I hate my colleagues. That’s not entirely correct. I don’t hate all my colleagues. Truth be told, most of them are pretty great people. As I think about it, I only hate one of my colleagues. Okay, so technically he isn’t a colleague anymore having left the lab over a decade ago, but I still hate him. Although I have to say that “hate” is a strong word. Let’s just say my gizzards are pretty steamed.
Let’s back up for a moment. After 26 of occupying the same lab space, our lab is moving this week. There is much that is good about this relocation: We are moving to a brand new building and we are now housed on the same the floor with other neuroscientists from our department. Our square footage is less that what we have now, but not so much so that it rises beyond a slight inconvenience. But like anyone else who has maintained residence in one place for for such an extended period, there is a tendency to accumulate…how shall I put this…lots of crap once important scientific data that is no longer required for the continuation of our exceptional work. Because we’ve known about the move for nearly a year, we have gone about our preparation in a systematic, and if I do say so myself, pretty intelligent way.
From the beginning of the year, one day each month was identified as “Purge Day.” I recognize that this designation may be a bit florid, and may bring to mind some rather unpleasant associations, but it accurately describes our systematic search and destroy mission for material that we will no longer use. This is not quite as easy as it sounds. When paring down a cloths closet, for example, one can use the rule of thumb that if you haven’t worn the piece of apparel in question for X number of years (where X=3 for me and =10 for my wife), you are required to remove it. Much of what we scientists keep around in a lab can’t really ever be thrown away. Lab notebooks, as an example, are permanent records of our daily work and are absolutely essential documents. Slides that we haven’t look at for years may contain information that would be useful 10 years hence. That said, we were pretty ruthless in our mission and got rid of an extraordinarily large amount of stuff.
Which brings me back for my former colleague. When he departed the lab, he not only left a legacy of fine work behind him, he also left virtually all of his files, the largest portion of which was his reprint collection that numbered over 6000. Reprints are basically copies of scientific articles (either photocopies or reprints from the publisher). This represents the old way of scholarship, as we now gain access to electronic versions (either online or through downloaded PDFs) of all the articles we need to read.
Now remember that I said that he left the lab over ten years ago. That means that the most recent reprint in his file in from 1998, which is, like, so last century. At best, this collection is mostly historical. So what should I do with them? The wise person would have simply tossed them into the recycling bin. But it may surprise you to know that I am just neurotic enough to want to go through all of them to see if there were any gems that I would add to my own collection. I had tackled about half of these a few months ago when we needed to get rid of a filing cabinet. This week I needed to take on the rest.
As I went through each of the remaining 3000 reprints, I began to have very negative thoughts about my colleague. But as soon as they entered my mind, I would find a cool set of reprints that I didn’t have. Some of the best finds were papers from Vic Denenberg, my recently deceased graduate advisor. These will be incredibly useful for the issue of Developmental Psychobiology that two of his former students and I will be editing to honor him. There were a couple of other classic papers in our field that I was pleased to find.
When all was said and done, I found about 100 or so reprints that were worth keeping out of the whole lot. Not a great percentage (< 2%), but some real winners. So I guess I don’t really hate my colleague after all. And now I recognize that the best part for me is yet to come. When I eventually move on to bigger and better things, I can pass on my extensive collection of reprints to the next sucker generation of eager scientists.