Scientific Progress?

After 3 weeks of emails, minor amendments, and transfer requests, I was finally able to walk a block up the road and give some of our experimental fiber diet to some knock-out mice.

We received the review from my last dissertation publication on March 11th. Their response was good, but they asked some very broad-sweeping questions that do not have a direct answer. At that point in time, I was t-minus 3 months until leaving, and as with most things I was/am in a hurry to get the ball rolling on the rebuttal experiments. (As a side note, I will be going regardless of the publication, but it only behooves everyone for me to get as much done as possible).

After a few days of exchanging ideas with the other authors on ideas, we came up with the following experiment, which is to just answer one of the unanswerable questions. A little background first: our hypothesis is that dietary fiber can dampen the response to infection and they wanted a more in depth "how." There are of course several ways to attack this, but given the limited time and available resources we decided to provide our experimental diet to a mouse that has a genetic mutation of a key protein (X) needed to mediate the signal from the bacteria. (This is still top secret stuff, so I apologize to my fellow scientists for the ambiguity).

Not a problem, I thought. Dr. Z, who we collaborate with, has these X knockout mice, we have used his mice before and our diet is approved and is OK with the 2 campus committees that regulate animal experiments. I figured that only road-block would be how many mice Dr. Z could spare. On March 18th Dr. Z informed me that there are some mice we can have and it is necessary to start feeding the mice the experimental diet ASAP after they are weaned from their moms.

The normal protocol for transferring mice from one PI to another is to submit a transfer request, which usually takes a day or so at most to approve - but there is where we hit snag after snag.

Our protocol was low on available mice (on paper) so we needed to write a minor amendment to add more mice. Other labmates were in the progress of doing this when we got the go-ahead from Dr Z. I was not sure if we were still approved to use space in the building with Dr. Z's mice (we can't bring them to our building - even longer story). So we took a few more days to write in use of building space and addition of these X knockout mice to the minor amendment. We submitted this amendment on March 19th and received approval notice on the 23rd.

But there was yet again another snag. Since the last time we had transferred mice from Dr. Z they wrote a new protocol and chose not to allow transfer as an option without specific authorization. Now mind you this was Spring Break at UIUC, and my emails to Dr. Z asking him to authorize a transfer went unanswered (out-of-office response is there for a reason). When my PI returned on the 30th he finally got an email response that Dr. Z was out of town until the 6th. After several more days of emails between Dr. Z and my boss, Dr. Z agreed that we could submit the transfer authorization on his behalf - this was done on April 2nd and received approval later that day. Then we still had to submit the original transfer request (which was the only thing I originally thought we'd have to do) which was done immediately after the transfer was authorized.

Finally on Friday, April 3rd, we were approved to transfer the X knockout mice from Dr. Z to our protocol and give them our experiment diet. Dr. Z was still out of town until the 6th and I finally was able to start the experiment. Now we wait for 6 weeks until they are ready.

After all the paper work and red-tape, it is pretty obvious why scientific progress takes so freakin' long.