i keep complaining that i am having trouble having to be in the lab and revising lectures. but then there are many doctors in my lab who have to be in the lab and who have to worry about getting biopsies and who have to worry about clinic duties, and some days have to be set aside as biopsy days and some days are not lab productive cos there are clinics to go for and some days are plain tired because of long hours the day before. and then there are profs who run a lab think about experiments organise a course or a degree and prepare lectures. it must be such a tough job, maybe i should complain less when a lecture isnt as great as i had hoped, when my lecturer seems sleepy in my lecture.. and i really respect the profs who come into lecture everyday with so much energy, who will try to make things accessible for you, who will make time to talk to you to see how you are doing..
and today i was reading about innate immunity in HIV and I was feeling quite sorry for my prof. cos here was a nature paper where this other lab took a stab and it was the right stab - they looked in DCs, while my prof had looked at macrophages (since HIV can infect mp) and it was a wrong stab, sigh..
and then i remembered a talk that Paul Bieniasz gave us when I was at Rockefeller, and i remembered how he always seemed to be investigating random disjointed things about viruses, so that maybe he can make one nice finding and let the other people do the rest of the job while he moved on to something else. and i wonder if it is perhaps better to do that - where maybe the only similarity in the projects in your lab is the technique you use and have optimised, but the nature and subject of the project is quite different. because the lab i was in at Rockefeller does that too..
