time to streak out some bacteria on blood agar or have a DNA gel ready to image on the UV transilluminator.

4) My parents also met my PI when they came out 3 years ago. We had just submitted a paper together, I had passed my prelim exam and as a 2nd year grad student, naively believed everything would continue to go as smoothly and couldn’t understand why it took 5+ years for people to graduate… My PI complimented me many times over when talking to my parents and the future seemed so bright (and my parents were happy to think that I would be back safe on the east coast again soon). What will happen this time? My PI and I still get along great and my projects and experiments have really started to take off again. But there will be an edge of bitterness to it all. We’ve learned a lot about the systems we study, but not all of it fit in with the vision we had 3-4 years ago. I wonder if my parents will pick up on that when they meet my PI this time?

5) On a positive note, there is now more to do in Central Illinois to entertain your guests. Last time my parents visited it was deathly hot outside and Central Illinois wasn’t exactly known as a tourist hotspot. So we lazed away indoors playing card games and watching TV. But now there are a few more options, including a wind turbine farm where you can take a tour and a shiny new Abraham Lincoln museum that everyone is raving about. Jealous?

I have many more gray hairs than I am entirely comfortable with at the ripe old age of 27. There are now three reasons why this might be:

1) Emotional/mental stress
There is no scientific evidence (yet) to support this old-wives tale and favorite reason of grey-haired fathers with teenage daughters across the globe. Also, I’m not a particularly stressed-out person, especially if you compare me to the rest of the graduate student population in the US. So it seems unlikely that this is the cause of my early silver highlights.

2) Genotoxic stress
According to a recent paper in Cell (Inomata, K. et al. 12 June 2009) gray hair can be the result of genotoxic stress to your hair follicle’s melanocyte stem cells. The researchers subjected mice to IR and, voila, the mice now have inferiority complexes and can’t get any of the 6 week old mice to notice them a very distinguished look to them.

3) Genetics
My mom didn’t start going gray until her 50’s, but my Dad definitely had a little salt and pepper going on by his mid to late 30’s. Still, I’m at least a decade earlier for the onset of gray hair than the appearance of my parents would predict. And blaming “my genes” just seems cliche these days.

So while the third reason seems the most likely, I might look into the rate of early gray hair among grad students working in organic chemistry labs. I should be able to find a link with a p-value of at least 0.1 ;)