Exercise summary: Yesterday I lost 364 calories, ran 2.9 miles on a 5.0 incline (on the treadmill).
Hello kitties,
Honestly speaking I am at a complete loss. I gave lab meeting 2 days ago as I do every 2 weeks. And I am so bothered by the results of that meeting. During the meeting I got reprimanded for supposedly not having the correct controls in my experiment. My boss said, "It is not a good idea to be at the position where you do not know what happend in your experiment. If you have all of the proper controls you should always be able to figure out what is going on."
But I did have all the controls, and for the rest of the night afterwards I was so confused I got maximum 2 hours of sleep. Yesterday I was told by one of the post docs that they did not understand anything I presented. I talked to him. I tried to explain my slides.
What I had done was that I had generated a virus and had tested its infectivity in HeLa Cells transfected with CD4 and CCR5. These cells are usually preaty good at letting you know if you virus is going to infect. So I tested it and it gave me good results. Then I decided from there I could do my experiments with another aliquot of the same Viral Stock (Lets call this Stock 1) in primary cells since this stock showed good infectivity.
I went ahead and found that the aliquot did not infect after all. At first I thought it was just the donor. SO I tried it again with a different donor and again I got bad infectivity. SOOOO finally I re-tested my virus in the HeLa cells and this time I got bad infectivity.
It was preaty bizarre to me. All three of these experiments had been done with 1 stock (Stock 1), and not all three of these experiments agreed. I concluded that the virus was just not good but the question that lingered in my head was, how could a virus work once if it is no good at all?
After concluding that my virus was absolutely useless I generated a new stock(Lets call this Stock 2) and I've been able to test them in HeLa cells and get good results just once.
So when I was giving lab meeting I said, "Yes, I don't know exactly what happend"... Once I said this I got a whole shpeell from my professor telling me that if I had the proper controls I would know what happend. Everyone in the room was just looking at me like if I were an idiot and nodding their heads at my PI's reprimand. I didn't understand what he was talking about but I just nodded and said, "Okay".
Then when I was talking to one of the Post Docs I realized that the whole time everyone had thought that Stock1 and Stock 2 were all the same stock. So they had concluded that the cells were the once that had been bad.
I felt soooo abused and mis-serviced when I realized this. I told the post doc that not only did my slide indicate that it was a new Stock but I had said it.
Not only had I gotten reprimanded but they had not been paying attention, and now everyone thinks I am an idiot that got reprimanded. I was mad cause if you are going to make me stress and work so hard that I have to present every 2 weeks shouldn't you be making an effort to understand my presentation? When I said this to the post doc he told me that I was thinking like a kindergarten kid. He told me that I should be thinking, "how can I present my results in a clearer way?" I agreed with him and in a way, in the back of my mind, where my ego doesn't exist, I thought the same thing.
Now I am just exhausted, overwhelmed, burnt out and sick and tired of my career and everyone in my lab, including my absentee wonderful PI. I indicated this to the post doc and he just said, "Maybe Science is just not for you".... SIGH...
This is a terrible comment cause it just adds to the self doubt and lack of confidence that has been building for the past year, ever since I joined this lab. It is as if I were an orange and everyone thought that peeling away at my layers and taking me apart and picking at me is perfectly fine to do.
I am soooo tired kitties, sooo exhausted. And I can't help feel that the post doc is right after all eventhough the thought just makes me cry.
