Dear Bill,

Last year I gave a Special Topics course on inorganic chemistry and, among other assignments, asked for a term paper on a suitable subject. One of the students, after having covered the basics of crystallography in the course, requested permission to write on the preparation of protein crystals.

While the paper was pretty good, the introductory remarks were even more enlightening. I think that the situation described and the effect it had on the student is of sufficient importance that all mentors and potential mentors in the crystallographic community should read it and become aware of their responsibilities to their young associates. The introduction to the paper follows.

Sam and Me

When I was in high school, our genetics class took a trip to Hot Tip Labs. I was awestruck, and I decided then that I wanted to be a scientist, and that I wanted to work there. Six years and three majors later, I interviewed for a job at Hot Tip with a crystallographer we'll call Sam. I had no idea what crystallography was but Sam said he would teach me all about it. Sam seemed like he was going to be a terrific mentor. He said we would use molecular biology and chromatography to purify proteins, and then we would crystallize and solve their structures using X-ray crystallography.

It turned out, however, that Sam and I did not get along very well. The problem? He did not tell me anything more than what I "needed" to know. The crystals were not growing (and somehow, it was always my fault, although I remember making a mistake only once ... MgCl₂ and MnCl₂ look the same when they are scribbled quickly ... ) and although I would read about adding different metals to the matrix and suggested trying different things, Sam refused to listen to someone without a PhD and we did the same experiments over and over and over. Growing crystals, I decided, was quite boring. He finally read one of these papers himself, and we managed to grow small crystals of the protein. I remember being really happy, thinking I was going to learn how to do X-ray crystallography.

Sam invited me into the X-ray room when he mounted the crystal and let me look in the eyepiece to see it. But that was the extent of my lesson. I was shooed away. The data turned out to be no good, and Sam decided the crystal was too small. Then he took it to a synchrotron radiation source and came back two days later with nothing (not even the crystal!). And we started over. Sam was a postdoctoral fellow and was under a lot of pressure (from his university, even his mother) to publish something. I understood how hard it must've been on him, but I couldn't take his mood swings and screaming, which were directed at me, the only person he had any authority over. I found I was scared all the time. When he started throwing my stuff on the floor, I decided to leave. This couldn't be what science was really like.

I left 7 months after I got there, feeling like a failure. My aspirations dashed, I had learned nothing abour crystallography and I was actually afraid to go back to visit friends at Hot Tip. (Incidentally, I took another job where I was treated well, I did my own experiments, my opinion was respected, and I learned that I was not a bad scientist after all. I left there to try teaching, and will probably go back to the lab soon.)

Crystallography continues to interest me greatly, and I think part of the reason is that I was denied learning it. This course and paper have taught me  that growing crystals is not boring, crystallography is not a black box, and Sam doesn't scare me anymore.