Relief

Dear Xiang Ru,

I have been thinking seriously about your work, and I am now convinced that we should seek alternative means of getting reasonable and quantifiable gene expression patterns...... No point for you to waste more precious time and materials on something that is not going to produce any form of result....... All these technologies are not exactly user friendly, and are unpleasantly bad in providing any reportable results when small discrepancy occurs with the conditions of associated consumables. The problems with all these high precision technologies are the cost that comes with their sophistication. It is either that you get high quality results or you don't get anything at all. Even the "high quality" results are questionable in some respects. No doubt they provide high accuracy in measurement. But whether these data are adequately meaningful in terms of biological validity, remains debatable.

At the moment, forget the milestones in the grant funding report. We will just have to cook up something from data generated via conventional RT-PCR. Hopefully, you can get something out of this soon. I think we should focus on your studies more. I am rather worried about the level of progress in your work......

Let's hope for the best, and good luck. It's unfortunate things turned out like this, but sometimes, opportunities (or ingenuity) comes from times of difficulties. The long raya break should give you ample time to reflect on all these.

Regards,
Assoc. Prof. Dr. XX

p/s: I truly appreciate this mail from boss. I felt relief as if the burden was suddenly released by someone who could understand my situation- that I'm close to the end of my second year, with barely any data (which worries me), but still have to put up with those 'datelines' given by people who don't understand how tough research can be. Now what matters the most for me is to obtain some convincing data so that I can move on from there and ultimately to graduate. Btw, I don't think I have any luxury of celebrating Raya at times like this.