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Solkanar512 posted:You've never actually worked in a private lab, have you? I'm talking about OMG SCIENCE because I was that guy, at one point. Since then, it's not so much "got disillusioned" as "realized that staying twelve hours after closing time watching the computer make things rotate is not going to save the world".
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Mar 4, 2011 07:18
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I think we were both just laughing at the idea of OMG Science, rather than making fun of you.  In fairness, I thought everything was all spiffy when I started here too. Couldn't imagine why all my co-workers were such grumpy turds. It took less than three years for that to change. PFE's fast!I don't think this guy is one of those. He's been here 4 years, and he's a good ten to twenty years older than I am on top of that, so pretty sure he's been at other companies. He's just spineless. Anyone else have "no references for former employees allowed under penalty of termination" policies at work? Anyone else absolutely ignore them and provide references / calls for anyone who asks? 
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Mar 4, 2011 18:06
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In my industry there is a fundamental problem with everyone's product that customers would pay out the rear end to fix. We and our competitors have various "solutions", ours works better than everyone else but still has its problems. I recently figured out a solution that is demonstratively beyond anything on the market but we cant make it because some other assholes have a patent vague enough to cover the process. They have no clue what they have. So instead of technological progress we are going to sit on the idea and hope they are dumb enough to not figure it out until after their patent expires.
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Mar 5, 2011 00:26
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Acelerion posted:I recently figured out a solution that is demonstratively beyond anything on the market but we cant make it because some other assholes have a patent vague enough to cover the process. They have no clue what they have. So instead of technological progress we are going to sit on the idea and hope they are dumb enough to not figure it out until after their patent expires.
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Mar 5, 2011 03:16
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Miss-Bomarc posted:Why not form a partnership with that patent holder to jointly market the solution? Fear of having them charge up the rear end for licensing or it might motivate them to stop sitting on their rear end and actually develop the process perhaps? And besides, the patent might just expire in a year or two anyway.
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Mar 5, 2011 07:37
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Have any of you graduated from an Australian university? I am currently an undergrad with a molecular biology major, thinking of adding a chemistry major to my degree as well considering a lot of the courses I have to take overlap and it certainly couldn't hurt. Is this a good idea? How are my job prospects in these fields? I would love to eventually get a masters, and strive for a PhD if I have what it takes. I get the impression that the biotechnology and medical sectors will become very strong industries within the next decade or so (hopefully stem cell research will stop being hindered at every turn), am I on the right track? Or am I being very naive? How are Australian universities looked upon by American employers? Do they just look at international rankings, the GPA or previous industry experience? Sorry for the barrage of questions, but Goons usually have the best advice.
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Mar 5, 2011 15:33
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SBJ posted:Is this a good idea? How are my job prospects in these fields? I would love to eventually get a masters, and strive for a PhD if I have what it takes. I get the impression that the biotechnology and medical sectors will become very strong industries within the next decade or so (hopefully stem cell research will stop being hindered at every turn), am I on the right track? Or am I being very naive? I can't say for industry (but others here can certainly comment) but the academic side will be a tough route if you choose that. While not as bad as say, trying to secure tenure in History, the tenure track in acadamia is long and competitive. There are vastly more graduates than tenure positions available. Couple that to limited funding and you have a difficult environment. It isn't uncommon to work two or three post-docs before getting hired on as a assistant professors, and then you gotta work your rear end off to get tenure. But with all things science, luck plays into it too. You may be a brilliant scientist but if you get stuck on lovely project or an impossible protein, it won't matter how smart you all. Conversely, some people just luck into great projects that publish tons of top-tier papers in a few years. Regarding Masters vs PhD, I was always told that a Masters is worthless if you are interested in acadamia - you absolutely must have a PhD. I imagine this is different for industry though. I think industry is pretty bumping right now in terms of hiring, right?
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Mar 5, 2011 16:42
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polyfractal posted:Regarding Masters vs PhD, I was always told that a Masters is worthless if you are interested in acadamia - you absolutely must have a PhD. I imagine this is different for industry though. I can't vouch for Australian industry, but biotech is imploding in the states right now. You can get jobs, but it's NOTHING like it was even ten years ago. That's not a good sign, because think of how little the field had going for it even ten years ago as far as technology goes. We've come a long way in the last decade, and there are even less entry-level positions than back then. The one thing I will say is this: A masters degree is not worthless in industry, but you will still hit a ceiling pretty quickly unless your company is a significant outlier. You still need a PhD to be anything more than a glorified lab-monkey. I had a lab manager offer with a masters degree at Cornell (both the degree being from them and the job offer from them, to clarify) which would have been quite interesting, but the pay was atrocious. The major benefit of positions like those are that you can often combine them with your own PhD program and effectively have an ultra-kickass stipend instead of living paycheck to paycheck throughout your entire grad career. (My stipend would have been $40K after the job salary adjustment to do my PhD. However, I declined this due to #1 - a vastly higher industry offer, and #2 - lack of a topic I loved enough to warrant doing my PhD.) Sundae fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Mar 5, 2011 |
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Mar 5, 2011 21:54
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Sundae posted:I can't vouch for Australian industry, but biotech is imploding in the states right now. You can get jobs, but it's NOTHING like it was even ten years ago. That's not a good sign, because think of how little the field had going for it even ten years ago as far as technology goes. We've come a long way in the last decade, and there are even less entry-level positions than back then. Wow, I had no idea. Why do you think that is? Is it just because most things biology take longer to develop than other fields? Drowning because of its own hype about saving the world/cancer/immortality/whatever and then not delivering? Just too expensive?
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Mar 5, 2011 23:39
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polyfractal posted:Wow, I had no idea. Why do you think that is? Is it just because most things biology take longer to develop than other fields? Drowning because of its own hype about saving the world/cancer/immortality/whatever and then not delivering? Just too expensive? My speculation would be the trend of gutting primary research in both the public and private sectors is coming home to roost, but I have no evidence for that.
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Mar 6, 2011 01:16
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I have wanted to be in the biotech/research industry for a long time now, but am having trouble getting so much as a rejection letter for an entry level job (I am in California- North Bay Area.) I am signed up with several scientific staffing agencies, but that has so far only yielded one temp stint at a winery lab (which was a great experience but not my career goal) and NO hookups with biotech companies. Any advice for a job seeker with less than a year molecular bio lab experience (outside of coursework) and a B.S.? Are there any industry/volunteer groups I can join for networking? I am interested in a goon lab rat linkedin group if that ever exists Polyfractal, Sundae already explained to me in beautiful detail why biotech is going down the tubes, here it is: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3380574#post387048903 This should be in the OP if this thread takes off.
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Mar 6, 2011 02:14
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polyfractal posted:Wow, I had no idea. Why do you think that is? Is it just because most things biology take longer to develop than other fields? Drowning because of its own hype about saving the world/cancer/immortality/whatever and then not delivering? Just too expensive? It's a combination of several things, in my opinion. I'm going to agree heavily with Solkanar512 on the research budgets. My company's research budget has been slashed every single year (this year, the difference was used to initiate a stock buyback) since I started here. Even more than sheer percentage cuts, the reallocations are deadly to research efforts. If you look at my company's research budget, you see about a 30% cut this year (which is several billion dollars, just for scale's sake). What you don't see is that the remaining budget has had 60% dedicated to external research acquisitions and only 40% to internal research. In short, we buy up other companies with our research budget now instead of developing drugs. In the business's view, this is a nice return on investment because they can pick up drugs other companies have already developed, or potentially entire pipe-lines by buying struggling biotechs for less than they're worth. From the biologist's point of view, he's finding himself out of a job because they don't need biologists to do acquisitions. We've shed so many scientists in the last 4 years, and we're just getting started again with more.  There are definitely some companies that buck the trend on this, but almost all of big pharma and a good portion of the little players have the same problems right now. Beyond that, the really little players are getting hamstrung because they can't afford to do the drug development themselves. Like you said, it's expensive and has a long product turnaround time. You can only rely on venture capital for so long, and in the current economy there isn't much of it going around. The other alternative used to be (and still is, if you have a real blockbuster) to go joint-venture with a big pharma, but they're all imploding on their own right now. At best, they'll offer you far less than you're worth. At worst, they'll say no because of an insufficient market estimate or potentially steal your IP anyway. On the public side, my friends inform ne research grants are evaporating too. I can't personally vouch for it, but I know that a lot of them didn't have their term contracts renewed because their positions were grant-funded and the grants ceased to exist. Edit: Or, you could read the post that he linked to.  Oops.
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Mar 6, 2011 02:17
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That's a pretty disappointing outlook on biotech employers. They got what was coming to them though. I'll have to diversify then and maybe look at options other than developing pharmaceuticals. Thanks for the heads up.
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Mar 6, 2011 03:35
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It's a shame, because there are some really, really good companies to work for in the field. My friends who got laid off from Pfizer all ended up over at Cubist, and they love it there. They're a mid-size "small" company, so they might possibly have a little sticking power, but most of the little companies are in difficult financial straits even without the big players imploding. The big players absolutely had it coming. Agreed.
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Mar 6, 2011 03:47
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I'm working as a pharmacy tech right now and I'm doing research in biology and those last couple of posts are depressing. Given the way things are trending, where is the pharma industry in the states going to be in 30 years? Is there a possibility for these big companies to reform the whole drug development pipeline to something "better" and less risky for all involved (especially the smaller companies), or is the system just gonna implode and something new going to take its place? Apologies if I'm a bit daft on the topic, but I'm kind of concerned what will happen to all the students in college (or younger) that want to pursue specialized degrees in the field. I mean, if they want a more stable career should they be going into something else? oldyogurt fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Mar 6, 2011 |
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Mar 6, 2011 04:02
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tishthedish posted:Yeah, I'm totally all right with the workload (as long as I'm compensated accordingly for what I do) because I love sleeping in everyday and working when almost no one is around. Evening shift people are generally more relaxed. Plus, at my lab, there are no supervisors in the evening! There's no one breathing down our backs, and the other technologist I work with has been there for 25 years so he can answer any type of question I have as a newb. Thats what they told us it would be at the interview. I mostly turned them down because I really didn't want to live in Houston. We used to not have a supervisor and it was awesome, now we do again. Fortunately hes only on my shift for 2 hours. Unfortunately all the new people still ask me questions all the time because I've been on this shift sort of the longest. I only graduated in 2009.
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Mar 6, 2011 04:28
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oldyogurt posted:Given the way things are trending, where is the pharma industry in the states going to be in 30 years? I don't know if any of us can answer that. I know I certainly can't. My guess is "China and India" is where it will be. Snide remarks aside, I don't think we can predict where a science/tech field is going to be in 30 years. Too much can change, and implosion is always a strong option.
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Mar 6, 2011 05:10
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Sundae posted:I don't know if any of us can answer that. I know I certainly can't. My guess is "China and India" is where it will be. Snide remarks aside, I don't think we can predict where a science/tech field is going to be in 30 years. Too much can change, and implosion is always a strong option. Oh, fair enough. At least I can better understand the implications of the news on this topic now.
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Mar 6, 2011 12:49
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Thanks for all the information, I found it extremely interesting. Being in acadamia you don't really see any of this. All you hear are academics griping about wanting to leave for the "greener side" of biology in industry.
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Mar 6, 2011 14:53
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quote:All you hear are academics griping about wanting to leave for the "greener side" of biology in industry. I'm going to check and see if one of my biologist friends in big pharma would like to give some input to this thread. If so, we'll get her set up with an account and perhaps she can give more details relevant to biology in particular. I was a bioengineering major / M.Eng in college and then stayed for a little bit working afterward for the school, but I was really quick to jump to industry when I got the chance. I didn't jump into biology here, though. I work in end-product development, effectively in material science and engineering. From my view, industry is still preferable to academia at least for a low-level employee/academic. I only have a masters degree. No matter what I do, I'll always be an underling whether I'm in industry or academia. My view of things was that the 'research freedom' of academia was largely overstated. I worked on the projects my lab had grants for, and since I wasn't a PhD student or one of the post-docs, I worked on projects they designated in particular. Effectively it was no different from what I do in industry. I work for PhD-holding upper-tier scientists on the projects they've been assigned by the department heads. The success of that project likely determines the continued funding of the department. The big differences are that I have more free time outside of work, I get better pay, and my benefits are better. On the other hand, I'm the youngest person in the department by about ten years (used to be five, but the 5-year guy quit recently) and have zero social connections with co-workers due to the age and stage-of-life differences. Instead of being too busy to spend time with people, I just have no desire to spend time with them. Golf before hitting up the elementary school choir event doesn't sound like my cup of tea. One comment I can make on biologists in industry is that if you work with cell cultures, you're still going to be here on nights and weekends. No way around it, I'm afraid. Oh... and people are still going to forget to close incubators, accidentally turn them off, or spill random crap in your cultures and not even leave you a note to apologize. Some things never change.  (My friend was absolutely furious a few years ago before she got laid off because someone had tried to clean out a petri dish with bleach inside the loving incubator rather than remove it, and they spilled bleach onto all her cultures on the next shelf down.)
Sundae fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Mar 6, 2011 |
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Mar 6, 2011 15:33
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Sundae posted:The closest I get to science is when people hand me completely impossible development tasks and say "make it work". Those can be fun engineering projects! For example, I had a two-drug combination where one was an acid, the other a base, and neither API worked if it left its specific pH range or formed salts. Meanwhile, one of them liked to hydrolize and release a second volatile acid, meaning contact-separation wasn't enough to get the drugs to work together. How did you make that happen?
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Mar 7, 2011 07:41
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Willheim Wordsworth posted:How did you make that happen? I had to use a variety of really stupid controls. The drugs were formulated using low-hygroscopicity excipients and various buffering excipients (to keep the proper local pH) and then tableted separately. One was given a cheap film-coat that basically acted as a contact-blocker, while the other was given a better coating for the purposes of further limiting moisture uptake. We weren't allowed to co-package, so I ended up going with a dual-fill into a capsule (two tabs in a capsule). I used HPMC-based capsules (gelatin-acid crosslinking was a potential problem with gelatin capsules, plus gelatin has less water-blocking ability) plus a dual-purpose dessicant with silica gel and activated carbon. The silica does the usual "dry poo poo out" stuff, and the activated carbon pulls a decent amount of the volatile acid. The capsules were then put with the dessicant in a bottle. Basically, six billion little engineering fixes which sound like complete overkill but still only barely get us to our desired shelf-life. I'd like to revisit it as a co-package if I can get approval and then just toss two tabs into a dessicated foil-foil arrangement and see how that goes. Haven't been able to get approval to do that yet.
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Mar 7, 2011 14:53
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Sundae posted:Oh... and people are still going to forget to close incubators, accidentally turn them off, or spill random crap in your cultures and not even leave you a note to apologize. Some things never change. I want to shoot these people. No one gives a gently caress about anyone else's work and heaven forbid you pull someone's equipment for the required periodic calibration.
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Mar 7, 2011 16:09
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Solkanar512 posted:I want to shoot these people. No one gives a gently caress about anyone else's work and heaven forbid you pull someone's equipment for the required periodic calibration. When I was in academia we had this completely insane post-doc that was convinced that we were all conspiring to contaminate her FBS.
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Mar 8, 2011 05:34
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Bastard Tetris posted:When I was in academia we had this completely insane post-doc that was convinced that we were all conspiring to contaminate her FBS. This actually happened! From Nature News: quote:
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Mar 8, 2011 14:39
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Wow. gently caress that guy. (Also, "internal pressure" ? What the gently caress?)
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Mar 8, 2011 15:44
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john ashpool fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Mar 19, 2016 |
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Mar 9, 2011 07:20
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Why isn't the requirement to shoot people who question QA/QC regulations added to the various ISO/IEC standards? I'm loving tired of having to deal with political power plays and short cuts that are going to gently caress us in the rear end come auditing time. If your QA person says you need to do something a certain way, then loving do it a certain way. Christ. EDIT: And quit stealing uncalibrated/uncertified equipment! You're going to look like a total rear end in a top hat when a client auditor throws out the final report because there was no paperwork attached to your equipment.
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Mar 9, 2011 21:23
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But... but... they NEED to take that uncalibrated equipment because by gosh their work is important and they can't wait 10 minutes to find someone to give them a proper unit or to go down the hall to find a calibrated unit! (Our lab is very out of date on calibration, sadly. The variation between balances is incredible. "Well, the tablets I made were 100mg +/- 15mg depending on where you weighed them. Does that work?")
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Mar 10, 2011 00:20
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And here's the best part - the owner refuses to buy anything new. It's all from auction sites and bankrupt labs he has purchased and looted. No consistancy in equipment, almost no documentation, and something is always breaking down. Oh, and in the rooms filled with fridges/incubators/freezers, he refuses to directly vent them to the outside. If the A/C goes out, then the in house maintenance guy has to fix it. If he's out of town, too loving bad. Let me remind you, we do food safety! 
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Mar 10, 2011 01:20
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Bastard Tetris posted:When I was in academia we had this completely insane post-doc that was convinced that we were all conspiring to contaminate her FBS. Working in a cell culture hood all day every day makes me totally neurotic about how I do things and I can almost understand how people could get like that. Granted, going from the mindset of "everyone else is an idiot and I can't trust anything that I didn't make/open myself" to "everyone else is intentionally contaminating my FBS" is a pretty big step.
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Mar 10, 2011 01:36
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My coworker started putting brochures for anti-schizophrenia medication in her cube on nights and weekends until she finally snapped (about two months after I left), called our PI a "Poison man", and got fired. And I feel you on the old equipment Solkanar- I'm replacing an automated incubator with the asset tag #0001. When it was installed I was eleven years old.
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Mar 10, 2011 03:50
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Solkanar512 posted:Why isn't the requirement to shoot people who question QA/QC regulations added to the various ISO/IEC standards? I'm loving tired of having to deal with political power plays and short cuts that are going to gently caress us in the rear end come auditing time. So yeah, maybe cause they suck?
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Mar 12, 2011 03:27
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seacat posted:Maybe their QA/QM department has a history of being incompetent and lazy? Our QC lab actually does most of what QA is supposed to be doing. None of our 4 person QA team have any even basic grasp of chemistry or microbiology so it kind of falls on our shoulders to actually implement any testing that needs to be done. The senior QC chemist writes all of the documents they are supposed to be writing as well as all SOPs, and sends it to them for "approval" at which point they sit on it for days if not weeks; she is also much more familiar with FDA and ISO:9000 regulations, and audits, than our whole QA team. All of the important QC documents are stored in the lab and filed by the technicians. We rarely see ANYONE from QA except for around audit time and to occasionally pull random paperwork. It's a wickedly and hilariously inefficient system. gently caress, it sounds like the kind of people that come audit our lab. They almost get a  when they see an expiration date on a bottle of reagents, but don't know a loving thing about science. No, it's because the owner is a micromanaging control freak who puts short term* profits over everything else and lots of managers know just to whine at him to get others out of the way of what they need to do. It's a giant mess of trying to do the job while not pissing off people to the point they complain to the owner even when they have no reason to complain at all. *Yes, we have dozens if not hundreds of uninvoiced orders going back a few years, but that's because he's too cheap to hire enough administrative staff to bill his own customers in a timely manner.
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Mar 13, 2011 18:21
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Solkanar512 posted:gently caress, it sounds like the kind of people that come audit our lab. They almost get a  as hell. They LOVE paper. As long as you show them a piece of paper or a logbook with plausible looking results, and as long as that paper is filled out properly, they're happy. It could be some poo poo you just made up!Lucky we use up most reagents far, far faster than they expire. Again, all of the internal stuff is taken care of completely by the technicians. Maybe they're more hardcore on pharma labs, though.
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Mar 13, 2011 23:37
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seacat posted:Maybe they're more hardcore on pharma labs, though. I think the FDA is pretty hit or miss depending on who you have to deal with. I've never had anyone from them bug me about anything, but one of the people helping me on the analytical end of a project had to go down to DC to explain HPMC anomalies in person on two days' notice last week. Queries with only two days to reply in person? What the hell is that? As a tangent, does anyone here have to deal with the DEA on a regular or semi-regular basis? gently caress them so hard, and gently caress C-II designations even harder. I spend easily 5X my research time documenting API quantities and filling out forms. Also, I'm in R&D. How the gently caress am I supposed to know, at the beginning of the year, exactly how much of a controlled substance I'm going to need for the entire year? I end up having to request stupidly large amounts just to play it safe for in case something goes wrong, and good luck explaining that to them. Paraphrased... "Your request is for 200 grams. This exceeds our expected use estimate for your site based on previous quotas issued. Why are you asking for so much?" "Because I don't know how much I need due to the nature of this project, which didn't exist prior to this year. That's why I haven't asked for as much before. As for the amount, I'll keep needing more of it until I get it to work right." "We can't grant you a license without a full work plan and your end-point." "My end-point is undefined because it's based on stability. How do you want me to define an end-point for an undefined path which depends entirely on stability results?" "That's your problem, not ours." Heaven forbid you work on the project at two sites, too! Or if you do, good luck ever getting any of your drugs from one site to the other. I filed to get some stability samples from one of our UK labs sent over to my lab in the USA back in October. It's still not approved as of Friday. Sundae fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Mar 14, 2011 |
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Mar 14, 2011 00:10
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Has anyone here ever dealt with USDA auditors, or the USDA in general?
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Mar 24, 2011 22:04
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Nope, sorry.
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Mar 25, 2011 00:05
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Solkanar512 posted:Has anyone here ever dealt with USDA auditors, or the USDA in general? I drink beer with a guy who was king poo poo at the USDA a few years back, PM me if you like.
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Mar 26, 2011 07:35
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Soo how many people here use something like LIMS and who still pushes piles of paper around? Which is most prevalent, but I am getting so sick of signing, filing, rewriting when something gets lost. Handwritten lab notebooks are a must but is there an ISO protocol for electronic documents? Are we the only ones stuck in the middle ages?
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Mar 26, 2011 23:50
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