As a old duffer you get many different life experiences and can sometimes have a different view to the norm.
As a young student my first task was to investigate something that was part of dermatitis dogma. It was related to a cell called a Langerhans cell in the skin..similar to a microglia in the brain.
The dogma developed by Jon Wang and Co was that if you remove Langerhans cells in the skin, which you could do using ultra violet light (UVB. However to do this effectively you need big exposures), then when you put a sensitizating agent on the skin that has no Langerhans cells you get immune tolerance rather than sensitization. Presumably due to tolerogenic dendritic cell and T reg function.
This was dogma...if you are an EAEer, it's like saying Tregs stop you getting EAE or Th17 are the bees knees...of course its all true before you bombard me with what ever.
Now my project was to repeat this as a starting point to my studies, but rather than use mice, the project was to use guinea pigs (Is this transparent..given the UK Governments request for transparency about animal work?) .
So experiment performed and hypothesis failed....repeated, failed again....repeated failed again, etc. etc....2 days off, bar Christmas in a whole year (Amercian says big deal someone from France may say I am bonkers:-) later yes no summer holiday and no free weekends. Eventually you just have to believe your own work. I deplete the Langerhans cells with ultra violet B, ultra violet C and even cellotape, that's scotch tape in American and always the same result...anti-dogma.
So time to tell the world that dogma was wrong and your first trip abroad to Amsterdam to present at the ECTRIMS of skin disease and the abstract is...........rejected. So no trip to Amsterdam...Bummer. Who gets an abstract rejected to a meeting?...No one?..Bar Me?. No wonder I have turned into a bitter and twisted person. Scarred for life!
Next and shortly after my boss is away on a jolly and so one of the demigods of Dogma of skin disease (I would add a good friend of the Lab), comes to the lab, so I have to entertain them and show them my work....5 hours later and I am constructively ground into the dust by the literature according to the demigod. So I spend all weekend planning new experiments to answer their points and have another meeting. Ground into dust again but some experimental plans are made. My boss comes back from their meeting abroad and when I tell them what happened he gets my supervisor to send a snotty letter to the demigold saying it will take 5 years to answer their questions posed and they are an *******. Through a bit more reading I realise that the knowledge that they asserted was on dodgey ground and was more grey than black and white.
Fast forward a year and some other mushroom food merchant from the demigods lab comes for a visit and uses the same old confident assertion that their views were right....however this time I had the confidence and importantly the knowledge to go to the bookshelf pick out the paper and show them that they were wrong and manipulating the facts.....fast forward another year and I caught the demigod out in public. They were manipulating the literature.
However fast forward a bit again and Jon Wang and his buddies have done more work in mice. It turns out in one mouse strain you get immune tolerance when you shine UVB on the skin of mice and apply a sensitizing compound but in a different strain of mouse and you get just what I found, the opposite, in the guinea pig many years earlier and they didn't quote me..Bitter not me:-).
However maybe not all humans are created the same and so this is a reason why we should let the researchers develop their idea more before rushing out to get a lamp. So lets see if it repeats.
Anyway I eventually got to Amsterdam a year later after the conference to collect some antibodies for work from the Free University in Amsterdam. However, because I wanted to use the antibodies to see the number of Langerhans cells in human skin I had had a suction blister on my skin to get skin to use the antibodies a few days earlier
Langerhans cells
They use a machine to suck the air to create a skin blister, actual a circle of 5 blisters. However, as it can leave a bit of a scar,or is red for a year, they do this under your knicker line. However coming back from Amsterdam (I never inhaled) I got stopped by UK customs looking for drugs and got strip searched and interrogated for 2 hours.
Explaining what a monoclonal antibody and a suction blister is whilst paraded in your Birthday Suit is enough to make you a bit bitter and twisted:-),
P.S. This is true in my mind at least...names have been changed to protect the identity of Jon Wang