I didn’t win the prize
First off I want to be clear that I didn’t expect to win the young investigator’s award. OK, I am still bitter about it, but I am bitter about lot’s of stuff. So while I am not particularly upset about not winning, it was the finalists who really irritated me.
All three featured commercial products some with affiliation to the “judges.” That really set the tone. Sure there is no point in reinventing the wheel, but using something you bought as directed by the manufacturer is not exactly ground breaking. To her credit the winner was actually collaborating with a chemist to improve the agent. La di frigging da.
None of the finalists used any methods other than imaging. Sure it’s an imaging conference, but if you are going to claim your labeled differentiated into a particular type of cell, you are obligated to back that up with some staining. “We injected some bone marrow, it did aomething, you can see it, isn’t that awesome?” Wow, mail that back to 1988 when it wasn’t taught in first year immunology!
So what was the judging criteria. judging from the abundant use of the RGD peptide for labeling avbeta3 integrin, it was mostly based on FDA approved nonthreatening tech. By nonthreatening I mean it doesn’t challenge anybody’s research. To set such a conservative standard for grad students and post docs is a travesty. This is the point in our careers where we should be challenging the status quo or at least looking at biology in a new way. Sadly, medicine is too parochial and corrupt to allow real creativity to flourish.