August 1: Fellowship complete: 3%

So I am 4 weeks old, so what have I learned thus far?
Then: I thought basic research worked like this: you get cells (in this case provided by the NIH), you run experiments (test for receptors, DNA/RNA etc) you publish data.

Now: you get a sample (NIH or from your patient), you grow them (in the right media, on the right plates, careful not to kill them), infect them with retro/lenti virus (after figuring out how much virus you need), select for the ones who grow the right genes (test by looking for GFP positive and then run western to confirm), split them make them grow more, freeze some (in case you kill them), grow and split again.  Use the same that you dont need to run experiments (in triplicate).  Keep growing them (increasing number passage) so you can do more experiments: proliferation assays, PCR or westerns.

Wow.  That's way more exhausting.
And that's without the CFF.  This is the term the ONC team coined for  the Clinical Fellow Factor (ie when I fuck it all up and throw cells away instead of doing PCR on them).