That's why they call it RE-search

Well, sigh. After Hedwig's last comment, I am sorry to hear that Starsucks is not accepting applications from PhDs who can't seem to hack it on the "competitive" (read: political) job market in science.

I am feeling like a hack, that is for sure.

So, when last we visited our heroine, she was proud to have finally obtained a PCR product and was anxiously awaiting the sequence confirmation.

Well, turns out it's the wrong thing. Guess why? Oh come on, you know you already know the answer!

Yes folks, the sequence I used for designing the primers was wrong. I give up, I think everyone should know that NCBI is just chock full of errors. If they're not going to curate the sequences, there is just no point is having it around. It causes more problems than it solves.

Someone brilliant in my lab finally told me she uses the Sanger database instead, so I went and checked, and sure enough, that seems to be a lot more trustworthy.

And guess what? All the other sequence alignment problems I was having were also due to the sequence being just plain wrong. So I am back at square one again. Fortunately I only lost about a week this time.

Ha ha ha. Oh, research is so much FUN!!

The whole idea of scientific method is supposed to be based on the concept that we can build on those who went before us. Right? But if you can't trust the most basic assumptions, like, public databases should at least be checked for MAJOR ERRORS , it's all crap.

We are the singing, dancing, crap of the world!

Anyway, at least if I were kicked out of this lab, I could honestly say I made a go of it, I tried, and now I can justify working in a coffee shop and singing for tips, or whatever it is people do when they are unemployed musicians. Somehow I think "unemployed musician" is looking a lot more appealing right now than this pointless banging my head against a brick wall, waiting to see if my advisor is going to hit the fan when she finds out about all this random circular chasing-my-tail I've been doing lately. And here I was hoping to have it all figured out by the time I give lab meeting!

HAHAHAHAHA