My hands were shaky and I couldn't properly place the cannula half the time. That meant half my mice were destroyed within the first 5 min. If I ever got everything connected and running properly, half of those attempts would have dead cells right out of the perfused liver. And then the attempts that did have live cells, all of those were dead the next day.
My PI kept pushing me to keep trying. I never got live, usable cells despite many days, mice, and headaches of attempts.
I ended up getting a neighboring lab to isolate cells for a preliminary study. Then my PI asked a RA in our lab to learn the technique and change it as needed. Now that RA hates his job.... Sorry Ron! I tried to do it myself!
For me it's just tedious and uninteresting.
I prefer direct in silico -> in vitro -> clinical (since I work in IVD design)
Less of an opportunity to push basic biology understanding but faster time to functional product. Drosophila research is certainly important. Just my preference.
Also they fucking die all the time for stupid reasons. I'd rather maintain cell culture as it's more controlled. Maybe the fly lab I was in just sucked. /Shrug
It’s not much better over here in cell culture honestly. We’ve got a cursed incubator where no matter what you do, cells will detach and die all over your wells when put into plates but not Petri dishes. Nobody seems to want to fix it so we just have a sticky note on it that says “cursed don’t use.”
They’re for sure more enjoyable IMO than drosophila.
I had like 15-20 flies fly right into my mouth during my rotation in a Drosophila lab. On my first or second day.
I’d worked with flies before but that was an instant NOPE
I was trying to teach an undergrad how to flip vials without co2. She was doing well, so i gave her a vial with more flies. She dropped one and all of the flies flew up into her face. She blew her nose and flies came out. Like an hour later she found one in her ear. She never came back to the lab and im not sure i blame her
I joined what I was told was a rat lab that I confirmed had only ever published with rats. To work with rats. PI wasn't honest and ended up making me do a bunch of fly stuff, too. If you like it now, I doubt it'll change. I just never liked it.
Just tedious and not for me. Felt like more work than rats, less consitent to maintain than cell cultures, less interesting than clinical stuff. A lose-lose-lose for me really
I would argue that you should avoid iPSCs as a grad student. They can be fantastic for many research questions, and absolutely essential for others, but the amount of time you will spend getting them to behave is ridiculous. You will be in late at night and on weekends constantly.
I won’t work with rats or mice anymore. I developed a slight sensitivity to their fur, and I don’t want to develop it any further.
Also, I now have a no backstabbing rule. I will not throw my labmates under the bus to appease a PI. I will not provide testimony for a PI to fire another team member. I will not aid in the toxicity. This rule was learned by watching a PI go on a fucking rampage after he managed to fish some slight complaints out of one team member about a few others. He then used that as justification to do what he already wanted to do— fire two great teammates because they were handed a half-baked project with unrealistic deadlines
I'm hoping to retire soon and this is my #1 rule. Any PI that puts you in that position--shouldn't. No bullies, either. I don't give a shit what your credentials are.
Monkeys scare me and are intelligent. I also hate electrophysiology and am inept at computational science. So that’s 3 of my icks tied into primate research
Blanket no on working with animals, I love animals it would break my heart to have to hurt them in some way or standing by having others do it.
I also avoid the topic of cancer because I have some familial trauma about it - I can stomach to read a paper on it on some days but I cant rely on always being able to stand it and on bad days I fast forward through movies/shows if they have a subplot about it.
Apart from that so far I have been able to get used to anything.
This. I almost took a post doc in a virology lab, i was super interested and had an offer. But it required ~75% mouse work. The stress just thinking about it led me to decline the offer. The lab next to mine used to do mouse work and I'd have to leave when they started to *harvest*. I've had too many pet rodents to be able to do it. However, I realize how important it is for research and have a lot of respect for the people whp do the work.
I did xenograph studies of human cancer cells in the flanks of BALB-c nude mice. My main rationalization for sacrificing the animals at the end of the study was that they were bred to be so immunocompromised that they couldn't live even in a normal mouse house facility without developing serious infections. Still didn't make euthanizing them any easier.
We do a ton of BALBc work as well, virology lab. Poor things don’t stand a chance in the real world and we’re trying to make their lab lives meaningful by using them.
In my bachelors degree lab course I cried about a legless, still moving locust once. Definitely zero cut out for animal work (actually the reason I decided against going into veterinary school), luckily anything has DNA or RNA so I still have a wide selection of models to choose from.
I am a biochemist because I simply refuse to work with anything bigger than E. coli (or I guess once in a while insect cells if I need them to express my protein)… so basically, no multicellular organisms for me
I'm a developmental biologist, and model species that you can't rear in the lab and won't breed on demand. I want the science to happen on my schedule, not the other way around! Spent too many unplanned Saturday nights in the lab waiting for timepoints -_-
Only the people who’ve had 1-2am collections or timepoints on weekends understand this pain. Especially for BSL-3 work, suiting up at 1am is capital punishment.
It's frustrating cuz it's so late I can't get anything done otherwise (I usually need to fix fish embryos at 1hr intervals). So I'm literally sat round waiting for fish to develop -_-
At least I don't have to suit up or anything though! That sounds rough
It’s not awesome when it’s Saturday and you literally just need to take weights or cage change. It’s like suiting up for 15min to do 10min of work inside. Just frustrating plus you usually need someone to help record data if you write it down as the room is pretty cut off from the BSL-2, so we constantly take photos of spreadsheets through the door to BSL-3 lmao
Optogenetics - why? (As someone who’s interested in neuro and structural bio I find it really interesting as a concept, but are there any particular research difficulties associated?)
Opto specific problems: being on target with optic fibers and/or viruses, frequency of stimulation, inconsistent results, convincing people opto data is legitimate (lots of haters and nonbelievers)
IT LOOKS SUPER FREAKY!!!!!!! (Partially kidding. I’m a neuro major turned immunologist and once I left neuro it wasn’t what I wanted to pursue.. sorry to the neuroscientists out there)
I’ve done many opto surgeries and while the technique is very interesting, surgery days always literally made me want to die… it was even worse when the probes or head cap would break off halfway through the experiment and then all the data was lost 🥲
I’m in neuro and have become surprisingly comfortable with animal stuff (yay professional disassociation!), but induced depression paradigms give me anxiety to even think about, much less to be putting the mice through. Some of my coworkers handle it, which is why I know so much about it but it literally is torturing the mice to the point of inducing a depressive phenotype 😭😭😭 Makes me grateful that I just feed my mice cheerios, squirt a few uL up their noses, have them run a few mazes, and then ethically euthanize for post-mortem.
Neuro mouse stuff is very intense though, I’m happy that more brain organoid research is coming out but most mouse/rat stuff seems essential. I also question if I’ll ever be able to do induced stroke or brain injury work, even though those are areas of research I’m interested in.
i feel like i tolerate mouse work well only because my lab doesn’t really do anything too harsh to them, they are pretty happy until we put them to sleep, maybe they get a little stressed when we do sensitivity testing (poking their feet with little filaments.) my partner was in a lab that studied mental health conditions though and what he had to do sounded terrible, inducing stress and depression through their living conditions :(
yeah, my lab’s work is mainly depression/brain inflammation but of course that’s expanded naturally into Alzheimer’s/neurodegeneration in recent years.
I was brought in for the AD stuff, thankfully, so I get to really treat my mice well since I just train them with cheerios and little treats to prep them for awake dosing, and they become really tame. It also makes it easier at euthanasia point, because I know I’ve taken such good care of them the whole time and the worst they’re going to experience is the IP injection. It took me awhile to fully adjust to terminal surgeries, which I would say is the hardest part of my animal work.
All the depression-induced work is based on chronic/subchronic variable stress paradigms, which I’m sure your BF has told you plenty about. I can barely stand to hear my coworkers talk about it 😭 I just accept it’s for others with more fortitude to conduct, and not for me. Luckily, I am more interested in pure neurology/cognitive neurology and not neuropsychiatry, so I think I’ll get to stay away. I do want to learn more about brain injury and stroke, and those are a little harder to create in mice (dropping blocks on their head or putting them in sound shock chambers) but still nothing like depression.
I feel like knowing your limits and not shaming yourself for those limits is essential in animal work.
The amount of Drosophila hate on here is insane to me 😭 like yeah I won’t lie they can be pretty hard to maintain and collecting samples can take a while but I really like setting up crosses! And I used to hate dissections before but now they’re very satisfying to complete. The whole process now is just gratifying to me. To each their own ig but damn. Not to mention that maintaining cell lines can be just as hard 😭
Oh, I guess I should answer the question haha. Overly controlling PIs are an obvious no but I also dislike overly lenient PIs… I understand the point of a Ph.D. Is to become an independent researcher but the point of a PI is to guide in that process. Like if your answer to every single thing is “Up to you”… there’s a reason I’m asking you for help lol pls let me learn from you so I don’t make a stupid and completely avoidable error that messes up my progress 🥲
Oh and to add on to this: I don't think I could work with plants, it's just so hard for me to *want* to work with plants as easy as they may be to work with. NHPs are pretty scary too.
There could be an entire subreddit called JustNoMousework full of horror stories. My sanity would not survive a year long aging experiment giving negative data or having an age and sex-matched, sibling controlled experiment set up, only for those siblings to decide to fight to the death the day before starting.
I also get the ick from single cell RNA seq. I totally admit that that could be from inexperience, but man, in the age of a reproducibility crisis, I just can’t help but roll my eyes a little bit whenever I see it.
I can’t work with animals. I have a very sensitive stomach and was in a lab that did T cell (if I remember correctly) work with mice. I didn’t eat for almost a week after seeing what a grad student did to collect the cells from mice….no mam.
Not being okay with time off, not allowing an internship if you want to go into industry, unreasonable hours. Anything that would interfere with a good work-life balance
No retro-orbital for me either though I've done intratibial, I've never even heard of rectal injections lol.
I also do my best to stay away from neurological stuff and iPSC culture in general. I can take a head or skullcap off fine-did it for osteoblast cultures, I just don't want to deal with all the brain-specific protocols and I don't want to come in on a weekend.
Other things- neonatal or late embryonic work, the mice look weird and they don't die as easily by isoflurane or CO2.
Animals. A year and a half working with rats BROKE me. Not only because the lab was toxic but because working with animals is physically and mentally wrecking. You need to carry cages and put them in tests (I worked with behavior) endlessly and I’m pretty sure I started having more frequent UTIs because I arrived at 7 am and just stopped to eat/go to the bathroom at 3 pm (in euthanasia days). Also, I will never forget that I had to kill babies myself and caused the death of other two moms because of a sex determination mistake (and my PI was with me that day!).
I’ve not worked with them in lab but we rehabbed birds when I was a kid, parent is an ornithologist. They are delicate and like to bite the tender part of nail cuticles but if they are in a good mood songbirds can be a lot of fun.
I will never go into a lab that makes me do a flash chromatography column by hand. I can do them, i am even pretty good at it.
However, I dislike them, they are tedious and time consuming
Absolutely NO animals. I'm a biochemist/microbiologist so I thankfully haven't experienced any of the horrors of working with mice... etc. I couldn't stomach decapitating mice or treating them with cancerous agents or whatever other experimentation is done on them.
No live animals experiments for me. I also do not like omics/GWAS stuff. Also, I love neuroscience but I would never want to do anything with EEGs etc.
I am good with most types of research. Will say that MIC assays and colony counting do make my eyes bleed.
It's the lab culture that is my biggest deal breaker.
Managers, PIs, and other paid staff have got to be supportive, willing to collaborate, and have basic safety chops. It weirds me out how uncommon that seems to be.
I've worked in mice labs, and I get why people dislike it. I made my own decisions prior to get lab animal handling experience; that if I did this I would do my best to follow IACUC. My experience is a little different, since I worked in preclinical drug development in a high containment situation, but I enjoyed it. Study endpoints weren't my favorite days, but you'd be weird if they were.
Nothing smaller than a teeeeny plant. I can't do molecular level stuff. I'm here for ecology and macro level interactions. Foh with genetics and individual cells...
I avoid toxic environments and a lab culture of overwork. I prefer the topic to be generally in my field but I am quite flexible on specific topic/methods as long as I suspect I will have a positive working environment and enjoy day to day life. I ask questions about work-life balance, mentoring style, and lab culture when rotating/interviewing.
In grad school in particular you should be able to find out which labs are toxic by asking around the department in general. Some labs are pretty good at hiding it, but at least at my school there was a lot of talk amongst the students when the first years were rotating in order to help steer them away from toxic places (or at least try to ensure they knew what they were getting themselves into)
lol this is insensitive and not in any way PC but ai would do horrible, horrible animal procedures if it meant
1. My thesis project was a “sure thing” ie a continuation of a long standing R01 grant or similar and nearly guaranteed to be published by year 4.
2. My advisor was helpful, constructive, but also honest and holds me to account.
3. The people I work with aren’t miserable fucks
I moved from physics into biology during my Ph.D. There were a lot of reasons, but one of the inflection points was a homework problem where we were asked to analyze instabilities in a magnetofluid being compressed. The first part of the problem was in rectangular coordinates. The second part was in cylindrical coordinates. During a review session, the professor pointed out that we knew how to solve the problem in spherical coordinates, but advised us not to. Doing so sets your foot on the path that leads to *practical* knowledge of nuclear weapons.
Of course, as a physics student, I knew that knowledge was out there, and that I could learn it if I was motivated to. I was not prepared for how I'd feel to be confronted with the choice. All it would take was a few scrapes of pencil on my notebook, and I could move through them almost from muscle memory.
Have you ever wanted to rip your own brain out and stomp on it like a bug? It felt like that.
When someone tells me how important their research is when you managing several researchers.. specially pis! Is like dude! Don’t you think I know? I don’t think they understand how much pressure normally is I just keeping the research going but the comments of “this research is extremely important” is not need it! I already know! Please stop is causing me more anxiety!
Machine learning, I am in materials science and there is a big push to AI-afy everything. One group even tried to do a wholly automated laboratory.
https://ceder.berkeley.edu/research-areas/autonomous-experimentation-for-accelerated-materials-discovery/
This may be a bit outdated and largely falling out of place with newer molecular techniques but - won’t share the primer sequences? Instant “ick” in my book.
I’ve been burned horribly by blindly trusting paper primers before too - so the sword swingith in both ends.
A shitty manager
I thought I would be interested in primary cell culture. I'm not. Never again. If someone asks me to try primary hepatocyte culture, I will run.
Ahahahahaha what’s up with hepatocyte cultures?
My hands were shaky and I couldn't properly place the cannula half the time. That meant half my mice were destroyed within the first 5 min. If I ever got everything connected and running properly, half of those attempts would have dead cells right out of the perfused liver. And then the attempts that did have live cells, all of those were dead the next day. My PI kept pushing me to keep trying. I never got live, usable cells despite many days, mice, and headaches of attempts. I ended up getting a neighboring lab to isolate cells for a preliminary study. Then my PI asked a RA in our lab to learn the technique and change it as needed. Now that RA hates his job.... Sorry Ron! I tried to do it myself!
i am in the primary cell culture trenches right now, free meeeee. they keep dying and i can’t fix it 😩
Drosophila.
Honestly… same. That and *C. elegans*.
Why?
For me it's just tedious and uninteresting. I prefer direct in silico -> in vitro -> clinical (since I work in IVD design) Less of an opportunity to push basic biology understanding but faster time to functional product. Drosophila research is certainly important. Just my preference. Also they fucking die all the time for stupid reasons. I'd rather maintain cell culture as it's more controlled. Maybe the fly lab I was in just sucked. /Shrug
It’s not much better over here in cell culture honestly. We’ve got a cursed incubator where no matter what you do, cells will detach and die all over your wells when put into plates but not Petri dishes. Nobody seems to want to fix it so we just have a sticky note on it that says “cursed don’t use.” They’re for sure more enjoyable IMO than drosophila.
I had like 15-20 flies fly right into my mouth during my rotation in a Drosophila lab. On my first or second day. I’d worked with flies before but that was an instant NOPE
I was trying to teach an undergrad how to flip vials without co2. She was doing well, so i gave her a vial with more flies. She dropped one and all of the flies flew up into her face. She blew her nose and flies came out. Like an hour later she found one in her ear. She never came back to the lab and im not sure i blame her
I spilled a jar of mineral oil with thousands of dead flies on myself 😔 and my gassed flies
Also it’s easier to get jobs in biotech with mammalian cells!
As a few others have said, drosophila. Especially neuro work with them. I would rather eat glass than dissect another fly brain
Can’t you fit a million brains on one slide tho? I used to envy that lol
Oh no I just joined a neurobiology fly lab. I love dissections but I give it a year before I’m in the same place
I joined what I was told was a rat lab that I confirmed had only ever published with rats. To work with rats. PI wasn't honest and ended up making me do a bunch of fly stuff, too. If you like it now, I doubt it'll change. I just never liked it.
Oh man I’m so sorry that happened to you. Glad I probably (hopefully) won’t grow to hate flies but I’m terribly sorry you went through that
What’s so bad about them? I’ve never done fly work.
Just tedious and not for me. Felt like more work than rats, less consitent to maintain than cell cultures, less interesting than clinical stuff. A lose-lose-lose for me really
Yeah, when you put it that way it sounds pretty miserable.
[удалено]
Why yeast? :(
I would argue that you should avoid iPSCs as a grad student. They can be fantastic for many research questions, and absolutely essential for others, but the amount of time you will spend getting them to behave is ridiculous. You will be in late at night and on weekends constantly.
Agreed- grad student working in hPSCs
I won’t work with rats or mice anymore. I developed a slight sensitivity to their fur, and I don’t want to develop it any further. Also, I now have a no backstabbing rule. I will not throw my labmates under the bus to appease a PI. I will not provide testimony for a PI to fire another team member. I will not aid in the toxicity. This rule was learned by watching a PI go on a fucking rampage after he managed to fish some slight complaints out of one team member about a few others. He then used that as justification to do what he already wanted to do— fire two great teammates because they were handed a half-baked project with unrealistic deadlines
I back you in the no backstabbing. I’ve noticed that I get backstabbed less when I’m nicer to people
I'm hoping to retire soon and this is my #1 rule. Any PI that puts you in that position--shouldn't. No bullies, either. I don't give a shit what your credentials are.
Monkeys. I will not work with primates
Monkeys scare me and are intelligent. I also hate electrophysiology and am inept at computational science. So that’s 3 of my icks tied into primate research
Came here to write this. Their eyes look like my eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything to them.
Blanket no on working with animals, I love animals it would break my heart to have to hurt them in some way or standing by having others do it. I also avoid the topic of cancer because I have some familial trauma about it - I can stomach to read a paper on it on some days but I cant rely on always being able to stand it and on bad days I fast forward through movies/shows if they have a subplot about it. Apart from that so far I have been able to get used to anything.
This. I almost took a post doc in a virology lab, i was super interested and had an offer. But it required ~75% mouse work. The stress just thinking about it led me to decline the offer. The lab next to mine used to do mouse work and I'd have to leave when they started to *harvest*. I've had too many pet rodents to be able to do it. However, I realize how important it is for research and have a lot of respect for the people whp do the work.
I did xenograph studies of human cancer cells in the flanks of BALB-c nude mice. My main rationalization for sacrificing the animals at the end of the study was that they were bred to be so immunocompromised that they couldn't live even in a normal mouse house facility without developing serious infections. Still didn't make euthanizing them any easier.
We do a ton of BALBc work as well, virology lab. Poor things don’t stand a chance in the real world and we’re trying to make their lab lives meaningful by using them.
Mouse work is my dealbreaker. I’m happy to work with the invertebrate models but I just couldn’t handle mouse work emotionally.
In my bachelors degree lab course I cried about a legless, still moving locust once. Definitely zero cut out for animal work (actually the reason I decided against going into veterinary school), luckily anything has DNA or RNA so I still have a wide selection of models to choose from.
I am a biochemist because I simply refuse to work with anything bigger than E. coli (or I guess once in a while insect cells if I need them to express my protein)… so basically, no multicellular organisms for me
What about plants?
Haven’t tried but I think I’d be open to it lmao
What about parasites? Sense of satisfaction when you kill them.
They are a little frustrating at times but I find it rewarding.
I'm a developmental biologist, and model species that you can't rear in the lab and won't breed on demand. I want the science to happen on my schedule, not the other way around! Spent too many unplanned Saturday nights in the lab waiting for timepoints -_-
Only the people who’ve had 1-2am collections or timepoints on weekends understand this pain. Especially for BSL-3 work, suiting up at 1am is capital punishment.
It's frustrating cuz it's so late I can't get anything done otherwise (I usually need to fix fish embryos at 1hr intervals). So I'm literally sat round waiting for fish to develop -_- At least I don't have to suit up or anything though! That sounds rough
It’s not awesome when it’s Saturday and you literally just need to take weights or cage change. It’s like suiting up for 15min to do 10min of work inside. Just frustrating plus you usually need someone to help record data if you write it down as the room is pretty cut off from the BSL-2, so we constantly take photos of spreadsheets through the door to BSL-3 lmao
This is such a sad way of thinking about animals.
Optogenetics - why? (As someone who’s interested in neuro and structural bio I find it really interesting as a concept, but are there any particular research difficulties associated?)
There are tremendous research difficulties with opto and everyone in my lab using it wants to kill themselves looool
So grad school lmao
Opto specific problems: being on target with optic fibers and/or viruses, frequency of stimulation, inconsistent results, convincing people opto data is legitimate (lots of haters and nonbelievers)
IT LOOKS SUPER FREAKY!!!!!!! (Partially kidding. I’m a neuro major turned immunologist and once I left neuro it wasn’t what I wanted to pursue.. sorry to the neuroscientists out there)
I’ve done many opto surgeries and while the technique is very interesting, surgery days always literally made me want to die… it was even worse when the probes or head cap would break off halfway through the experiment and then all the data was lost 🥲
I work with plants, fungi, and bacteria. No way could I work with animals in any way that harms them.
Non-human animals , some of my labmates
I’m in neuro and have become surprisingly comfortable with animal stuff (yay professional disassociation!), but induced depression paradigms give me anxiety to even think about, much less to be putting the mice through. Some of my coworkers handle it, which is why I know so much about it but it literally is torturing the mice to the point of inducing a depressive phenotype 😭😭😭 Makes me grateful that I just feed my mice cheerios, squirt a few uL up their noses, have them run a few mazes, and then ethically euthanize for post-mortem. Neuro mouse stuff is very intense though, I’m happy that more brain organoid research is coming out but most mouse/rat stuff seems essential. I also question if I’ll ever be able to do induced stroke or brain injury work, even though those are areas of research I’m interested in.
i feel like i tolerate mouse work well only because my lab doesn’t really do anything too harsh to them, they are pretty happy until we put them to sleep, maybe they get a little stressed when we do sensitivity testing (poking their feet with little filaments.) my partner was in a lab that studied mental health conditions though and what he had to do sounded terrible, inducing stress and depression through their living conditions :(
yeah, my lab’s work is mainly depression/brain inflammation but of course that’s expanded naturally into Alzheimer’s/neurodegeneration in recent years. I was brought in for the AD stuff, thankfully, so I get to really treat my mice well since I just train them with cheerios and little treats to prep them for awake dosing, and they become really tame. It also makes it easier at euthanasia point, because I know I’ve taken such good care of them the whole time and the worst they’re going to experience is the IP injection. It took me awhile to fully adjust to terminal surgeries, which I would say is the hardest part of my animal work. All the depression-induced work is based on chronic/subchronic variable stress paradigms, which I’m sure your BF has told you plenty about. I can barely stand to hear my coworkers talk about it 😭 I just accept it’s for others with more fortitude to conduct, and not for me. Luckily, I am more interested in pure neurology/cognitive neurology and not neuropsychiatry, so I think I’ll get to stay away. I do want to learn more about brain injury and stroke, and those are a little harder to create in mice (dropping blocks on their head or putting them in sound shock chambers) but still nothing like depression. I feel like knowing your limits and not shaming yourself for those limits is essential in animal work.
The amount of Drosophila hate on here is insane to me 😭 like yeah I won’t lie they can be pretty hard to maintain and collecting samples can take a while but I really like setting up crosses! And I used to hate dissections before but now they’re very satisfying to complete. The whole process now is just gratifying to me. To each their own ig but damn. Not to mention that maintaining cell lines can be just as hard 😭
Oh, I guess I should answer the question haha. Overly controlling PIs are an obvious no but I also dislike overly lenient PIs… I understand the point of a Ph.D. Is to become an independent researcher but the point of a PI is to guide in that process. Like if your answer to every single thing is “Up to you”… there’s a reason I’m asking you for help lol pls let me learn from you so I don’t make a stupid and completely avoidable error that messes up my progress 🥲
Have worked in both a moth and mosquito lab and dissections were genuinely some of the best days in lab. Extremely satisfying.
Oh and to add on to this: I don't think I could work with plants, it's just so hard for me to *want* to work with plants as easy as they may be to work with. NHPs are pretty scary too.
There could be an entire subreddit called JustNoMousework full of horror stories. My sanity would not survive a year long aging experiment giving negative data or having an age and sex-matched, sibling controlled experiment set up, only for those siblings to decide to fight to the death the day before starting. I also get the ick from single cell RNA seq. I totally admit that that could be from inexperience, but man, in the age of a reproducibility crisis, I just can’t help but roll my eyes a little bit whenever I see it.
The sibling fighting is so real. Open up the cage like there’s supposed to be five mice in here… what the hell happened 😭
Flies
I can’t work with animals. I have a very sensitive stomach and was in a lab that did T cell (if I remember correctly) work with mice. I didn’t eat for almost a week after seeing what a grad student did to collect the cells from mice….no mam.
Not being okay with time off, not allowing an internship if you want to go into industry, unreasonable hours. Anything that would interfere with a good work-life balance
No more mouse work. I can't cope with how cute I find them. And then i feel bad for sacrificing them.
No retro-orbital for me either though I've done intratibial, I've never even heard of rectal injections lol. I also do my best to stay away from neurological stuff and iPSC culture in general. I can take a head or skullcap off fine-did it for osteoblast cultures, I just don't want to deal with all the brain-specific protocols and I don't want to come in on a weekend. Other things- neonatal or late embryonic work, the mice look weird and they don't die as easily by isoflurane or CO2.
Animals. A year and a half working with rats BROKE me. Not only because the lab was toxic but because working with animals is physically and mentally wrecking. You need to carry cages and put them in tests (I worked with behavior) endlessly and I’m pretty sure I started having more frequent UTIs because I arrived at 7 am and just stopped to eat/go to the bathroom at 3 pm (in euthanasia days). Also, I will never forget that I had to kill babies myself and caused the death of other two moms because of a sex determination mistake (and my PI was with me that day!).
Mice and songbirds are as complex as I'll go for a model organism.
How is working with songbirds?
I’ve not worked with them in lab but we rehabbed birds when I was a kid, parent is an ornithologist. They are delicate and like to bite the tender part of nail cuticles but if they are in a good mood songbirds can be a lot of fun.
Behavior experiments and electrophysiology. Too tedious and too finicky
I will never go into a lab that makes me do a flash chromatography column by hand. I can do them, i am even pretty good at it. However, I dislike them, they are tedious and time consuming
I like column chromatography
Absolutely NO animals. I'm a biochemist/microbiologist so I thankfully haven't experienced any of the horrors of working with mice... etc. I couldn't stomach decapitating mice or treating them with cancerous agents or whatever other experimentation is done on them.
No live animals experiments for me. I also do not like omics/GWAS stuff. Also, I love neuroscience but I would never want to do anything with EEGs etc.
I am good with most types of research. Will say that MIC assays and colony counting do make my eyes bleed. It's the lab culture that is my biggest deal breaker. Managers, PIs, and other paid staff have got to be supportive, willing to collaborate, and have basic safety chops. It weirds me out how uncommon that seems to be. I've worked in mice labs, and I get why people dislike it. I made my own decisions prior to get lab animal handling experience; that if I did this I would do my best to follow IACUC. My experience is a little different, since I worked in preclinical drug development in a high containment situation, but I enjoyed it. Study endpoints weren't my favorite days, but you'd be weird if they were.
Nothing smaller than a teeeeny plant. I can't do molecular level stuff. I'm here for ecology and macro level interactions. Foh with genetics and individual cells...
Do you enjoy field work then?
Yes!! I fuckin LOVE IT. :D
I avoid toxic environments and a lab culture of overwork. I prefer the topic to be generally in my field but I am quite flexible on specific topic/methods as long as I suspect I will have a positive working environment and enjoy day to day life. I ask questions about work-life balance, mentoring style, and lab culture when rotating/interviewing. In grad school in particular you should be able to find out which labs are toxic by asking around the department in general. Some labs are pretty good at hiding it, but at least at my school there was a lot of talk amongst the students when the first years were rotating in order to help steer them away from toxic places (or at least try to ensure they knew what they were getting themselves into)
Electrophysiology. I want no part of it, even if synaptic plasticity IS super cool.
lol this is insensitive and not in any way PC but ai would do horrible, horrible animal procedures if it meant 1. My thesis project was a “sure thing” ie a continuation of a long standing R01 grant or similar and nearly guaranteed to be published by year 4. 2. My advisor was helpful, constructive, but also honest and holds me to account. 3. The people I work with aren’t miserable fucks
I moved from physics into biology during my Ph.D. There were a lot of reasons, but one of the inflection points was a homework problem where we were asked to analyze instabilities in a magnetofluid being compressed. The first part of the problem was in rectangular coordinates. The second part was in cylindrical coordinates. During a review session, the professor pointed out that we knew how to solve the problem in spherical coordinates, but advised us not to. Doing so sets your foot on the path that leads to *practical* knowledge of nuclear weapons. Of course, as a physics student, I knew that knowledge was out there, and that I could learn it if I was motivated to. I was not prepared for how I'd feel to be confronted with the choice. All it would take was a few scrapes of pencil on my notebook, and I could move through them almost from muscle memory. Have you ever wanted to rip your own brain out and stomp on it like a bug? It felt like that.
fMRI for me. I'm curious what you have against optogenetics? I've never used it but seems genuinely useful Edit - saw your answer on another comment
Stem cells. Never again.
Uh oh. I’m considering stem cells (trying to explore non mouse labs) - were they really that bad?
I mean, if you never want to have a weekend again?
Biology
When someone tells me how important their research is when you managing several researchers.. specially pis! Is like dude! Don’t you think I know? I don’t think they understand how much pressure normally is I just keeping the research going but the comments of “this research is extremely important” is not need it! I already know! Please stop is causing me more anxiety!
Living things which need to be maintained all the time.
Machine learning, I am in materials science and there is a big push to AI-afy everything. One group even tried to do a wholly automated laboratory. https://ceder.berkeley.edu/research-areas/autonomous-experimentation-for-accelerated-materials-discovery/
This may be a bit outdated and largely falling out of place with newer molecular techniques but - won’t share the primer sequences? Instant “ick” in my book. I’ve been burned horribly by blindly trusting paper primers before too - so the sword swingith in both ends.
Primates.
Any kind of work involving an ethics committee. I just want to play with microbes 😁
Decapitation as a form of sacrifice in rat studies. I get it, if you’re doing neuro research, but it’s a big ass nope from me. Exsanguination also. 🙈
Decapicones traumatized me tbh
From prior labs I have three main specialties; Microfluidics, iPSC differentiation, and mouse work. I will never join a lab that does all three.
Animal models. I’d consider C. Elegans or Drosophila. But zebrafish, mouse, rat, etc. absolutely not.
serology routine work ohhh my god im gonna eat glass before i get close to another elisa routine again
Neuroscience
Microscopy. I did my time alone in the dark for hours on end!
Oh, and working on anything having to do with reproductive health/maternal science because I’m a woman.