Training Days

Barb is out this week, at an immunology conference. Or perhaps she's skiing. Anyway, that leaves me to train Yue in many of the lab techniques she's going to become familiar with over the next year or so.

I can't help feeling a little conflicted and frustrated by the situation. I like to teach, and thought for a while that I would choose a career as a physician-educator, hence my reason for choosing the MD/PhD track. I feel that I'm a pretty good teacher and have had success in the past with incoming members of various labs that I have been in. Additionally, in the long term, training Yue to the best of my ability works out to my advantage, as she will be finishing up the work that will lead to the publication on which I will be first author.

However, given the time crunch that I'm experiencing, by no fault of her own, training Yue is truly testing my patience. No, not patience. Perhaps...endurance? It's just very hard to take that time to train someone when I have to work on writing my thesis - kinda like showing someone the railroad tracks as the train comes barreling in.

Barb has me showing her how to do two experiments this week: chromatin immunoprecipitations (ChIPs) and transient transfections. Briefly, for those of you not familiar with these protocols, ChIPs let us look at specific proteins and the sites to which they bind genomic DNA. The transient transfection lets us inject a small loop of DNA into mammalian cells so we can study things like protein function. The ChIP is about a 3-day assay with about 25 steps, while the transfection takes about an hour of preparation and about 5 steps. I find that it takes a lot to train somebody new, and I really didn't even go into detail about more empirical topics such as experimental design or how the particular protocol fits into the IL-1ß project.

Things have gone reasonably well - it's always a good sign when a new member of the lab hasn't broken any equipment or set fire to the building. Plus Yue is a very nice person. When preparing standards for quantitating the amount of DNA we purified in the ChIP experiment, the curve was almost perfect, with a R²-value close to 1. Our transfections turned out equally well, with almost 40-50% of our cells positive for green fluorescent protein (GFP). If I ever figure out how to take a picture on that microscope, I'll post it.

There's an inherent amount of handholding when someone new enters the lab, and I feel somewhat like a hypocrite for doing that with Yue. I detest being micromanaged, as I was when I worked for Matt. Plus it's not like Yue's inept - she's holding an MD from China. Yet there are valid reasons for doing this with someone new as I'll describe with Yue's sterile culture technique.

Only two criticisms, the first being that Yue's sterile culture technique needs some work. She frequently forgets that the grille at the front of the tissue culture hood is considered non-sterile, and she often puts objects on it that need to be kept sterile: lids, cells, plasmids, etc. Also, she often keeps media open in the hood longer than I would like. Mistakes here can be costly, as contamination of any of these components may lead to the loss of hundreds of dollars in reagents or time spent preparing said reagents. But technique is something that will come with experience.

The other minor complaint is one that I'm just going to have to deal with, and that is she tends to get too close. She's always either at my elbow or closer, observing my every move, even when she doesn't need to be. Just the other day I was taking a rack of microtubes to the freezer, and when I stopped at the freezer, Yue ran right into me. On another occasion, Yue was observing me aspirate some fluid from a microtube, and she just got a little too close for comfort. I'm trying to ascertain whether this personal space issue is an individual thing with her or a cultural difference. Either way, I'm not sure how to effectively communicate that issue without confounding her too much:

"Yue, look at this, no, not too close, no, now you're too far, lean in a little bit, no, not that far in, back a little, okay, a little to the left, okay, good....Can you still see?"

The good news is that Yue is a talker. She and Barb are going to get along fine.

So, for the first week, here is my (informal) evaluation of Yue's performance:

Enthusiasm: A
Lab Competence: A
Pipetting Accuracy: A
Sterile Culture Technique: D (will improve over time)
Not violating Mikey's Personal Space: F-

*******

What I'm listening to now: Disturbed, The Sickness

Not sure what this band is saying - they could be Satan worshippers for all I can make out, but, hey, it's loud - and that's kinda what I need to focus on what I need to do. This album includes a cover of Tears for Fears' "Shout", and Disturbed is able to handle the key change very well, indicating that they know at least more than four chords. Always a plus.