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Thursday, August 21, 2014

Overly Honest Methods - A Personal Compilation

Being a scientist myself... well somewhat... I'm a science postgrad in full research mode... no? Okaymeme.jpeg

Anyway, I find these so hilarious that I want to share with you guys.... and to whoever who reads my blog posts :)

Have fun laughing your heads off... I might just add a few of my own... but please don't tell my supervisor :P







----- I was forced to do that.... once. But the usual case is I created a master mix and I have some leftovers - I try to put the leftovers equally into all my sample tubes because magnetic streptavidin beads are hella expensive.
----- Yup!




--- lol, in this case, I'll be like 'Fck the experiment, my stomach is more important' and then you'll develop a guilty conscience and go 'nah, I'll just repeat this one more time... it might just take a pity on me and work if I'm hungry'
---- and in fact, lab rats (the actual rats) are treated better than the people in the labs.
----- Just the abstract of those papers ;)
----- super agree... it's more like approximately... but it's a very rough type of approximation. And since I measure the powder by directly using the Scott bottle as the 'weighing boat', it's not like I can take the powder out.
----- I used to actually read lots of papers in a day (from front to back)... then I realised that it is absolutely useless. You won't remember any of them by the time you are writing your thesis or academic paper.
----- yup, enuf said!
---- ahahaha! I'm going to aim for this achievement in my discussion for my thesis.
---- this is exactly what my BF experienced... or something like that. And in the end, dunno how many days' worth of work goes down the drain.
----- always! well, almost always!
---- yuppp!
----- I just did this for one of my graphs in my thesis and there are still 2 more graphs that needs repeating... sigh. My co-supervisor told me that this is 'normal practice' and that I should do it if I want to ever graduate... I was hooked on the graduate part.
----- protein expression and purification can be a total biatch. Seriously...
----- LOL! Like my currently under-review review paper... the reviewer wanted new information (and it's not like I didn't include 2014 papers, but he wanted more), so I just searched a list of recent papers up on PubMed using the keyword and viola! xxx new papers cited in my review... lol...
----- although this did not apply to me, but it's still pretty funny :P
----- well, the results won't turn up right and the PI will still blame you for being the 'lousy teacher'
---- like my current crappy project...
---- okay, this is a mistake that almost every fed-up beginner in postgrad does... but most of the time, it's mislabelled. You can ask my BF how he fared when he wasted months of work due to mislabelled forward and reverse primers...
----- ah... just the typical PI ego.





----- and some of these OHMs made it into academic papers as well xD
------ I'm famous for doing this in my lab lol. And I'll keep 'used' gloves around because all my data or any impromptu protocol modifications are on them :P

---- yeah, like the load of quotation work or if your PI is aiming for the professor position, his professorship application forms and documents...
----- I've failed so many times that I've lost count, so even though my negative results are 'statistically significant', I cannot explain them lol
------- yes, yes and yes! It's just 0.2 or 0.5 anyways, it'll work. xD I did that plenty of times... any pH buffer can be a pain in the ass to adjust the pH.
----- I should do this to my second reviewer who said my paper is a load of trash lol... (Unlike the first, third and fourth reviewers who recommended my paper :P) If only I knew his/her name... lol
----- like my 25 paged introduction and lit review as compared to my possibly less than 10 pages of results and discussions... oh well, time to enlarge the font size and narrow down the margins
------- try that with adding samples to a whole bunch of PCR tubes or microtiter wells and you'll cry... nah I'll just make an educated guess as to where I've stopped and proceed as usual
---- like me needing to get ethical approval for using my own urine sample in a spiking experiment...


------ lol! exactly what I did for my thesis lit review... dayum~

----- so don't test me on molecular bio jargons, I'll out-jargon you xD but I'm not taking on people who have more experience than I do in this field btw.


------- and sometimes even later because I wanted to sleep in
-------- it all boils down to the free gifts. Like the time I ordered a kit and some other unnecessary stuff (but they are reagents anyway, so I will use them.... one day) from a supplier just so I can get a chance to get free movie tickets...... I didn't get them


Source: A fake Los Angeles Times news site.




My personal experiences or other people's experiences that I've witnessed first hand 
... or maybe I've just made them up ;)

The fact that I incubated my samples in -20C overnight rather than in -80C freezer just so I could go home.

Or that I incubated my samples in the drying oven instead of the water bath or the heating cube because they were already occupied.

Or that time I was sick on a Friday and my blot was destained over the weekend... and it worked. Since then, I've destained every blot over the weekends...

Or the countless hours of 'over-incubating' my samples because I went out for a long lunch and then forgot about the time.

Or the time I copy and pasted my proposal literature review into my academic paper, my conference abstract, scholarship application AND my thesis. Recycling and reusing ftw! (Just the 2-3 pages on aptamers and the figures lol)

Or using weight balances which were not calibrated (coz some stupid idiot moved the stupid machine and didn't recalibrated it) just because there is no way in hell I'm picking up someone else's sht. I've done it plenty of times in the past but no longer!

Or the time when the waste pile is so high, that once autoclaved, a horde of drosophila spewed from the autoclave machine. Don't blame me though, it's not my turn!

Or you've forgotten to put the autoclaved Scott bottle of agar into the oven? Don't worry, put the solidified agar into the microwave oven and hope for the best!

Or my experiment involved spiking because I've tried with real samples and it didn't work.

Did you know what happens when the common lab computer has so many files on the desktop that it no longer has any space to display anymore? You probably don't, but I do. :P

Here's a quick anecdote - There was a time when I used PowerPoint to draw a gel image to provide the audience an image of the expected result of my experiment and one of the audience said to me, 'Wow, nice gel image! How did you get that?' I was like.... 'Didn't you listen to me when I was presenting? It is just the expected results...'

And some academic papers are exaggerated possibilities based on a very little not-really-accurate data. Like have you ever imagine why there are so many papers on cancer cure discoveries or 'possibilities' but none of them actually discovered the actual cure?

For more funny and overly honest methods, check these out:

If you like these sort of things, you can check out my other scientifically 'funny' stuff or personal experiences here:

The 12 types of postgraduate students in the lab

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