Things Left Unsaid



10 minutes was not a lot of time. I’m so disappointed that I didn’t get to mention the cool EGFP plasmid HHR assay – the test was smart and straightforward, and then Noreen referred to something similar in lecture an hour before my presentation, and it would’ve been sooo cool! I also forgot to mention the initial confirmation assays, and to work in/ran out of time to critique the paper. I wanted to point out the presence of hydroxyurea in their in vivo trials, which is a little sketch, but not so much that I’d oppose a clinical trial. I also didn’t get to rant about the figures. Here follows the rant: Why did they only average their data ONCE?! Nobody needed to see the exact data from all 5 of their replicates of each condition. The writers or editors really should’ve gotten the hint when their figures were LARGER than a FULL PAGE, and the descriptions of all the different parts that were crammed in ran over into the footnotes on the next page.
This presentation was so much more work than I thought it was going to be. Understanding the paper was hard; I think I will vary my order-reading strategy. But the warm light of comprehension that washed over me in the last few hours was worth it. All the experiments seem so logical now; the build neatly off each other. I UNDERSTAND (NOW)!

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