Uh oh! Do you have a lab meeting coming up, and you (somehow) don’t have any data to report? Don’t panic! Why go through all the trouble of doing experiments, when you can just do some evasive tweaks? Here are our top suggestions:

Get creative! 

Change your graphs around. Make that bar graph a box and whisker plot. Change the colour of your fluorescence. Flip your images upside-down!

Redo your stats…. again. 

It’s not p-hacking if your ultimate goal is to create bullshit rather than significance! Was that a repeated measures or independent values analysis? Oh, who cares?

Focus on details! 

Give everyone a very lengthy explanation of how you’ve optimised every single step of that 3 day long protocol – if you lull them to sleep with the ins and outs of your most boring protocol, they will forget to ask you about results!

“The equipment is down…” 

So what that it’s the 90th time you’ve used that excuse. How can you do your experiments if the necessary apparatuses aren’t working? It’s not like you can… find something else to do in the meantime… right? No. Definitely not.

Say you’ve been reading and writing. 

You’re a scholar, so obviously it makes sense to take long stretches of time to do nothing but read… while watching Netflix.

Don’t even go. 

Stay home! Say you’re sick! Pretend you forgot… even though they’ve been at the same time for the last 3 years you’ve been in the lab. When they ask if you can just send them your data, simply reply, “no ❤️.”

The post 6 Ways To Say ‘I Don’t Have Any New Data’ At Your Next Lab Meeting appeared first on dnatured journal.

In an attempt to find a “public engagement activity” required for an upcoming grant application, third-year graduate student Tammy Jones was released from her PhD duties for a whole 45 minutes to attend a STEM-promoting school event, and put on such a good performance of feigned happiness that she earned an Oscar nomination for the role of “Mentally Healthy Person Happy With Their Life Choices”.

“I was slightly reluctant in running the workshop at first, since I hadn’t really spoken to anyone in more than 7 weeks, and was worried my voice would crack from the effort of talking for longer than three minutes straight.” (Three minutes is the time it takes for Jones to order a pizza on the phone).

“But then I quickly skimmed through the script when I was on the can, and it was actually really well written. It had all the major clichés, such as science degrees “opening doors” for you, and being ‘exciting,’ ‘stimulating,’ and ‘fulfilling,’ but added an innovative appeal to pathos, normally reserved for social work, by claiming these degrees ‘allow you to make a real difference in the world.’ Brilliant, really!”

“Fortunately, I got so carried away in my performance that we ran out of time for the Q&A bit of the workshop – I doubt I would have managed to keep it together if I had been forced to go off script.”

Sir Kevin Williams, chair of the committee responsible for selecting the winner of the award, released a thread on Twitter explaining their decision:

“Ms. Jones did an absolutely terrific job in this role. Members of The Academy were particularly touched by the student’s sincere expression when suggesting that she was “thrilled he decided to embark on this soul-destroying journey.” Also, we just felt bad for the fact that her PhD work will most likely not lead to a “publication that is read by more than 5 people, let alone to a Nobel Prize, so we thought this was the best we could do.”

Jones hopes that continuing to “method act” happiness with her PhD program will one day translate into research success.

The post Graduate Student Awarded Oscar For Performance As “Mentally Healthy Person Happy With Their Life Choices” At High School’s STEM-Outreach Event appeared first on dnatured journal.

Despite reading her university’s daily emails featuring “Health & Wellness Tips,” graduate student Molly Thompson, whose PhD project has been brought to an abrupt halt as a result of the ongoing global pandemic, has yet to see a single improvement in either her health or wellness.

“At first, I thought maybe I just wasn’t following the instructions on how to breathe in and out properly,” said a visibly exhausted and anxious Thompson. “Like that time when incubating my buffer at 63°C, instead of the required 62.5°C, and I messed up 3 months’ worth of experiments,” added Thompson with panic in her eyes.

“Anyway, after a few weeks, I just had to give up on the breathing stuff – it only made me more stressed, because my mind kept wandering off to all the experiments still on hold while the labs were closed,” explain Thompson. “I never really got to the bottom of why it is that breathing exercises didn’t help fill the gaping hole that a complete lack of in-person social interaction has left in my life.”

At that point, the online interview as interrupted by the all too familiar sound of an email notification.

“Oh my goodness, they’ve just sent another one,” exclaimed Thompson, her face frozen in despair because of her home’s weak internet connection. “It’s called ‘5 new things you can try to make the most of your free time.’ What free time? I am currently trying to learn three different programming languages so I can turn my fully lab-based project into something that I can do from home while the whole world is on fire.” 

She paused.

“That’s on top of my mandatory morning cry, of course.”

“I’ve never had less free time in my life,” she whispered, exhausted.

Asked what she would like to see in future Health & Wellness emails, Thompson thought carefully. “Apart from an announcement that we all get free mental health benefits, I guess puppies?”

The post Uh Oh! University’s Health & Wellness Email Not Cutting It For Students Enduring A Global Pandemic appeared first on dnatured journal.

Day -1*

Right, we close down tomorrow, so I gotta grab all the “data” so I can work from home – although why the lab should close down in the first place is beyond me! Surely my very specific research on a very narrow sub-discipline that is vaguely health related should be considered “in the immediate national interest”?

*Yes, scientists sometimes arbitrarily decide where t=0 is, and then proceed to attribute a negative value to anything before that, in what can only be described as a fulfilment of the childish need to defy the laws of the very nature they study.

Day 1

Or is it Day 0? Anyway, working from home (WFH) is great. I love WFH. And overusing acronyms. WFH truly is amazing. I can get up one hour later than I usually do and still make it to the lab, I mean, make it to my desk earlier than the usual time!

Day 5

WFH is great! I love WFH! WFH truly is amazing! If I set my alarm to the usual time and send a cheeky email to my boss to pretend I’m awake, I can then go back to sleep and get up anytime! My right thumb has been acting up though – it must be having withdrawal symptoms from the lack of pipetting…

Day 12

WFH sucks. I miss my cells… I bet they miss me too. Do they? Maybe they’ll never forgive me after I split them a day later than I should have, just because I was careless and didn’t go in that Sunday. How could I have thought that a “weekend away for my 5th wedding anniversary” was a good enough excuse… Why was I so careless?! What if, when I bring them back to life, from sub-sub-zero temperatures, they all hate me?!

Day 17

Today, I have started to wrap myself in white blankets to recreate a lab coat. This has brought some peace to my otherwise troubled soul.

Day 26

The cold, dark two-photon microscope room suddenly appears comfortable. I long to be there.

Day 29

I haven’t had water in 10,080 minutes. It is simply unbearable to pour myself such imprecise volumes of fluids. Sadly this also excludes alcoholic spirits, which would come in handy during these difficult times. I now buy vodka strictly for the aroma, as it brings back fond memories of the cell culture room. I buy beers, rums and whiskeys to remind me of LB broth, Rosé wine for it’s cell culture medium appearance, and milk to mimic Western blot blocking solution. I am fine.

Day 9

Wait what? Day 9??!! But we were on Day 29 just yesterday! Fourteen years of training on how to keep a perfect log of everything I did, didn’t do, almost did and wish I’d done and time went backwards?! Did I dream those few weeks?

Alright, come on, just try to remember what you did during that time… Nope, it’s useless, like when you forget to get the timer going and try to guess how long your samples have been incubating for. Oh god how long have I been inside?

Day 10 And Beyond

Screw this, what’s on Netflix?

The post Banned From The Lab: Diary From A Quarantined Scientist appeared first on dnatured journal.

Professor Dame Mary Johnson, head of Quantum Physics at the University of Cambridge, was pleasantly surprised to hear that she would be receiving a substantial raise after getting an email from a prospective student repeatedly misgendering her as a man.

This was not, however, the first time that she received a bonus after someone had presumed “Dr. Johnson” was a man based on rank and field of work. Last month, while serving as the keynote speaker at a symposium on Women in STEM, a 26-year old graduate student introducing Dr. Johnson fawned over “his ground-breaking work on wave-particle duality” and that “he basically laid the foundations for modern quantum mechanics.”

The student noticed his error just as he finished calling Dr. Mary Johnson “the most you could want in a scientist, a mentor and a man,” as she walked up to the podium.

“At this point, it’s more of a pleasant surprise when they get it right at first try,” explained Dr. Johnson, who has over 460 scientific articles published under his — sorry, her — name, and is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards in the field. 

“I do realise it’s not inconceivable for a man to be speaking at an event celebrating the achievements of women in science,” she conceded, matter-of-factly, “but to have researchers not even do a cursory Google search?”

Dr. Johnson, who says she does not particularly care about the monarchy, even accepted the title of “Dame,” hoping it would simplify things.

“I thought it would help make my gender that extra bit clearer – you know, to all of those who hadn’t realised that ‘Mary’ is an exclusively female name in 14 different languages or something.”

Dr. Johnson says that the emails persisted even after adding “she/her” pronouns to her email signature.

“It seems as though ignoring all the obvious signs is easier than the concept of a woman being a successful scientist studying physics.”

After this raise, Dr. Johnson is now on pace to earn the same as her male counterparts in about 17 years.

The post Cool! This Female Professor Got A Raise After Receiving An Email That Started ‘Dear Sir’ appeared first on dnatured journal.

PhD student Elizabeth Johnson, now in her final year, has just emerged from a two-year long research rabbit-hole after her supervisor suggested she do a “quick literature search” to find out the best method to perform a phenol-chloroform DNA isolation, which he claimed was a “quick and easy” yet apparently “critical” step in a months-long protocol. 

“Everything was going well at first,” said Johnson. “Sure, there were a few potentially interesting papers that only had the abstract available, as well as another one which asked me for a $128 subscription to access the poorly scanned first page of an article from 82 years ago.”

“And yes, I went all the way up to tab 18 on the PubMed search results. But after only 8 months I did manage to find the golden pot at the end of the rainbow: a recent, fully accessible paper, with a fairly detailed methods section – the dream!”

Or so it seemed.

“But apparently, Stan et al. (1998) had used the same isolation method as Xi et al. (1967), who had performed it exactly as Leblanc et al. (1912), who, in turn, seemed to have done it as our ancestors in 225,000 BC,” explained an exasperated Johnson. “Sadly, the Homo Erectus weren’t particularly good at taking notes, and didn’t leave any of their work in writing for us, so I was back at square one.”

Thankfully for Johnson, it only took another 16 months until her supervisor returned from sabbatical and remembered that the month-long protocol he had originally given me was much more complicated than needed, and a simple acid-base DNA isolation would have worked just fine.

“Once I had access to that tiny bit of information, it took me about 56 seconds to find a perfectly fine protocol for that,” concluded Elizabeth, looking exhausted, malnourished and aged, but otherwise beaming with a sort of crazed joy.

“Now I only need to finish my actual PhD in the 3 months I have left. It’ll be a piece of cake compared to this living hell!”

The post Success! Research Article Finally Located After Two Years, Seven $79 Journal Subscriptions, And A Small Monthly Sacrifice To Anubis appeared first on dnatured journal.

31-year old PhD graduate Dr. Jane Smith was recently shocked to discover that spending five years on her research project (which was “mostly pipetting”), while neglecting every other aspect of her life had not, it turns out, “opened many doors” for her, and in fact failed to equip her with the basic interpersonal skills required by most jobs outside academia.

“As a PhD student, I spent most of my time optimizing a supposedly novel DNA isolation method, which meant spending most of my week pipetting small volumes of various colourless fluids,” said Dr. Smith. “Sadly, the exquisitely fine motor control over my right thumb and the painful tendinitis that resulted from all those hours are hardly “relevant skills” when applying for a position as a sales manager in a biotechnology product development company.”

She also lamented that her ability to survive for extended periods of time on a strict diet of ready-made meals and coffee was not an advantage, but merely a requirement for many science office jobs. 

“I can’t even put that I “work well in a team” because I’ve only worked with machines since my final group presentation in Bio 201.

Also, it seems that spending several years learning increasingly more about increasingly less will hardly give off the impression of someone who is “versatile” and “flexible,” which she says comes up on a lot of job postings. As for being a “people person”… Well, let’s just say I spent more time with the fruit flies I isolated DNA from than another human being during my PhD.”

Despite the inherent disadvantages, some recruitment managers deliberately seek out PhD graduates as a cost-cutting source of labor. 

“Oh I love PhD graduates,” said recruitment manager Michael Cook. “They have excellent problem-solving skills, an outstanding ability to perform under pressure and, crucially, they thrive in poor working conditions and won’t ask to be paid for working extra time or for a salary that matches their qualifications. 

“We just like to play hard to get with them really,’ continued Cook, “if they get very desperate to find a job, they’ll settle for anything.”

The post PhD Graduate Struggling To Translate Hours Of Pipetting Into Relevant Skill For Office-Based Job appeared first on dnatured journal.