Finding (and with any luck properly articulating) flaws in reasoning, methods, process is a favorite past-time. So thank goodness I can direct these energies into science, because they could get pretty destructive on the home-front.

With that in mind, my critique of last week’s journal club presenter is two-fold. Firstly, the presentation involved an obscene amount of  ”um”. Now, I prefer “um” to “like” any day, and nerves are nerves. But I did want to scream, “C’mon, just stop with that noise.” Secondly, the research was presented almost as if the presenter was a member of that research group. Pronouns like “we” snuck there way in there when all in the room are fully aware that the presenter was not involved in this research. Improper pronouns aside, there was no critique of methods, analysis, interpretations – no critique at all.

In my relatively unschooled opinion, the lack of critical insights really undermined the presentation. Partly because (so far as I can tell) no research is flawless, and partly because the audience would have been more engaged had the presenter done more than just summarize the paper. Most of the incoming questions were in the form of “Do you know if they or anyone has tried method X?” or “Have you seen analysis Y”, and most of the answers were “No, I haven’t come across that data”. It seemed like the audience wanted more. But the best question, from the head of the grad program (and a woman definitely in the running for best dressed faculty, but that’s another post) asked the presenter to assess the analysis methods used by the researchers. And our presenter nervously came through with a considered assessment, that would have made a much better bullet point  than most of the densely worded points that were dictated to us that afternoon.

Of course, this is in no way designed to insinuate that I could do better. Preparing for my first poster presentation brought me to tears, and promted a faculty member to remind me that “they can smell fear” (though the poster session went well, and was actualy a lot of fun)  – I will certainly make mistakes when my time comes. And I will certainly attend all Journal Club sessions from here on.

Recently, in my new quest to read what other people write about their lives in science, I came acorss some posts on the topic of  Impostor Syndrome. Written in 2007 by an anonymous PhD student under the title I love Science, Really , this three-part post includes a link to a paper on the topic (with assessment quiz! I score a 69.) Briefly, the term Impostor Syndrome refers to the tendency of high achieving women to doubt their abilities and harbor fears that one day they will be exposed as frauds.  The focus of ILSR’s discussion was the prevalence of this feelingamong women in science.  And I wholeheartedly agree that this is a major dysfunction among women in this field. But would these women feel these same secret-faker-feeling  had they not chosen a career in science or academia?

While there are plenty of science-specific hurdles for women, I have to argue that this feeling is not limited to high achievement, or the sciences, or even specifically  to women. (A well timed voice from the radio says that  art is “a man’s world” as I write this.) But, a quick scan of my hard drive reveals I’ve never verbalized the impostor feeling to a man, and no man with whom I’ve been professionally acquainted has ever admitted his imposterhood to me. So maybe it is specific to some women, perfectionists, people with high standards, people who are really hard on themselves, people who define self-worth partially through work, or people who have staked it all on a certain endeavor for one reason or another.

So, what’s the appropriate response to someone who’s baring their faking fears? In no situation (yet)  have I given the right response, but I think it’s something really positive like “You’re great at what you do”,  not “Fake it ’til you make it”, which I will (with some embarrassment) admit I having said.   It’s a dark place, and I remain relieved that other people go there too. Below, a list of the moderately entertaining doubts I’ve harbored and the jobs they were attached to – a matching game.

Impostor’s thoughts

• I am just pretending to be in charge, and when these kids figure that out there will be blood.
• What if I screw up that regular customer’s order AGAIN!
• I have no interest in making this bed/selling this cupcake/doing my boss’ bidding/painting this wall/packing this artwork/making this coffee - it’s hard to focus and I do a half assed job – if I can’t even do this right how will I ever do what I really want to do.
• I guess I am doing well, but it’s just a matter of formulaic work, intelligence has nothing to do with it.
• I should be too smart for food-service/house-painting/managing someone else’s bills, but maybe this is all I’m good  at.
• I am not actually that creative,  and the more I force it the sooner I’ll wind up working in food-service again an justifying my lack of creative output as a choice I’ve made.
• I am not actually that smart, faking it completely.

Imposter’s Jobs (there may be more than more correct match for each job)

Scientist, Baker, Barista, Nursing home assistant, Decorative painter, Art teacher, Artist, Artists’ assistant, Student part 1, Student part 2.

I work with chick embryos, so the illustration above, found here , entertains on a few different levels.  Recognizing  unanticipated bonus data, or just distinguishing between important and unimportant details seems to be one of the most useful skills in this field. I’d rank it right below the ability to recognize when data are saying something completely unexpected, or telling you that your experiment is flawed.  At this point, I have difficulty knowing the difference between a thing I’ve seen a couple of times and could quantify, and a thing I have seen a couple of times but have no real way to keeping track of or comparing with the other things I am keeping track of.

Besides things related directly to my research, I also try to keep track of other things. Re-training for a new career involves a lot of boyscout style orienteering. Being six to eight years behind the people my own age in the field, I have just beginning to understand how the world that I now inhabit works. What’s good, what’s bad, what’s just middling. So, I find myself in the dark woods of neuroscience often, sometimes with and sometimes without a compass. Last weekend, I attended a local SfN meeting with some interesting speakers from worlds outside of neuroscience (in the strict sense, anyway).  Robots that learn from and respond to their environment pattern after neuronal development to a certain extent.  This week, I found a visualization of patterning in citations. It is fascinating to see how isolated (or connected) different scientific disciplines are. In short - because I am out of time – robotics and computer science plus neuroscience equals some really interesting stuff.

My time on the computer is over now, and in keeping with certain new-year initiatives, I’ll publish this without making it perfect. (But reserve the right to fix it later. )

While not as informative as I would have hoped, here’s a fun image that I made in ImageJ.

ImageJ is a free NIH sponsored sciencey-photoshop program, minus the user friendly interface.

]]> http://fishprint.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/adjustments/feed/ 0 fishprint http://fishprint.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/i-spent-all-morning-doing-something-that-didnt-work/ http://fishprint.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/i-spent-all-morning-doing-something-that-didnt-work/#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:20:12 +0000 fishprint http://fishprint.wordpress.com/?p=37 ]]> Matt the part-time lab tech says, “That’s science”, with a goofy smile.

Time, I say to myself, for some computer work. 

Here are some pictures of things that didn’t work.

Look at that! 

This is a merger of two images of the same area of tissue (dorsal roots into neural tube) taken with the Multiphoton microscope today.

These are not results, rather they are only the very beginning of figuring out how to get results. But they’re promising and pretty.

What I am trying to image, is the longitudinal extension of sensory afferents in the neural tube. The cell bodies of these axons live in little clumps all up and down either side of the spinal cord, and they project towards the mid-line (eventually into the grey matter of the cord itself) and towards the periphery (so you can detect sensations like pain, temperature and pressure). In the embryo, chicken, these cells develop in the ganglia and then grow into the cord. But before they grow in, they grow rostrally (north) and caudally (south) in neural tube. How this growth progresses normally, and what effect inhibited or enhanced cAMP (part of cellular messaging systems) has on the growth – these are the things I am trying to understand and visualize.

With that in mind, the little branches at the bottom are what interest me. The big blobs at the top are the dorsal root ganglia, painstakingly labeled with DiI in live tissue, and then preserved. The extensions out of the blobs are the dorsal roots extending into the neural tube, and the branching at the bottom appears to be the longitudinal extension of these axons within the neural tube.

So, the theory goes, if I can get these pictures, I can get better pictures, live pictures (skipping the preservation step), and eventually sort of a movie of the growth in real time using that fancy microscope. Right now, it seems like it is not an impossibility; and in truth, I am looking forward to giving it a shot.

Here is my favorite. The clearest globe-like ganglion with it’s little roots and longitudinal extensions just streaming out, reaching for those other segments. Enjoy!

Now that my main job is microdissection, I spend a lot of time using different microscopes. Only in passing will I note that most microscopes in my lab come with notes on them to remind us all of the basics of using anything; “turn off after use”, etc. And yes, I do have a favorite scope – the Leica Wild 10 in the embryology room. It doesn’t slip out of focus, is located in a room where I can turn off all the lights and shut the door, has appropriate levels levels of magnification (because I need to dissect little tiny things!), and nice functioning adjustable lights

Although I love the Leica Wild, it may soon be replaced with a new winning scope. Last week I went down down down into the basement and visited the BioRad MultiPhoton microscope for the first time. This microscope is so cool that it exists in a private room jammed with what I can only describe as tons of complicated stuff and what seems to be one helluva computer. According to the word on the street, this baby cost a ton of money . On top of that, it requires a full time guy (appropriately bearded and outfitted in a seemingly endless series of tucked in flannel shirts) to teach people like me how to get images out of it.  This guy is not a tech (Editing from the future: I soon figure out he does MUCH more than just teach people like me to not break expensive equipment). He’s the director of Imaging and Physiology who helps teach classes with titles like “Three-dimensional Cryo Electron Microscopy of Single Particles”. And he has a wife and a two year old child – obviously amazing.

But as much as I would like to figure out exactly how one becomes expert in operating such machines, and in the process of three-dimensional cryo electron microscopy of single particles, while still finding the time and inclination to procreate – it will be a while until I get to take my little pulsating blobs of living tissue down  to make movies of their insides. Crawling before walking… and really, before I even think about crawling I have got to flip myself over onto my belly and turn on some primal brainstem and spinal cord pattern generators to see if they’re working.

In terms of the project, this means I have to get the live tissue dissected out and properly labeled to see how certain axons grow during the different stages of development. Today was devoted to getting that live tissue dissected out. This involves taking one of those gorgeous embryos, removing it from the egg, eviscerating, decapitating, and “blocking” it so that only the spinal column (with T4 carefully marked) remains. Then begins the rather painstaking task of removing the neural tube, with dorsal root ganglia and (hopefully) dorsal roots attached. Amazingly, after plenty of frustration, and the acquisition of my very own personal pair of very pointy number five forceps, I was able to do it three times. And at five pm, my difficult to please mentor said “That’s nice and clean -but maybe too clean, you’ve probably severed the dorsal roots”.

Ah, science. Frustration, trial and error, and very picky people who notice every little thing. But, in any case, I left the lab floating on a minute cloud of satisfying accomplishment. Ready settle into the evening with a review paper on live imaging, or at least to carry it with me from room to room with good intentions.

Big girl was my first dissection, a cat, for my anatomy and physiology class at community college last year (when I first returned to school). Half of the A+P sections worked with clay models, the other half did the more traditional cat dissections. Everyone did the sheep brain and cow eye. And luck of the draw had me in a cat section. Faced with an embalmed cat, my beliefs were out the window – I wanted to learn the anatomy, and told myself a convenient lie that the cats were euthanized from shelters. Still can’t figure out what part of my brain made that up. But, however flawed and false my rationalizations, there is no denying that I learned from Big Girl. Named by Ana, one of my Polish lab partners who refused to touch her, I became intimately acquainted with the muscles, nerves, organs and blood vessels of this large female cat. I liked working with my hands, learning with my hands – and I can say confidently that a cadaver would have been better, but the cat taught me all of the foundations.

By saying that a cadaver would have been better, does that somehow excuse me from participating in the death of this cat to teach a bunch of community college kids anatomy? I guess that’s my way of qualifying – sure I would have learned from a human, why don’t you donate your body? But, by calling that class a bunch of community college kids, I am oversimplifying and not giving them or myself any credit. Everyone who finished that class wanted to work in health care. The majority will be LPNs, nurse’s aids or RNs, some will become NPs, PAs or doctors. I can only assume that those cats gave the rest of the people in the class a similar foundation, and what’s that worth? At the risk of dramatizing, what’s that worth when you’re in an ambulance?

Well, this question will not be resolved easily, or through monologue. Back to the embryos. They are small, really tiny. Surrounded by yolk and other membranes that I can not yet name, they are so perfectly perfect when you get up close to them. It is a shame to poke at them with blades “dull as ditch water” according to Betsy. They are also somewhat colorless, aside from the blood, making texture the main distinguishing feature between tissues. I tried and failed to extract three embryos from their yolks. I saved two more eggs for tomorrow, hopefully sleep will refine my motor skills.

First days are first days. And, philospohical concerns aside, hopefully these embryos will teach me as much as Big Girl did.