Lab Notebooks, PIs, OCD, and You.

[Fixed Gear]

First off, Let me say that I firmly believe in a keeping a good notebook with clear descriptions and all necesary information so that another person could pick up my notebook and redo anything I've done, from a ChIP to a FACS to my ES cell culture.

I take pains to label any pictures of gels and even show calculations when designing primers or making solutions and buffers. Lately, I've been doing a lot of cloning and I label every lane, and even each relevant band from pictures of gels.

When I meet with my PI, she has this habit of circling things, drawing out vector diagrams and stuff RIGHT IN MY NOTEBOOK. It goes from being nice and neat to having her scribbles all over it. Every time she does it, I cringe. She sees me cringe, yet she still does it. A few times I have yanked my notebook away from her and caused her to write on her desk (or an RO1 grant). It drives me nuts. I always put a few pieces of scrap paper next to her and she'll usually use them......but at some point, she's circle something or draw something in my notebook. I think my next step is to smack her hand away when she reaches for a pen and my notebook.

Am I alone here or do any of you guys have LNOCD? (Lab Notebook Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)

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[EvoDevo]

Oh man! I'm the worst. I don't even use the bound-type books, but put everything into 3-ring binders, tabbed and indexed by project. Each lane in each gel is labeled, with concentrations, volume loaded, gel concentration(0.8, 1.0, 2.0% &c), running time, voltage...you get the idea. Same thing with my in-situ Ab or hybridization rxns. Basically, I follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Me being the stupid one, I hate to have re-calculate massive experiments, etc. Heck, I even wrote down my Drosophila crosses (hundreds of these) just so I remembered how each one came about.

I date everything and clearly label all my experiments so that I can find the notes for a given data set months/years later. Though my friends have mocked my anal-retentiveness, my PI loved it when he'd ask to see the relevant info from an experiement and it'd be a snap for me to pull it up. As a result, when I left my last lab for my current one, the turnover was really really painless.

If my PI did to my notebook what yours does, I'd have gone postal before long.

 

[drdr2010]

seriously, what is it with scientists and having to draw all over anything they get their hands on?
my PI is terrible with that. in the past few years, while we have been talking he has taken things off my desk or out of my hands and diagrammed elaborate models and experiments on such things as: a term paper, a travel award application (that i had completed and really was just trying to get him to sign!), one of my student's assignments, Subway napkins, the back of a card my mom sent me for my bday....among other things.
i appreciate his need to draw things out for us to understand, but maybe i should just have a pad of paper at the ready for him.
i wouldn't dream of letting him near my lab notebook with any writing utensils...everything is so pretty and color coded...maybe i have LNOCD as well.

 

[Fixed Gear]

Evo, we use three-ring binders in our lab too, so there are always tons of legal pads/graph pads/whatever lying around.

She acts like I'm making such a stink, but then she'll ask me really detailed questions that I can only answer if I write things down.

 

[Fixed Gear]

SUCCESS!!!

We just met and she confined all her scribling to the scrap paper I gave her. .....after I gave her a stern leering when she tried to draw a locus in my notebook.

 

[QofQuimica]

My prof does this, and I do it, too. But I have no qualms about yanking whatever he's about to draw on out of his hands if it's something I need, and giving him some other piece of paper instead. Also, I purposely leave all of the backs of my lab book pages blank, expressly so that he (or I!) can scribble notes there.

 

[Gfunk6]

Trust me. For those of you who are meticulous with you lab notebooks -- it will pay off big time when you graduate. My PI ran an impromptu audit for me a few days after I defended. He pulled out my publications and pointed to three random pieces of data. He wanted me to pull out the raw data and show him exactly how the fiigure was made. I can tell you I would've been in deep doo-doo without a well-organized research notebook!

P.S. My PI never scribbled on my notebook, instead using scrap paper. Probably, it was so stained with chemicals and carcinogens, he wouldn't touch it without a biohazardous suit.