That’s one hell of a post! I appreciate all points made and the interest to share. I’m generally familiar with all of this.
Your experience as a postdoc joining the project as finisher is very similar to one episode I had in cancer research. I could not replicate previous results from a newly minted PhD, or demonstrate further anticipated results. Then I started testing (with a fancy nested PCR assay) the lab’s archived cell lines and determined they were widely contaminated. Those cell lines used for the project in question had the most potent mycoplasma signal. The PI basically stopped communicating with me after that, out of embarrassment and a passive shoot the messenger attitude.
The lab described above was overrun with undergrads without proper training or supervision. I was capable, motivated, and could have helped improve the lab in all manner of activity and mentorship. But no, this was a Cargo Cult where everyone was expected to individually imitate the high impact publications and hot narratives. I found myself in labs like this not once, but 4 different times.
My latest efforts to work with the best were rather successful, but I’ve still given up hope for my science career. Now I know from the inside that HHMI is as woke as it gets, and they have jumped straight off the cliff. The constant DEI propaganda and prominent role in promoting the Plandemic shattered the last shreds of respect.
Stories like that are so depressing. I can't say leaving is a bad choice. There are still some good people in there interested in science, at the moment, but I wonder what is coming in the future when those become fewer and the corrupting influences take greater hold. I wish there were some alternatives, outside of the academy, for people to get started in a biology-related career. It's tough now because of the expectation of slaving away at PhD and postdoc positions. For now I'm skeptical that going to industry first gives enough opportunities to lead to a position for much innovation, unfortunately.
Our stories are more similar than you thought. In my role as a finisher, I first started using the lines then got the "bad" (real) results, then found they had mycoplasma (and not just for that project, it was every single line in the lab, which they kept using). Unfortunately, the PI, and member who had been working on the project a while, thought that the mycoplasma was the explanation for the bad results so they wasted more resources on it. Also, it was the same situation. There was almost no one formally trained on the basics and the PI traveled non-stop and rarely ran the lab, beyond pressuring everyone to have good results from afar.
That’s one hell of a post! I appreciate all points made and the interest to share. I’m generally familiar with all of this.
Your experience as a postdoc joining the project as finisher is very similar to one episode I had in cancer research. I could not replicate previous results from a newly minted PhD, or demonstrate further anticipated results. Then I started testing (with a fancy nested PCR assay) the lab’s archived cell lines and determined they were widely contaminated. Those cell lines used for the project in question had the most potent mycoplasma signal. The PI basically stopped communicating with me after that, out of embarrassment and a passive shoot the messenger attitude.
The lab described above was overrun with undergrads without proper training or supervision. I was capable, motivated, and could have helped improve the lab in all manner of activity and mentorship. But no, this was a Cargo Cult where everyone was expected to individually imitate the high impact publications and hot narratives. I found myself in labs like this not once, but 4 different times.
My latest efforts to work with the best were rather successful, but I’ve still given up hope for my science career. Now I know from the inside that HHMI is as woke as it gets, and they have jumped straight off the cliff. The constant DEI propaganda and prominent role in promoting the Plandemic shattered the last shreds of respect.
Stories like that are so depressing. I can't say leaving is a bad choice. There are still some good people in there interested in science, at the moment, but I wonder what is coming in the future when those become fewer and the corrupting influences take greater hold. I wish there were some alternatives, outside of the academy, for people to get started in a biology-related career. It's tough now because of the expectation of slaving away at PhD and postdoc positions. For now I'm skeptical that going to industry first gives enough opportunities to lead to a position for much innovation, unfortunately.
Our stories are more similar than you thought. In my role as a finisher, I first started using the lines then got the "bad" (real) results, then found they had mycoplasma (and not just for that project, it was every single line in the lab, which they kept using). Unfortunately, the PI, and member who had been working on the project a while, thought that the mycoplasma was the explanation for the bad results so they wasted more resources on it. Also, it was the same situation. There was almost no one formally trained on the basics and the PI traveled non-stop and rarely ran the lab, beyond pressuring everyone to have good results from afar.