Life Science Tools of the Trade

I never make resolutions but perhaps I should start this year:
1-Be nice to Sales Reps
2-Try and be more understanding of G*******’s need for constant praise
…………………….nope, can’t do it.
Happy 2006 everyone.

I know I’ve been goofing off for the past week but I was wondering if anybody was actually getting science done. Connecticut to New York and to New Jersey, I’ve been making the circuit up here in the Northeast. For the first time today, I realized I had c0mpletely forgotten about the lab and the project!!

Hopefully everyone else is enjoying the holiday week as well.

Ahh, the joys of the Holidays. Nobody is around, its quiet, and you think you are going to get some work done. But I think it is too quiet, and therefore I search the internet for amusement. Oh well, at least I’m working on digesting all the food that was force fed to me over the long weekend.

One quick update. Since the hbogerd’s last posting the Qiagen tech support has called the lab again. Evidently they had his email wrong, and wanted to shoot him a email. I guess they are still reading the blog. I’m sure we’ll get an interesting update when the masked man returns from his holiday respite. Personally, I think Beta testing would be great….if there was some incentive. Hbogerd has already made mention of the reasons not to, so the incentives should be pretty nice. Just a thought.

Alright then, how ’bout a little contest. Reply to the post with your most outrageous company/lab holiday party stories, and when one is left that beats mine, I’ll post that for your amusement.

Okay, so maybe the pen is mightier than the sword. Life Science Tools of the Trade Blogs complaining about the lack of attention from Stratagene (who we (had?) done a lot of bu$ine$$ with) and another complaining about Qiagen (a Quality Control problem that was denied, then ignored and finally confirmed) prompted almost immediate responses from both companies.
What happened (part one): The new Stratagene rep stopped by to introduce himself. Did he get in trouble when a superior read the blog? That wasn’t the intent but that may be the way it played out.
What happened (part two): Two Qiagen reps stopped by today. Apologies offered, accepted. Problems till linger: Qiagen has a money back guarantee. They KNOW they shipped defective MaxiPrep columns to many research labs, not just ours. The sales rep stated, that yes, there was a confirmed problem in Quality Control and defective product shipped. They can never make up for time lost but they should send REFUNDS to every lab that purchased the defective kits. Will this happen? I doubt it. Should this happen? Yes, without asking! Belly up to the bar, Qiagen and do the right thing. Rumor has it some of the SAB blogs/forums made it to the head honcho in Germany. Unfortunately, the Sales Rep probably got some heat although this was a problem that Quality Control should have caught. Kick their asses, not the people that sold the shitty product. Having said that, the boss of the Sales Rep asks if I’d be willing to do some Beta testing on a new Qiagen product? WHAT THE F?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
I’m going to spend my time testing a product for a company (QIAGEN) that screwed the lab and never offered a replacement (You want more of our shitty MaxiPreps?-No thanks! ) or a full refund? There should have been a voluntary product recall, luckily nobody dies when Qiagen screws up.

Next on the chopping block?

Well, nearly.

The moving company has been paid, flights booked and visa obtained. I’ve told the lab mangler where and what my stuff is. I’ve bequeathed special and sacred reagents to my distraught followers. I’ve inducted my very young apprentice into use of the new, shiny scanner and the DVD/CD burner, I’m burning my stuff to DVD and am about to return the Perl and C manuals.

The only thing that hasn’t gone to plan is those damn’ litholoops. I’ve got time on the X-ray set but they haven’t turned up, which is rather dischuffing. Oh hum. I’ll try again when I’m in my new lab. Which will be interesting because my old supervisor is working on something similar to what I’m going to be doing, and is looking to collaborate already.

I doubt I’ll be writing again this side of the Pacific Ocean (the ‘Specific’ Ocean as we used to call it) – one more day at work, then a week packing, a week at my parents, and then

FWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH

Happy Christmas and a splendid 2006 to all our readers!

Sorry for the long absence, not that anyone missed me. I’m getting close to the time where I move on from my graduate studies and begin toiling for slightly more money than I am making now. Yes, that’s right I’m looking for postdocs. In this time of uncertain funding, I decided that I should possibly look outside of traditional academic postdoctoral oppertunities to at least see what was out there. My current institution sponsers a “PhD Career Fair” and for the first time I took them up on attending to talk with all the interested employers who I was promised would be waiting to snatch me up. Boy was I sorely disappointed. Evidently, I am completely unemployable. Industry wants protein chemists, formulation chemists, and other people with industry experience. Unfortunately, I don’t know how you actually get industry experience so that you can get a job that wants industry experience (but no postdoc experience). Perhaps I’m wrong, but it looks like no one wants a virologist with strong molecular biology training.

Hmmm…perhaps they are hiring at the golden arches.

Maybe someone can explain this Hybridization buffer to me. I buy it for the post docs in the lab but I really don’t understand the advantage of it. My understanding is that it allows for quicker hyb times than traditional buffers.

Sounds great BUT what perplexes me is that they have to incubate the ExpressHyb for hours for to get it to resuspend. How is that faster? By the time the buffer is back in solution they could have already hybridized the blot with the old fashion cheap buffer. That’s the other thing, this stuff is expensive. $500 for 1 litre!

Right now we have the money so they’ll keep getting the ExpressHyb but with NIH slashes….who knows.

Monday PM-resubmit manuscript to N.A.R.
Tuesday AM-receive email/paper is accepted
Friday AM-receive/return proofs
Next week-should be epublished/online

I haven’t dealt with Nucleic Acids Research before but that is as quick as I’ve ever seen. Sorry if this appear Gavrilovish but I thought it was worth mentioning/considering if you have a manuscript you are trying to get out fast. Of course this doesn’t mean a reviewer might be slow gettting it back to the editor in the first place, but that isn’t really the journals fault.

Since I’ve been giving Qiagen such a hard time lately, I figured it was time to pick on another company. I know that you’ve heard we loved our Stratagene sales rep. Well, Stratagene HAD a fantastic sales rep who left to work for, mmghh…Qiagen. Tin was one of those reps who actually knew what we ordered from him and thanked us for the orders. Imagine that!

The thing is, Strategene got a new rep and we haven’t even heard from this person. No email, no flyer, no generic introduction, no nothing. To say the least, I find it mindly annoying that we buy all this TAQ from them and we haven’t even seen the rep. Doesn’t the company suggest the reps go meet their customers? It won’t matter anyway, I think it’s time to get TAQ from somewhere else.

Any chance if anyone knows if wedding bells are in the future for Tin man?

With all the talk about grade inflation perhaps this is the time to bring up manuscript inflation. With the explosion of places to publish (blogs, ejournals, expanded paper journals: Nature Medicine, Nature Genetics, Nature This, Nature That, pseudo-science magazine/journals and the plethora of anti-aging journals) is it really that impressive when someone compiles a publication list consisting of magazine articles/book chapters/non-peer reviewed op-ed pieces/reviews of reviews of reviews/recycled revolutionary theories and letters to the editor. It appears that at least some scientists are quite happy to pad a CV with an endless list of publications (although in reality most scientists wouldn’t truly consider them publications in the first place-but Grandma would be damn impressed!) that contain no primary research.

Finally, after months and months of hearing nothing about the Qiagen fuzz problem, the rep informed me yesterday that yes, there was indeed a problem with their kits.
In case you missed the initial complaints, everyone in our lab was having problems with fuzz in their DNA maxi preps. After numerous phone calls to tech support and little if any resolution, we gave up and changed to Roche DNA kits. Qiagen didn’t seem to concerned with the problem and they certainly did little to appease us. (After spending tens of thousands of dollars with them…you might think they would want out business.) Apparently, the fact that the lab has done over thousands of maxi preps wasn’t enough to convince them that we did in fact know how to follow a protocol. Instead, it was somehow our fault we were getting fuzz. The tech support phone calls were infuriating to say the least and we had had enough!!
All of that being said….the Qiagen rep stopped by yesterday and informed me that it wasn’t us and there was a problem with their kits. FINALLY! After six months they agree with us that their was a problem. Something to do with the kits sitting on loading docks in extremely high heat. I’m not really sure of all of the details and I really don’t care but I do find it very disturbing that a company takes that long to recognize and identify a problem.
We have completely switched to Roche Genopure kits (I highly recommend them) and haven’t had any problems thus far. My advice to you…if you’re having problems with a Qiagen product….switch to a better company!

I forgot to write something last week, as I’ve been far too excited about my new $SHINY from $FRUITFLAVOUREDCOMPUTERCOMPANY.

Yeah, it finally arrived. And it was well worth the wait. The 23″ widescreen flat display is drop-dead gorgeous, with touch-sensitive brightness control and power switch. The computer itself is a quad G5 (count ‘em. FOUR (4) processors) and is so flamin’ fast that I don’t know what to do with it. I launched Pymol and set it to rotate a complex protein structure. I then checked the activity monitor and found that one processor was operating at 50% and the other three hadn’t even woken up. I’ve not seen a load average above 0.6.

Currently I’m compiling everything I can find at Fink, just because I can.

I should be solving this NMR structure but the drool is getting in the way.

I figured I’d be the first one (especially since no one else knows) to congratulate hbogerd on his recent manuscript acceptance. Hopefully, he won’t post (like someone else on this site) and tell you all what a great paper it is. I do think some congratulations are in order though. What a way to end the year!!!

Nothing says the Holdiay Season is here like a glass of red flavored punch, a cold congealed meatball and some bad karaoke!

Egoflash: It looks like I just might wrap up the last reviewer’s request and resubmit my manuscript. When that baby is accepted, I’m gonna Gavrilov it to death, posting the title one day, then the abstract, the materials and methods, daily updates when it is (or is not) referenced, a scan of the journal cover, repost the announcement in several forums, the impact factor of the journal, etc.

What else is new? Nothing much. I fixed the dryer vent yesterday.

No………….not really viruses………….Software ripoffs. Stores routinely offer non-scientific software (a local office supply store offers Norton Sytstem Works, which includes an antivirus program, this week for free after rebates ). MacVector, a not so great DNA analaysis package, costs over $600 dollars for a program that has had no real upgrades in 10 years! Why do they charge so much for a mediocre program? Because they can. I guess it is somewhat analagous to the $600 dollar toilet seats the US Government was buying a decade ago. If it isn’t your personal money it is easy to say “Who cares it isn’t my $$$$$” and pay the outrageous high prices.