Issue Six, this eleventh day of April, 2003

'We're in a crisis'

Things you don't want to hear from your 3 year-old daughter at 7 in the morning: 'Ew, my got nose juice on the carpet!'

G'day, exiles. It's gone on long enough; Sauron Must Die. I was off sick on Monday, so missed the extraordinary lab meeting that was scheduled for then, but had to suffer before and after (during goes without saying) the regular Friday yabber-fest. I've been getting my ear bent because I haven't been able to get a derivative for 'six months' (slight exaggeration) and we need to 'grow lots of crystals' because we're now in a 'crisis'. You know, it's not as if I haven't been trying my damndest to get nice crystals, and I have tried bloody hard to get a derivative that doesn't completely blow the few good-looking crystals I do get away. The irony is of course that progress would a lot quicker if I didn't give in and try his 'suggestions'. I know, I have no backbone.

So, I made public the presence of beautiful-looking crystals of the isoform, towards the end of an excrutiating torture session during which I composed the following limericks:

There once was a hippy called Neil
Who expressed THP with zeal.
But the protein at best
Was an insoluble mess,
So he cloned a different allele.

Do you know this student called Sai?
He would give anything a try.
But his Kap95
Was barely alive:
Oh God, we're all going to die!

I knew a post-doc named Jade,
Whose knees made women afraid;
His Australian legs
Were really the dregs,
Dripping VB and lemonade.

Of course, post-LM I now have him buzzing around seeing if these new crystals diffract. And naturally, I need to disappear early today but nooooo he's getting his mucky mitts on things and SLOWING ME DOWN. Just bog off, willya? Oh my. It gets worse. He's setting up collections 'for' me. ARGH ARGH ARGH.

Anyway, we had some gems today. 'Inclusion bodies are bombproof' 'If you were a protease, what would you think?' 'We've done importin beta to death in the eyes of the rest of the world'. He wibbled on about 'coming back from the dead' (I think he meant refolding proteins) and 'low loading' - which is not, apparently, some sort of bus (public nuclear transport?) but a way of making protein look pure on gels, and recommended that Jade do . . . PLATE ASSAYS! I thought my ears were deceiving me but then he said it again!

I am convinced that Jazza and Stud-muffin are turning into a gestalt entity. They are inseparable.

I saw Sai screw up his eyes
And peer closely - to my surprise -
At one of Jade's gels,
The overloaded wells:
He should stick to his beer and pies.

I've had enough. I'm now off to come back from the dead.

Dreaming of the genie with the light brown mass spec,

Richard (- the Herodotus of the Scientific Age).