A good summer student, it is said, will only set you back a month.
I was reminded of this rather pessimistic piece of advice when I commented on Jenny’s post about dark arts this afternoon.
When I was at the LMB in Cambridge, we used to take on summer students if they came with a recommendation, if they could demonstrate at least that they knew one end of a Gilson from the other, and if some brainless monkey work needed doing. It turned out, one summer, that I needed a shedload of protein growing so that I could solve its structure by NMR. We got a summer student, he spent all summer in the cold room, and we got enough of the 7 kDa fragment to solve it by natural abundance ( 1 H) methods. This work was published in the then Nature Structural Biology and we were very happy, and even happier when we realized that it was a complete work of fiction and published the correct answer to our question a little bit later.
cough
Anyway, this was a good experience with summer students, and so we tried again a a couple of years later: again when I needed a lot of protein for NMR (although for this one we’d managed to get the labelling working).
Oh boy.
Now, to be scrupulously fair, it was the fault of the lab manager, who taught the chap how to grow up bacteria for protein preps. For ages (except for a couple of aberrant years when a quitter visiting post-doc from Australia got everyone except me using IPTG and GST-tags) we’d been doing transformations, taking single colonies into a litre of 2XTY in a 2 l flask, shaking overnight at 34°C and letting the little beauties auto-induce protein expression (long before Bill Studier published his impressive analysis of auto-induction, by the way. We just didn’t think it was worth publishing, which just goes to show, innit?)
So after I trialled the method, and left the student with complete instructions under the care of the lab manager, we got one successful prep. But nothing afterwards — we weren’t getting any protein at all, and wasting the horribly expensive 13 C and 15 N while we were at it. One day I watched this chap set up a prep.
He went to the freezer, took a frozen bacterial pellet, scraped some gunk from the top of the pellet with a pipette tip and dropped the tip into fresh media for his grow up.
After I had peeled myself off the ceiling, I asked him why.
“Zat ees how $LAB_MANAGER showed me,” he said.
One culpable homicide later, we got back into business and made the protein and I solved the structure and I blogged about it.
This summer student was not completely harmless though. Before all this, I was showing him how to do certain things.
“Oh,” he used to say, “zat ees not how vee did eet in Germany!”
Everyone in the lab used to get this. It wore a tad thin after a while.
One fine day, I was drying a protein gel between cellophane sheets.
“Oh,” he said, “zat ees not how vee did eet in Germany!”
I am sorry to report that I very nearly lost my temper. I turned around, poked him in the chest (he was bigger than me) and said,
“Well sunshine, you’re not in Germany now; you’re in the Army, and we do it my way.”
He was quiet after that.
For the entire summer.
I think I know this person. Was he blond and called Thomas?
No, he was blond and called Florian.
Must be his twin brother, then.
Did Thomas have a monocle?
Oh ye gods. I once attended a practical course at a certain Very Famous Genome Centre Not Entirely Convenient To A Famous English University™, and one of the attendees came complete with this attitude also: “Zis is not how ve are doing it in [famous German scientist]’s lab”. Argh.
Heh, is that the one that’s sign-posted ‘Gnome Campus’ near a place beginning with ‘H’?
What’s really fun is when Germans complain about the plumbing.
Yep, you got it (think they changed the signs though).
We also had a German postdoc here in Toronto who seemed mortally offended that she couldn’t get some fizzy apple-flavoured soft drink – Appeltize or something. Combined with the French postdoc complaining about the cheese, and the British one about the quality of the baking flour, it was a bit much.
That’s odd, because Canadian flour is really good for bread-making.
Making you just export it all?
What? ‘Meaning’ probably. Must be Friday.
No, he didn’t have a monocle – did Fabian?
Funny you should mention the plumbing, though, he had trouble plumbing his Buchner condenser – apparently we had all been putting the water in the wrong end all these years…
Ah, if he was a proper German he would have complained about it being the wrong sort of water.
What’s really fun is when Germans complain about the plumbing.
Or more specifically about the embarrassing gap between the loo stall door and the floor.
Why is that embarrassing?
It’s a much bigger gap in North America than we Euros are used to. Very disconcerting at first.
It’s not a gap as much as a “half a door missing” ;)
Richard: I know the feeling.. you think you know what they are doing but you really need to see it with your own eyes to pick out the faulty thingy…
Picking out a faulty thingy is always difficult. Takes years of training.
It’s important only to use your thumb and forefinger, or alternatively, a nice pair of forceps. Which your student will probably chuck in the bin by mistake.
He went to the freezer, took a frozen bacterial pellet, scraped some gunk from the top of the pellet with a pipette tip and dropped the tip into fresh media for his grow up.
After I had peeled myself off the ceiling, I asked him why.
Why not? (Except that it didn’t work?) That’s how I always get a new plasmid prep going again from a favorite clone.
Let it not be said that I am not humble enough to let myself appear downright stupid.
Because if you don’t pick colonies you don’t actually know you’ve got plasmid, and this is a very expensive way to find out.
If it’s any consolation, the young man shows up in economics, too, except there he’s called Rudi and he’s more cheerful than anyone in economics has any right to be. Comes with the certitude, I suppose.
Because if you don’t pick colonies you don’t actually know you’ve got plasmid
Plus, the top of the frozen stock is sometimes just glycerol, depending on how it’s mixed.
I should add that these weren’t even glycerol stocks. They were 1l growups spun down and froze.
Funny stuff. I bet you’re happy you don’t have to deal with that anymore, or do they have an equivalent in your new field?
Heh. A different class of funny stuff.
Because if you don’t pick colonies you don’t actually know you’ve got plasmid, and this is a very expensive way to find out.
How are your bacteria growing at all if they don’t have plasmid?
‘the plasmid you think they should have’.
I think a key phrase here was “left the student with complete instructions” since if you bother to leave them with instructions, you expect the student to bother trying to follow them. And therein, I suspect you specified that you wanted him to pick colonies again.
Generally the cost of a mistake is much less for me and does not involve exotic isotopes, so that’s probably why I never was very dogmatic about it. And my glycerol stocks do have glycerol – and generally, bacteria still on top. I do now stand corrected, though, and see the logic behind the practice.