Grad Diary 6/24/09

This afternoon I found myself in a rather delicate when Prioty, an undergrad who is doing a workstudy in our lab this summer, asked me a seemingly innocuous question: what voltage do I normally run my agarose gels?

True, it seems like a simple enough question (unless you have no idea what electrophoresis is), unless you knew why she was asking me. You see, Prioty is an undergrad and is working under one of the post-docs in the lab, Kerry. A post doc is someone who already has their PhD but is getting specialized training in a lab, usually for two or three years. Anyway, Prioty has been working with Kerry for the past few months, and recently she's been running agarose gels of radiolabeled DNA. Things had been going smoothly, but recently her gels were showing poor results - there was streaking, the bands were bowed like smiley faces, or sometimes she wouldn't get bands at all. For the fifteen minutes before Prioty asked me for my input, I could easily overhear the two of them discussing her latest gel, and Kerry was trying to diagnose where the problem step was (the buffer? the voltage? pouring the gel?). Kerry is pretty good at what she does, but she is not a very good teacher, and she isn't very patient...she knows how she does it but doesn't do a good job of explaining why she does it that way.

So after having this conversation with Kerry, Prioty was told that she should run the gel at a lower voltage.

I could easily overhear all of this going on (they are right behind my bench) so I knew exactly why Prioty asked me what voltage I normally run my gels. On the one hand she wanted to get help, but really she wanted to get back at Kerry by getting my approval for how she was running the gel.

I found this position to be kind of amusing - I mean, she obviously thought I was smart enough to be a credible source of advice - but at the other hand I didn't appreciate the passive aggressive route she was taking in her relationship with Kerry. So I tried to be as helpful as I could without giving Prioty any ammo to shoot at Kerry (the last thing I needed was to get on anyone's bad side, I've only been here a few weeks!).

Fortunately, when it comes to doing electrophoresis, the voltage depends on a lot of factors: the size of the fragments you're interested in, the concentration of the gel you've poured, the buffer you're using, how well you need to separate bands of differing sizes. So I was able to tell Prioty quite truthfully that, though she should take all these things into account, the best person to ask would be someone who actually has experience with her particular experiment - i.e. Kerry.

While I obviously didn't give her what she really wanted, she seemed satisfied with this answer and went on her way. All in all, I found the entire thing quite amusing, though I also learned a valuable lesson; it's sometimes important to take note of the dynamics of the lab and not always be caught up with what you are doing.

One word to those just getting into research; if you disagree with someone about how best to do an experiment, be open about it. It's much better to find out why someone does an experiment a particular way and to talk about the relative merits of doing it differently rather than try to prove you're smarter than the other person.

Cheers!