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Juliasarmoire, on 11 September 2010 - 10:17 AM, said:
It's almost like he really loves this. He gives me a modified vector with a wrong insert. My job is put another insert in. He tells me to sequence the vector as he has no clue will it work out, but only in one way. I do it in two ways. I can't get cloning working. He yells at me how people have use the same vector for decades and how it should have taken me three days to make the construct. Also if I would be a good molecular biologist I wouldn't lose DNA while purifying it from the agarose gel. The sequence results are ok form one way, sequencing it from the other way gives some totally nonesense results. The boss says it's a contamination. I still get the same results back. I should use cDNA library for PCR. After one week I have wasted the most precious DNA ever and how can I have been that stupid and idiotic. I work and work and work and produce some totally nonesense. He lectures me. I'm not a good molecular biologist and even it's not anything personal, I have a lousy university education. Then by the way, you don't have to do the cloning. I already have the vector, BUT now tell me about the details of your future experiments with the staining... and ooh, you always should think ahead and not just sit still. In one week you managed to produce nothing...
Hi Julia,
I do understand how you feel. I used to be in almost same situation like you (oh...again...LOL).
My lab used to purchase a bacteria strain around 10 years ago (I call it bacteria b.c). It had been distributed for so many generations of postgraduate (for so many different labs as well) before it comes to my hand. I use this bacteria as my reference controlled strains for my pcr, and I had designed few pairs of primers based on the deposited genomic of "bacteria b.c" but none of it seems to work even after numerous troubleshooting. Initially I thought was my design error, and of course I wasn't satisfied. I do feel that this is not "bacteria b.c" and I had told my boss about it. Without thinking, my boss directly saying I'm wasting time and being not productive, and was saying all the labs around using this strain and couldn't be wrong, and if anything wrong then should be either my design or my technique. My boss was then get all the strains back from the labs she used to give to and asked me to work with those. My boss even claimed that I actually had contaminated my stock due to my poor techniques. My primers also doesn't even worked on those strains either. I almost gave up, and I told myself to do my last try by using nearly 20 of the archive clinical strains of "bacteria b.c". Amazingly, my primers work in 18 out of 20 of the archive strains! (and I even found that the morphology of the so-called-reference-strain was different with all the archive slinical strains)
In order to further convince my boss, I do 16sRNA sequencing for bacteria identity confirmation of all the not working "bacteria B.c". apparently, all the "not working" ones are actually not "bacteria b.c" and was something else. I tell my boss with evidence that this is not "bacteria b.c" and is something else, and the senior postgraduate approximate 10 years ago had made a mistake by subculture it wrongly and distribute the strains to others. For all these years no work was done by anyone to re-confirm the strains identity. Everybody was assuming it was the correct "bacteria b.c" and use it in their research, until I found out it wasn't "bacteria b.c" they use all these while. Now, is up to my boss to inform everyone, but I don't seems that this had been done.
As you already known, a whistle-blower will rarely have a good ending. Is true that I was graduated from a university which had less accreditation from the present one. I was questioned for my credibility to run project by saying "you are not credible enough to do things on our own yet" without take count of my exposure of working in 3 labs prior joining this. people had advice me to leave after heard my situation. Is always my dream to get a postgraduate degree, even just a master in science, although I got no scholarship due to low CGPA, and this is the only boss who willing to stipend me (although lower amount than scholarships). and that's the reason I stay.
As lab rat said: Do what works best for you. I strongly agree with that.
I wish all the best to you. You are not alone, we all hear you, and we do support you. you can always share anything with us (in bioforum).
Adrian
Edited by adrian kohsf, 16 September 2010 - 07:15 PM.
