Is sending this to Pton ethical?

newest_newb
Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:59:10 +0000

Dear xrCalico23,

As someone who has worked in labs for longer than you and has been published in Nature, let me remind you of one important fact.

Since you have so much lab experience you MUST know certainly that there is a very clear distinction between a procedure being easy to perform (such as is the case with PCR, plasmid prep, chromatography, running a computer program, whatever) and a procedure being consistently reliable.

The former has to do with being able to follow instructions, which honestly, at a high school level, should not be considered difficult.

The latter, however, has to do with the cutting edge of the field. You want to come up with a better method of DNA amplification than PCR? One that doesn’t have 1/10,000 error rate and is extremely sensitive to such conditions as primer design, AT richness, fragment length, temperature, mixing conditions and cycle number? THIS is what you are referring to when you say that it is hard sometimes to get the results you want. This is EXTREMELY different from a high school lab hand following some predetermined protocol - a very easy feat indeed, which is why they even let people like you (and yes, me as well) do these things in the first place.

Please also use paragraphs. Your posts make my eyes bleed purple kool-aid, and that’s not even considering the content in them.