I’ve ranted a number of times about the idiots I have to work with.
These are the idiots who are working on cutting edge virology all in a selfless attempt to cure the world of terrible fatal diseases, STDs and to earn enough money to get blotto on friday night.
This is going to be more incoherent than usual… between the frozen burrito I had for dinner (and subsequent issues it generated) and the car alarm that went off for 10 freaking hours I’m a little tired.
Not to mention I’m having some anger issues at the moment.
Anyhoo:
Picture this: you’re a bold explorer in science.
You’ve striving to find the perfect marrage between buisness and science.
You’ve ended up slightly junior to a twerp 2 years out of undergrad.
On your wall you proundly display the 4 keys to science which are written by a nobel lauriet. I suspect it’s Watson or Crick… something this stupid can only be written by someone who stole all their data.
- To succed in science you have to avoid dumb people, you must always turn to people smarter than yourself.
– Piece of cake for you. For me, 6 hrs each day this is substantially harder to do.
- To make a huge success, a scienist has to be prepaired to get into deep trouble.
– This is a VERY disturbing key to succeeding in science. NOBODY wants a virologist who gets into “DEEP TROUBLE”. What sort of trouble too? Are we talking drug trouble? Women trouble? Or the insatiable urge to whore yourself out in tijuana for shiny quarters so you can prank call people in New Jersey without your wife finding out.
Sweet hemmoraging christ folks. You don’t want virologists getting into deep trouble. Yeah sure, there was a time and a place when we needed scientists who said, “Lets try all these different plants we found in Africa on poor people then see if they will feel pain during a 4 hr exploritory surgery.” I think that time has passed.
- Be sure you always have someone up your sleeve who will save you when you find yourself in deep ship.
– A fall guy. A suggar daddy. Someone who can make those 4 dozen hiddeously mutated and dismembered corpses go away before the FBI can find them. If you had the brain god gave to a piece of distended rectum you shouldn’t need a fall guy.
- Never do anything that bores you. Constantly expose your ideas to constructive criticism.
– Unless you’re a moron.
Christ, my eyes are throbbing. They’re throbbing in time and in sequence to that god damn car alarm. Over and over again… it’s one of those 4 different sounds in 1 alarms. You know the sound, it’s like you strapped a male banshee down, spread his legs and cinched a bloodpressure cuff around his scrotum and started pumping.
It’s the sound god makes when he gets his balls stuck in a car crusher.
So, say you’ve got a problem.
You have 2 cytokines (each a specific type of protein) you have to treat some cells with them at a concentration of 20 ng /mL for one, and 10 ng/mL for the other.
Each cytokine comes in a 5 ug vial.
Now, you have to add the cytokines to media, 1 mL of media to be exact.
Only you don’t how to reconstitute the protien.
You see the protien comes in a powder, you add PBS and BSA and presto! You have cytokines in solution. You don’t want to make the cytokines too dilute, if you have to use 500uL of cytokine solution you can only add 500mL of media which won’t be enough food for the cells.
So you can see the problem here.
Clearly this is problem beyond a master’s degree.
“How should I reconstitute them?”
“What concentration do you want?”
“20ng/mL and 10ng/mL”
“If you make them like that you won’t be able to add media, it’ll be all PBS and cytokine”
“Oh”
“Yep”
“What should I do”
A full mag and some privacy would be appreciated, but given how my luck is going you wouldn’t take the hint and I’d be stuck with having to help you load the goddamn gun.
“What concetration of the cytokines do you want to work with?”
“20ng/uL and 10ng/uL” – 1000X concentrations…
- 10ng goes into 5ug 500 times… I’d try adding .5mL, but what would I know I’ve only got a BA…*
“250 and 500 uL respectively”
“huh”
I write it out.
“Thanks”
“Don’t forget you need to have BSA in there too, if you have too small of a total volume you won’t be able to add enough BSA.”
You see, they both need .1% BSA to stabalize the cytokine. If you have only a 250 uL total volume, .1% of that is .25 uL which is too small to easilly pipette… Personally I’d make the 10ng/mL cytokine up in 1mL, with 1 uL of BSA and have a 2.5 ng/uL stock and just add 4 uL/mL of media.
This wasted 30 min of my day.
And considering I’ll have to explain it again it’ll probably waste another 40 min.
God I can still hear the fucking alarm.
