legionnaire

Wow. Ouch. Had my weekly lab meeting this morning. One of the postdocs was giving a presentation, and it just happened to be the one person in the lab who I really intensely dislike, everyone else is cool. She's always saying how great she is because she finished her PhD in three years (in Australia, because they only make people stay in grad school that long) and correcting everyone.

Well, I'll just say that she made a complete ass out of herself in front of the entire lab. Her presentation consisted of talking about how the project that she had originally planned on doing wasn't working out, so she spent the last four months reading up on the scientific literature to come with a brand new, super-dooper, groundbreaking new project.

What she apparently neglected to read during that nice, long hiatus, however, was the paper that had been published by our own lab not nine months ago that already did the project that she was proposing. Disproving her original hypothesis.

The second half of her talk detailed some experiments that she had been doing over the last year. They consisted of a single series of examinations looking at the distribution of several Alzheimer's disease-related proteins in aged mouse brains. Which at first looked actually pretty cool. However, it turns out that her analysis technique for looking at the pattern of expression of these proteins was fundamentally flawed, and showed a remarkable lack of understanding of the entire process.

To quote my professor "This is embarrassing" (said during the meeting.)

Now I realize that I'm probably going to hell for taking pleasure in the misfortune of others. Well, I have two responses to that. First off, hell probably won't be all that bad, at least the weather's warm, and most of friends will likely be there with me. So we'll just hang out and complain about how it used to be so much cooler before all of the n00bs started coming. And second, it's a lot easier to enjoy someone publicly humiliating themselves when that same person has tried to shoot me down countless times during scientific discussions, nit-picked all of my data to death, and basically condescended to everyone else in the lab. So ha.

After starting to work on my next biology review project, I've decided to delay putting out the original topic (Learning and Memory, Part I) and instead post a relatively brief review of the basics of synaptic transmission. I figured Learning and Memory would be totally incomprehensible without out it. Expect to see that at some point tomorrow (it's 11pm and I'm tired. deal with it.)

Good night all...