Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Oh, the drama: Part 1

I’ve had a pretty nasty couple of weeks. We’ve had all this drama with our collaborators about getting this paper out and getting scooped on paper number 2 so now we’re trying to get that one out and I have a big problem with the authorship on paper number 2 and it’s just been drama, drama, drama. Which is not so much fun.

It’s really been stressing me out because my part in this whole little scheme is to purify cells for the engineers to work their magic on. This process takes me about 2 hours and requires a transgenic/knockout mouse as the source of the cells. I’ve been purifying cells for these collaborators basically since I started in the lab. I usually do it once a week and we’re all happy. Now, because of aforementioned scoopage drama, they’re trying to do every conceivable experiment NOW. Which has translated into me purifying cells 3 times a week for the last three weeks. Needless to say, do not want.

What’s really getting ridiculous and why I’m getting progressively more upset about this is that most of the experiments don’t need to be included or could be added in response to reviewers if needed. Meaning there’s no reason for me to be spending 6 hours a week purifying cells.

The real reason I’m getting upset about what a chunk of my time this is taking is how the authorship has panned out. Last draft I saw I was fourth out of seven. That’s despite the fact that I purified every single cell used in every single assay (not to mention breeding and genotyping the mice). There’s one whole figure (of four) that is entirely my biological data. One of the people that’s ahead of me has been in the other lab literally a month. As far as I can tell the two people between the first author and me have contributed one line on one panel of one figure each. Crazy Man and I agreed when we discussed this. And yet he continues to be bullied by our collaborator. He’s not standing up for me, and that both pisses me off and hurts my feelings.

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