Describe your experiments - NAG, NAG, NAG... - (Jul/05/2006 )

Does anyone else out there feel the same way as me.

I'm getting fed up with posts that read like this:

'Help! I'm doing PCR on a 5 kb fragment and it doesn't work. Why? Please help'

First, why not read a book on PCR. Second, at which point in writing that message does the author contemplate the length of the answer they will get to such a meaningless and open-ended question? Not at any time methinks.

Please, please, please will people start to write down experimental details in as much detail as they care to share. Otherwise just read a book.

Obviously the answer to the above query regarding PCR was that the student in question was too hung over from a party the night before to turn up in the lab the following day. Hence the lack of result.

So agree with you DocMartin. I enjoy this forum but as you say, we can only answer if we get sufficient detail. For my part I'm often surprised how loathe people are actually to do the experiment. I mean, when people come up with an either or situation they ask "which should I do." Answer, check the literature if there's nothing there..suck it and see.

I agree with both of you, regarding the fact that i ask for more information in several posts.
I try to reply as i can. And i realized that in my first posts, i did the same as i was in my experiments and did the mistake, by thinking all forumers were part of my lab
so i don't blame anyone...

Well, there r labs where people dont get decent help and they have to figure out many things on their own. To the extent that they dont even know which book to read or dont have access to these books. This is usually the case with beginners, including me.

I feel mostly the people with such questions do try to find answers on their own but also want some input from others. So as long as they describe their experiment in detail, and there's no harm in giving suggestions.

I agree with scolix: people asking for answers to their uncomplete questions are mostly students that have nobody caring about them in the lab. This is common, unfortunately. Most of the times, they don't even know that there are books on PCR available and some things are not immediate to understand if you are just a beginner, not even if you read them on a book. I had some students that didn't know many things and couldn't understand English very well: when they were reading something on a book I gave them, sometimes they had questions because they didn't understand what was meant by the authors. It is true people should learn how to be more precise but it doesn't take so long to answer: "Maybe you should be more precise because otherwise I cannot help you". And maybe we could also ask the right questions to know more about it. If one gets fed up by these posts, maybe he/she could just ignore them...

i'm not fed up because i love to help if i can. I think too that raising good questions may be a part of the solution itself.

I have no issue with people who are inexperienced or in the unenviable situation of having no in-lab support or literature.

What I cannot abide are questions that cannot be answered and are unnecessarily vague (I also can't stand bad spelling and incorrect punctuation, but those I'll forgive given the diverse nationalities using the forums).

I want to help but some consideration needs to be put in by the poster. If you simply state that your experiment didn't work how on earth can I tell you where it went wrong. Maybe you didn't turn the machine wrong, maybe the cleaner doesn't like you and sabotaged your work or perhaps it just doesn't work for five days following the New Moon.

Without details no truly useful answer can be given. This, surely, must be apparent to the poster with the problem.

You might have guessed that I'm a supervisor for undergrads and it's mainly from having to mark their ambiguous, non-descript ramblings that this irritation derives.

if I have to pick up a new technique and my boss can't babysit me through the first run, I start with Google. it's a pretty amazing tool, if you are patient enough to sort through extraneous hits and try a few different keyword combinations

for any labrats who are needing help with some basic techniques and don't have labmate-support, try this method that has helped me a number of times; for example, when I wanted to understand FPLC better, I went to google and typed in 'FPLC tutorial'

up popped a bunch of weblinks to extra course material, both graduate and undergraduate, dealing with FPLC. I had to wade through about 1/2 dozen before my questions were fully answered (I knew the basic theory but had some specific questions on how to apply the technology), but I got some great animated examples and some good information to flesh out what I knew. everytime I need to pick up a new trick, I always try to do a "........ tutorial" search

another is to see if you can find a handbook or protocol book in the 'technical notes' section of websites that sell products dealing with your technique. this is super useful even if you buy your stuff from someone else. for example, Qiagen and Promega have great tips for working with DNA. Pierce and Bio-Rad have great tips for working with proteins, although sometimes you have to pull up actual manuals to get the good stuff, Ambion has great tips on RNA work, ABI for real-time...yada yada yada and everyone has their favorites

I sympathize with both sides...lazy people drive me nuts and I think some people use this forum as a crutch...hurting themselves in the long run; if you don't at least try to figure it out yourself initially, you'll never learn how to be independent...but also it is hard to be on your own with all this overwhelming stuff coming at you when you're learning

IMHO, I think the problem lies with undergraduate lab courses. if I hadn't had real bench experience from my side job in a lab, I wouldn't have really learned anything about real lab work from my course labs...it's very hard to design experiments that will fit within the time requirements that can teach a student about REAL benchwork and how to think properly about experimental design and approach. My classmates who didn't have lab jobs didn't really know anything about lab reality, unless they were lucky enough to get a really good internship

Someone posted a number of posts in Chinese and I can only guess the bit written in English.