Cultural differences

So in discussing the Boobywars on ScienceBlogs, one commenter made a point of telling other ladies to show off their feminine attributes without fear, because we could not live our lives in fear and must, at some point, square our shoulders and work to change our culture. However, she also mentioned that she was surprised that junior scientists and students in her lab had intimated that they had used their feminine wiles to get grades, assistance, etc. and then went on to joke a bit about the importance of putting various unguents on one's breasts to make them more lustrous. I joked back, well, a better option might be glue, all things considered--I don't want to put on a peepshow by mere accidental stumble. She was not amused by my joke and seemed a bit horrified, as if the joke had been pushed too far for her liking. Maybe it was.

But the more I thought about it, the more it struck me that she must come from an extremely different world than me, money-wise. I went to school in economically depressed areas of the US, where double-digit unemployment was the rule rather than the exception. Women students at my alma mater frequently did put themselves through school by gluing things to their breasts and then jiggling the results at paying men. That was not unusual in the least; it was seen as just another option for a part-time job in college, like bartending. It paid rather better than most other part-time jobs, but this was looked on as hazard pay, similar to any other dangerous job that is done by part-time contractors (crab fishing, lumberjacks, etc.) and can only be done by the relatively young and healthy. Nor was it unheard-of for undergrad women to collect their tips from their own university department heads. The women themselves saw their own bodies as a straightforward economic resource, not a game. They wouldn't have found the commenter's joke funny, merely puzzling. Why would you put Vaseline on your breasts for any reason? Didn't she know it would make your skin break out? Then they'd expound on the many types of body make-up, relative pricing, ease of use, and so on. Some worked as prostitutes, also.

I cannot emphasize enough how normal and regular this was, especially for working class students. Lower-middle class students, whose parents were just barely able to send their daughters to school, but not able to afford them the tutoring and private schools that would have given them enough academic skills to compete, were more apt to trade their bodies for grades and favors. They didn't have any other means of getting grades enough to meet their aspirations, although those aspirations were not usually any different from those of wealthy students whose parents expected them to become doctors, lawyers and chief executives.

{Male students who needed to raise money in a hurry usually used their organic chemistry skills to manufacture LSD. You could correlate the student drug busts exactly with the announcement of tuition increases and the bursar's billing schedule. Students who only occasionally deal drugs aren't good at avoiding police detection. Basically, there's just not enough financial aid for students who need it, there aren't enough jobs for students who need them, and the jobs that exist don't pay enough. A temporarily crummy or black market job to get a leg up in the class wars is worth it to some people. They've seen how their parents live and don't want to die like that. But I digress.}

For decades, my alma mater's chemistry department was run by a man who did trade grades for boobage. All the chemistry teachers were known for grading their large lecture sections hard, and women especially. Some of my friends would experiment on their professors by coordinating their answers with the male students, then comparing grades. Male students got A-s and B+s for the same exam answers that merited a C- from female students. When this was brought to the attention of the department head, they were given the option of trading oral sex or stripteases for a revised grade. This scam went on for many years before the department head in question tried it on the wrong student, who promptly sued. One of my undergrad advisors argued on his behalf in court that it was grossly unfair of the school to fire him, since he had tenure.

When I went to grad school in an area that was far from economically depressed, in an area that was in the midst of a small boom, there were no strip clubs, no bad part of town where hookers cruised, no known whorehouses, and a few college bars which any respectable person could be publicly observed. Only a few students ever complained to me that they needed financial aid, and for the most part they managed to get scholarships or additional loans. The lower-middle class kids did offer to trade sex for grades, but this was fairly infrequent and many professors were horrified by the propositions they received.

It struck me that the commenter and I are coming from such different experiences. I don't think to show off any of my feminine attributes, well fit as they are, because when I was a lass showing off your figure was something women might do for money, certainly not for free, and it was a job I didn't want. There were professional jobs that I wanted to have, grubby jobs I didn't want to have, and showing off your feminine wiles was grouped along with "scrubbing toilets" and "car salesman" under the Jobs I Don't Want heading. Things I might have to do out of economic necessity, but would prefer not to do if at all possible. Yet to the commenter, her breasts and sexuality are toys, a joke, a fun part of her appearance and something she can afford to lecture other ladies about. If she ever struggled with a difficult class, no doubt her first tactic was to study harder, get tutored, attend extra study sessions. She didn't have to do the calculus of X hours in class + Y hours at work = no additional time for studying, and wonder how to pass a needed course at her wits' end. She cannot see how her economic advantage shaped her thinking on the matter, or how she can afford to be brave in the confidence that she has many other options for battle or for escape if she encounters a sexist situation.

Animal rights activists firebomb university scientists

Winning hearts and minds.

Disclaimer: I have done animal research in the past on rats, mice and squirrels, although I don't do that currently. I raise cage-free, extremely spoiled chickens in my barn, and occasionally have to cull them if they are injured or ill beyond recovery. I fish regularly, and eat local venison when they feast on my garden. I have no compunctions about killing wasps, mosquitoes, aphids, slugs, wireworms, or any other garden pests. I keep an extremely spoiled dog and several cats. So I probably qualify as Evil as far as animal rights go.

In my experience, the animal rights folks--and I know many, my mother included--don't have an awful lot of experience working with actual animals. They specifically don't want any, either, which seems odd to me, since a horrible lot of animals end up in rescue situations where they could use some love and support from a hairless monkey with compassion and time to spare. In a sort of circular logic, I can see this, if you're starting from the point that it's wrong to domesticate animals at all for any reason. That this first point is obviously wrong doesn't seem to matter to them--is it also wrong to wear clothing, cook food with fire, eat with silverware or take birth control? We've domesticated ourselves to a large extent, too. I guess it's OK to domesticate yourself because you're doing it to yourself, but that argument also applies to human babies and plants--is it wrong to eat any kind of tomato that isn't a landrace, or eat maize in any form, or consume the many Rosaceae derivatives that have been domesticated these past few millennia? Or is that OK because plants aren't sentient? How do you know for sure they aren't sentient, though? Lots of things don't look like animals but really are, and other things that look sentient really aren't at all. You end up with the whole epistemology question again.

True story: I had a philosophy professor once, a seriously involved animal rights activist, who said that we should all use traditional Chinese medicine because it's so much kinder to animals. Yeah, she really said that. And many of the animal rights people I know feel that we should use something other than animals because there are all these alternative ways of doing things out there. Only, in actual point of fact, when you ask them what specifically these ways are and how they've been validated, because our animal rooms are damn costly and a real pain in the arse to staff, they haven't got any answers.

Quite frankly, I don't think many scientists really enjoy doing the animal work. I don't know any who wouldn't rather use something else if they possibly can. Petri dishes don't need fed on weekends, they don't bite, they cost about a buck, one tech can manage about a thousand of them, and you get results in a couple of days rather than a couple of months or a couple of years. Here's the alternatives we've got and their relative drawbacks:

Genomics: There are several techniques in genomic analysis and transcriptome analysis. The most developed one is probably the AffyChip system. Error rates for the Affy system are about 10%; that is, 10% of the hits you get as "gene expressed/present in this sample" are wrong. To some extent you can correct by using longer oligos, better computer algorithms, but really you do have to run RT-PCRs to confirm hits. The initial capital equipment investment is not small either. And the fundamental problem is, this only tells you about genes, and genes aren't everything. There are several other levels of molecular control, which an Affy system will tell you nothing about.

Proteomics: There are several proteomics workbenches on the market. They also have some nasty error rates. The proteomics problem is, there are a couple million proteins in any human and they can all have their own subtle differences even with the same transcript. So most people focus on a single tissue. However, this often produces as much gobbledegook as actual data, as proteins tend to be very subtle things rather than the simpler on/off mechanisms that genes have.

Metabolomics: We don't have any good models yet. We just don't. Although folks have been trying for many years to cobble together models of the pathways, they are still not good predictors and at best can only work with extremely simple control loops. Whole people aren't simple.

Tissue culture: OK, so let's say I add Drug X to my dish of human liver tissue to see how it behaves. My liver tissue is immortalized through various means; how do I know that the immortalization process (whether through viral transfection or creating lesions in the DNA or by creating hybridomas) didn't screw up the metabolic processes? Because it usually does, to some extent. But let's take it for granted that this liver culture is pretty good, and also that the lack of an epithelium to affect uptake and diffusion isn't a problem. Even assuming that my liver tissue culture will do a decent approximation of first pass kinetics, how do I know that other tissues won't be affected by the metabolites? Do I test all the thousands of tissues in a human? We don't have cultures for all of them, but we do have cultures for many of them. We do, in fact, have high throughput systems and liquid handling mechanisms that we could probably test a couple thousand tissues in triplicate on a gradient. That still doesn't tell me whether or not all the tissues working together will behave the same way.

And the error rate due to the immortalization process is cumulative. Cell cultures drift over time, in many cases over a fairly short time--say, three months. It's the nature of immortalized tissue to drift genetically, because it hasn't got the control mechanisms to correct its own genes. Worse that that, tissue cultures can be very delicate things. You've seen news stories about Compound X that "kills cancer in tissue cultures"? Everything, except possibly sterile heat-treated fetal calf serum, will kill a cancer cell in a tissue culture! Other cancer cells in the same bloody dish will kill their neighbors in tissue culture! The mere shear stress of pipetting the cells up and down too often kills cancer cells in tissue culture, but that doesn't mean that if you ride enough roller coasters you won't get cancer. Tissue cultures are not stable critters.

Co-culture in a reactor to produce complex systems: Sometimes these are advertised as "growing organs," but they're more like growing a piece of an organ rather than the whole thing. Again, you've got a piece of a cancerous growth in a highly-oxygenated, extremely artificial condition. It may share a proteome with a human tissue, but it sure doesn't quantitate expression the same way.

So, we could use some other tools. Hey, animal rights folks say we should develop them, and I agree. I don't like having to wait two months for Drug X results, either. It seems to me that since animal rights groups have many dedicated people and get plenty of donations, that they should establish some cell & molecular biology scholarships and fellowships, fund a grant or ten, and develop us some better tools. I would love, LOVE to have a metabolomics in silico model of a human, to start with, and that only requires a bunch of textbooks, a UV-Vis spectrometer, some Sigma-Aldrich reagents and a couple of good computer programmers. If I had a couple of good engineers and didn't have to work full-time, I'd do it myself. Most of my colleagues have been begging our bosses to let us do it, but they are fussy about having us focus on curing cancer and stuff, they don't want us to spend a lot of time developing tools as we are not a tool-making company. You could sell such a model for a small fortune to various drug companies, thereby eliminating much animal suffering and experimentation, as well as earning a living and being able to quit your day job. The cost of the grant to fund it would be, oh, let's put it at $125,000/year for three years, meh, round it up to $500,000. Surely some animal rights group has $500,000 to spare? Isn't that, like, a fraction of their advertising budget?

Anthrax researcher dies

I'm actually quite interested to see how this case turns out. So far every article posted on CNN, BBC, etc. have been very lite on facts. Although I did some work for ECBC (the Fort Detrick bioweapons center) myself as a contractor, I didn't know Dr. Ivins.

From what the half-arsed articles say, the FBI's case is basically, "he swabbed some areas without getting official approval first, and it turned out the swabs did find anthrax in those areas, where it wasn't supposed to be." They declare this highly suspicious on the grounds that he should have gotten approval first.

O RLY? What if, say, his results demonstrated that the Fort Detrick containment system was a joke, and that there was no place safe in the whole building from the bugs they had stored there, and that the senior management knew this and put all the workers and contractors in danger on a daily basis because it would be Too Expensive to pack up the hazards, ship 'em to CDC, and re-engineer the whole entire lab complex from the ground up? What if his results would have caused a major scandal for the organization and about a zillion lawsuits? What if his boss, upon receiving Dr. Ivins' request for permission to swab those areas, realized what havoc a positive result would wreak, and therefore said Absolutely Not?

Anyone who thinks that senior managers don't knowingly pull shenanigans with highly dangerous stuff hasn't been out in the working world long enough. Talk to an environmental engineer who does fieldwork and Due Diligence for chemical company acquisitions. Talk to the industrial hygienists who clean up after regular everyday hazards in coal mines, chemical plants and steel mills on a daily basis. Just two years ago, about an hour up I-95 from me, a big paint manufacturer went kaboom, leaving naught but a giant crater where the building used to be. Turned out that management and their process engineers had knowingly created a faulty flammable liquid handling manufacturing method that resulted in the explosion. Miraculously, no one was killed, only injured. It would not surprise me one bit to find out that USAMRIID managers calculated the risk of what could happen if it turned out the cooties had indeed escaped the lab, and turned Dr. Ivins reasonable and concerned request down. And then decided to throw him under the bus. Unfortunately, government officials and senior managers with a lot of money and their own personal careers at stake, really don't have a great track record on accountability and integrity. They've got a great track record for scapegoating though. That's just the working world for you.

And sadly, I don't know that Agent Scully, with all her science, actually works at the FBI. You have to be a bit of a specialist even as a scientist to understand why a microbiologist might go around swabbing stuff after their boss told them it was a bad idea, and then understand what the molecular diagnostics mean and how to interpret them. Did the FBI have such a specialist review the sequencing results thoroughly, including the bioinformatic logarithms of the computer program used to analyze them, and troubleshoot accordingly? Were the sequences double-checked by some other method? What level of identity was considered a reasonable match, and how was that acceptable mismatch level calculated? Were they working from theory or from a library or what? Did the FBI know to ask this stuff? Or did they just take Dr. Ivins' boss' word for it that everything was done properly? Did they seize the notebooks and samples and try to re-create the results? If not, why not? I would think that the very first step in such an investigation would be to figure out who might be telling a tall tale, especially who might have a vested interest in blaming someone whose career is conveniently over, but then again I am not a criminal investigator. I don't even play one on TV.

John Tierney ignores (mountains of) data that do not support his hypothesis

I can't believe my mother hasn't emailed me this NYT article yet. It's right up her alley. Any minute now, my inbox should be pinging with a reminder that I am unnatural, not female, possibly not human, and any day now my British husband will squeeze into a tutu and leave me for a gay man who does better oral than me. Isn't that the gawd-ordained fate of a female scientist?

I don't mind, actually, if my being a scientist means I can't be a woman too. As long as I get to keep the multiple orgasms, Mr. Tierney can envision a new gender for me, since I definitely don't have a penis. Although this brings to mind a whole new genre of pornography...

Anyway, for anyone interested, the fact of sexism in science can be found at the following links, although I really dislike having to repeat what has been shouted by many, many people and which Mr. Tierney is well aware of:

Nature, SherryTowers' investigation of Fermilab
European Commission Directorate-General Research Report on sexism in STEM (pdf)
A whole wagon-load of scholarly references, brought to you by Science (pdf)

You know what discouraged me from going into science/tech/eng? It wasn't all that subtle. I mean, when you sit down in your high school algebra class on the first day of eleventh grade, and your teacher sneers at the class that he doesn't want to teach this class because, and I quote, "you girls should all be in Home Ec, not taking a college prep level class," that was a pretty clear indicator that I wasn't welcome. Thanks, Mr. Tryba!

Also, I'm Pennsylvania Dutch. I was reared to bake really good pies, muck out barns, and serve dinner to the menfolk and to Grandmom, who ruled the Thanksgiving table with an iron fist. Not to be "anything you want to be, honey!" unlike many young women these days. I was told in no uncertain terms that I could not have X, Y and Z because it was a Thing For Boys. My mother figured that when I went to college (which she wasn't willing to pay for, not for a daughter), I would study art or English Lit or some cheesy thing until I got my MRS degree. She demanded, several times, that I not take classes she didn't approve of, even though she wasn't paying for them. Nor was she above going through my mail to find out if I was lying about my course schedule. My honors advisor once had a faux schedule printed up for her benefit, and I used to get mail at my advisor's office for that reason.

When I was an undergrad, oh lordy, which story do I tell? The one about the genetics prof who regaled a room full of honors students (men and women) with his stories of picking up prostitutes to see to his "manly needs"? The one about the ecology prof who couldn't keep his hands to himself and figured that having tenure meant you could perv on your students and hang up Playboy centerfolds in the main office? The other genetics prof who told his class that "ladies are always welcome to come to class without their clothes"? The chemistry department head who, if you asked for help on the homework, offered to exchange sex for grades with several students before finally picking on an Iraq War v. 1.0 vet who sued him into oblivion? They've all created some special memories, for sure.

It's funny, does anyone really ask why people leave science? I see a lot of speculation in the editorial pages of the weekly journals, plus a lot of speculation by the authors Mr. Tierney cites, ("women just aren't interested"--did you ask? no you didn't, you ASSumed) but it seems like no one really asks anyone. Maybe we should have exit interviews. I know many of my fellow alumnae ended up going to nursing, dentistry or medical school instead of into research as a direct result of their experiences with sexism. I know several female co-workers who went into nursing school or teaching because they needed a steadier job than STEM could offer; outside of the coastal areas of the US and a few select regions in Europe, steady, middle-class-paying jobs for scientists, engineers and mathematicians are pretty thin on the ground. When I lived in the Midwest, I once was offered a job that involved temping for a full year before the possibility of full-time work would even be considered, for $15/hour, with a 90-minute commute (one way), no health insurance, working with BSL-3s. And this was for a federal defense contractor. Nursing, with starting pay at $20/hour and all the benefits you can eat, looks pretty good from there.

I can also see the rationalization that women leave for family reasons. I've always wanted a stay-at-home wife, myself; you know, the kind from the 1950s who does all the housework and greets you at the door with a cold drink and dinner ready? I asked my husband if he would be a househusband, though, and he didn't seem too keen on the idea. He immediately saw the downside to being a stay-at-home spouse: economic insecurity, infinite boredom, social aspects of work, plus the basic reality that doing housework all day really blows. But if you have a spouse who earns a lot more than you (likely, given the usual wage disparity in most jobs), and your actual workplace isn't all that social or fulfilling (perhaps because your colleagues are sexist jerks), then maybe daytime TV and play-dates with the neighborhood Mommy Brigade don't look so bad.

Hey, there's my inbox now! I bet it's mom...

How To Compress Training Time

Someone on Scienceblogs said they'd be interested in learning about training compression. Industrial geeks will notice that what I am posting here is extremely similar to cGLP/cGMP methods, with a little bit of Mayo Clinic-style training and Dale Carnegie thrown into the mix. I've used these methods to train technicians, scientists and engineers to run the old-fashioned stainless steel chemical reactors as mammalian cell culture bioreactors, to teach undergrads the fine art of protein purification and various biochemical techniques, and to teach chemical engineers basic biology and tissue culture. It used to take my employer about two years to train people to run the bioreactor hall, and now it takes about three to four months. However, if you choose to cherry-pick what I'm posting, realize that you may only get incremental results depending on what technique you select. I'll explain why in a bit.

First: Lots of people who teach in academia have never, not once, had any training or seminars on how to be a good teacher. Some people are naturally good teachers, but those are few and far between. When you’re teaching an auditorium full of bored undergrads, it’s a qualitatively different experience from training someone whose failure could mean your livelihood and health on the line. Trainers cannot rely on their awsum innate skillz to be good at teaching. Don’t rely on student feedback forms to tell you if you’re a good teacher or trainer, either; if you handed out free As for everyone regardless of merit, you’d get great reviews too. If I had a dozen students sleeping through lecture in an auditorium full of 400 other kids, it was no biggie—I handed them an F, told them they could take it up with the dean if they wanted, and sent them on their merry. When the engineer I worked with didn’t thoroughly check the valve configuration and filled the entire 2000 square meter bioreactor hall with hot caustic NaOH to a depth of 2 cm, that was a Problem. In order to be a good trainer, you have to want to be a good trainer, is what I’m getting at. The old, “But I’ve been teaching for a zillion years! That should count for something!” is really not sufficient. My bum has been a bum for…well, a very long time…and I don’t listen to what it says, either. The true test of whether or not you are a good trainer is how quickly your trainees get up to speed and the trainee’s skill level.

Now, about the cherry-picking: The first lesson you learn in education is that people learn in different ways. Some people learn by visual demonstrations. Some people learn by reading. Some people have to have something verbally explained to them. Other people learn by doing something hands-on and figuring out the spatial relationships themselves. Most people have some combination of techniques that helps them learn best. In order to make a whole group of people learn something, you need to have a way of teaching to all of their preferred methods. So, if you decide you’ll only have a ring binder of protocols in the lab for anyone to peruse at their leisure, you’re leaving out the folks who need something explained verbally, the folks who need a demonstration, and so on and so forth, not to mention leaving yourself at the tender mercies of the poor grad student who gets the thankless task of writing up all the protocols. By having super-redundant training methods, you not only reach everyone in your audience but you also make sure that all those crucial details have been communicated to several people for proofreading and troubleshooting.

OK, enough caveats. The actual method. You start by writing every single protocol your lab has ever run in a shared electronic document where everyone can access it. The protocols need to be extremely detailed. For the sake of future publications, I strongly recommend a “Summary” section of each protocol at the beginning that can be neatly copy/pasted into manuscripts. Your Methods sections might be boring and formulaic, but they’ll be consistent and readable. After all the protocols have been written as drafts, send them round to other lab members with “Track Changes” turned on, so they can add their comments in other colors. Or send around hard copies and colored pencils. Make sure everyone gets a crack at it and that all variations on the protocol are added.

Example: Incubate the blot at room temperature for 3-18 hours in a 1:1000 solution of primary antibody in Tris buffer. TBST 0.1% Tween-20 works better—M. Smith I used 3% milk once and it was fine—J. Johnson

Then have the author execute it right in front of you while you are standing beside them. If they missed anything out of habit (“oh yeah, I forgot, you kinda have to flip that switch”), now’s the time to add it. Print hard copies. Make a shortcut on a computer that’s available to everyone. Index it, make it searchable. And be 100% certain that everyone who sets foot in the lab knows where it is and what they should expect to find in it. Follow up and make sure the book is being used and updated regularly. If it’s not, find out why not and hold the authors accountable. If someone in your lab hands you a manuscript with a method that differs significantly from your lab book, demand a resolution.

This maybe should be its own separate step, but it’s really just a part of method review: Are your protocols any good? “Why of course they are good! They were good enough for great-grandad and they are good enough for me!” Have a long hard look at your technology. Then have a long hard look at the latest offerings from Invitrogen, Perkin-Elmer, VWR, and Qiagen. Then look some more. If a protocol takes three years to do properly, and there’s no new alternative method, maybe you need to hike across campus and see if the Engineering department can come up with something better for you. Yeah, I know, back in your day you had to walk to work in the snow, uphill both ways! So did I. It only makes me all the more grateful that now I have a bunch of sleek shiny boxes and an on-site reagent shop and I don’t have to waste years cooking up endonuclease from bacteria. There’s a paper or three in developing and validating a new technology, too. Heck, there’s a whole multimillion-dollar startup, early retirement and a really cool car in that sort of thing. I’ve heard the worry that trainees won’t truly learn how to troubleshoot with a machine, and I tell you it is not so. When the machine breaks down and the field service guy can’t come out till next week, you’ll figure it out right quick. I’ve seen million-dollar automation systems temporarily repaired with rubber bands, plumbing Teflon tape and plastic zip ties by relatively inexperienced chemists.

Next step: Figure out the order that the protocols are best learned in. This order is not necessarily going to depend on the project, nor will it necessarily be with the goal of making the trainee the most useful as quickly as possible. For example, in order to make technicians extremely useful very quickly, we used to train them on the simplest, most routine, everyday protocols. Then we delegated those tasks to them and had more senior techs actually run the reactors. We figured that the techs, as they observed the larger, more complex tasks, would kind of grow into being able to do bigger and better things. This turned out to be a really lousy way to train people, because they had no way of seeing the rationale of why they were being told to do this or that. They waited to be given orders, which meant that I had to think about their schedule, my schedule, everyone else’s schedule, all the bloody time, and follow up to make sure they did it right. Since we had high turnover, that meant I was always mothering over someone new and barely had time for my own projects. When they made a mistake, it was a nightmare to go back and fix it.

What worked better was gradually introducing them to the rationale of why things happened the way they did. They learned the calculation process from the very start, by working with small cultures by hand. Sure, that meant that for a few weeks they spent a lot of time warming a chair, reading articles and watching online training presentations. By using small pumps to move cultures and media around and maintain culture splits, by working with very simple disposable reactors, they learned the basic requirements, the math and engineering that guided the system, and figured out the hows and whys. Then, when they had proven themselves on a small scale, we taught them the same thing again on the big reactors. I never, never once had to correct a tech’s math when they were taught small-scale cultures maintained by hand first. When I had full-blown engineers and scientists who were trained in the “let’s make them useful first” method, I always had to correct their math and explain something fairly elementary. Over and over and over. It had nothing to do with their innate ability, everything to do with the training method. There’s an order you need to teach, and in my experience it’s best to start with the big picture first.

Third step: Train the trainers. I think the best teachers I ever had were from a small liberal arts college. Those folks were heavily invested in teaching as their primary job, and by and large they were pretty good at it. Lots of things that I have since been told are “impossible” to teach in less than two years, they happily taught in a few months as a regular lab course: various types of liquid chromatography, protein purification, electron microscopy, tissue culture, veterinary surgery, all kinds of things. The catch is that they made a big honkin’ point of getting professors who really cared about teaching. The general method, which I have seen many other teachers and corporate trainers use with great success, is this:

1. Teach a lecture explaining the theory. Give a short quiz on theory. You need to have good lecturers do this, don’t assign it to the guy who barely speaks a word of the local language. I can just about order a beer and a sandwich in German without making a total fool of myself, but I’m sure not ready to go lecturing at Max Planck Institute.

2. Once the students are in the lab, demonstrate the technique while narrating what you are doing. This is a skill that the Dale Carnegie public speaking courses teach pretty well, and I highly recommend them.

3. Walk the students through doing the protocol themselves, nitpicking their technique until they get it exactly right. Don’t give up and decide that it’s good enough when it’s not. Really nitpick, in a nice and respectful way of course.

4. Give them a protocol to run by themselves that you know will run just fine, given the material they already have. Do not expect them to troubleshoot at this stage.

5. Demonstrate yourself, and walk the students through several scenarios, where something went horribly wrong, and explain why it was wrong and how to ensure that the wrong thing doesn’t happen.

Schedule exactly 2.5 times the length of time it normally takes you to run the protocol when everything goes smoothly, just to run each protocol one time. I can split a 2500L reactor culture in about two hours, but if I’m training someone I allocate five hours for the process. This allows time for the narrative, errors, double-checking, questions on the fly, etc. That means for a two hour task, you’re going to spend a minimum of 20 hours training someone on how to do it. And yes, that’s even if they do have prior experience and education on the protocol. They might have learned a very different way.

The key here is that you don’t want students getting frustrated with something that doesn’t work all that well to begin with. You want them to build the confidence that they can carry out this protocol, by themselves, and they can make some good guesses as to why things go wrong and how to fix it. You want them to have this self-confidence before you set them loose in the lab. Otherwise, it’s a recipe for lots of wasted materials, wasted time, wasted energy.

The bonus you get for yourself from this exercise is robustness of results. Let’s imagine you have a postdoc in your employ who seems to have magic hands that get all the right results that support your pet hypotheses du jour. When you test-drive his/her protocols with trainees, the results the trainees get are only half-baked, for some mysterious reason. Now that you realize that your results aren’t really all that reproducible, you know that you need to take a long, hard look at your postdoc’s notebooks. Hey, if the notebooks check out, are high-quality legible data written in ink, signed and dated, great. If not…

Fourth step: Make sure you hired people who can do the job. “Thanks, Captain Obvious!” Yeah, you’re welcome. But when my grad school advisor made up his mind to hire a student who had no experience, no motivation to learn, and only wanted to put in a year or two before buggering off to medical school, he didn’t see for the life of him why that was a Bad Idea. Things You Can’t Teach include motivation, interest, a love for the field, and passion. Don’t hire someone who only wants the job because they don’t know what to do with themselves, because their mommy told them they needed a Master’s, or because this was Plan Y and Plans A-X have already failed them. If a trainee sees no reason to commit a procedure to memory, they’re not going to learn it. On the contrary, you can teach someone to carry out a grad school-level procedure even if they completely lack formal education, so long as they are interested in the subject and motivated to learn.

Final step: Keep on top of it. Track who is trained on what and create a training program for all new lab members. Have trainers decide who is adequately trained, don’t leave this up to trainees. Reward people who get trained on new techniques somehow, and reward people who invent or bring new techniques from other labs. Make it clear that you value training in your lab, and that innovation will be honored and respected—a Nature Methods paper should be respected just like any other Nature paper.

Bear in mind, most of the examples presented here are from my own experience organizing training for a bioreactor suite. The important thing to take away is that this is a method for organizing thought processes of a large group and delineating the degree of training involved for both trainee and trainer. It can be applied to most any training process.