Schadenfreude, Part I

I didn't want his name on this blog anywhere, but I have to admit that I dream a lot about this person. More specifically, I dream a lot about said person burning in Hell. His name? Dr. Matthew Fenton. Dr. Fenton was my first thesis advisor at Boston University. I do believe that the advisor-advisee relationship is one that comes under much strain and often leads to complete disdain by the end of it all, but Fenton took it to another level.

Among my grievances:
1. Never settling on a solid thesis project. My so-called 'thesis projects' were nothing more than red herrings. His philosophy was to just keep on doing experiments until something 'interesting' happened. My favorite quote of his: "You seem to be one of those people that like to work from a set of given hypotheses. In my experience, science doesn't work that way." Real scientist or charlatan? You decide.

2. Never trusting my work. One of the controls I did showed something 'interesting'. Hmm, instead of pursuing that 'interesting' finding, he passed it off as ineptitude on my part. Another researcher published the same result several months later in Nature.

3. Using me as his technician. Not even a glorified technician - that guy got a first-author paper. No, I was Dr. Fenton's manufacturer and supplier of plasmid constructs to other people in the signal transduction world. He gets an acknowledgement if there is a publication. I get nothing. (That's not entirely true. When I left his lab, Dr. Fenton gave me a certificate with the title 'Master of Plasmid DNA Request Fulfillment'. Printed off his very own color ink-jet. What a jagoff).

4. Micromanaging, patronizing, egomaniacal, cheap-ass SOB. Required lab members to 'check in' with him before we left for the day, and required one lab member to bring in doughnuts for lab meeting each week. If he put as much effort into my thesis project as he did in organizing the food schedule, I might have finished graduate school by now.

5. Interviewing for other positions elsewhere without informing any of his lab members. Is this why he put no thought into a valid thesis project on my part? He knew he'd be leaving and my career was therefore meaningless to him? This act ultimately proved what a self-centered jerk he is, and that nobody else's fate meant anything to him. He needs a kick in the teeth.

Last time I checked, Dr. Fenton was recruited by the Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care at the University of Maryland Medical Center, where he has been awarded with the position of Director of Research (ha!). Somehow he had convinced those poor souls that he was an expert in mucosal biology. A little Googling revealed that he had lured at least one post-doctoral candidate and one graduate student into his lab. Pray for them. And again.