When working in a lab, you may need to get things from a colleague, and sometimes what they give you isn’t the right stuff.

What would you do if your colleague gave you the wrong type of bacteria for your test, but you figured it out and made it work, and then you gave him the correct stuff back, making him confused?

That is what happened to the PhD student in this story, and his colleague was left confused as to why he would do such a nice thing.

If you can’t beat them, confuse them

When I was working in a lab as an unpaid intern while I was waiting for the start of my PhD program in a different town, there was a group leader from a neighboring group who was a complete jerk. He kind of reminded me of Odo from DS9 so let’s call him that.

This sounds pretty advanced.

My boss and him were good enough friends and she needed me to borrow some DNA called a plasmid, which basically is a little circle of DNA that tricks a bacteria into doing two things – making a protein and being resistant to antibiotic.

Bacteria are lazy little critters and if you try giving them a plasmid that expresses a protein they don’t like then they will do anything to stop having to make it – like grabbing the antibiotic resistance gene, stuffing it in their own DNA and ditching the rest.

I guess that makes sense.

If you are sensible, you always use a strain of bacteria that cannot do this stunt or you won’t achieve anything and when you try to purify your precious plasmid from the bacteria you get nothing but water. This is important.

I needed to borrow just a few microliters of a plasmid from him that I knew for a fact bacteria would hate to have.

Why do some people act like this?

He acted like a total jerk and gave me a third of what I needed. When I tried to use it to make bacteria resistant to antibiotic (and prove they were expressing the offensive protein) I got nothing.

He acted like I was a useless idiot. He gave me some of his stock of bacteria that were already resistant.

Ok, I suppose he can do that.

I grew them up, tried to purity the plasmid and got back water, just water. He didn’t believe me again. He demanded I provided proof of the fact that these bacteria had no plasmid.

After days and days I presented my evidence and grudgingly he gave me a straight DNA sample from his private stash.

So, what was different about these?

This worked an absolute treat, the cells were resistant to antibiotic and everything was as it should be.

It was at that point it became clear to me that this big clever group leader had used the wrong strain of bacteria.

He figured it out.

Those little critters had ditched the nasty bit of his plasmid and kept the antibiotic resistance all to themselves. This was a rookie mistake and as a rookie I had spotted it.

I used the right strain, grew up a whole bunch of the bacteria and made several preps of top quality DNA.

Who wants to just let things go? That’s no fun.

I could have just let it lie and let him figure out his own problems. However, instead I decided to do what he least expected.

I breezed into his lab, casually dropped off a tube of 50 microliters of freshly prepped DNA and plate with freshly grown correct bacteria – which would let him prepare a limitless supply. I didn’t hang around for him to say anything and breezed on out.

That was nice of her.

A few days later his wife, who worked for him and she was also a piece of work, randomly congratulated me for my upcoming PhD position. This may seem inconsequential but it actually proved my plot had worked. I found out the following bit from talking to others.

In the words of Monk – here’s what happened…

He didn’t expect him to do anything nice.

Shortly after I had dropped off the enchanting gift in Odo’s lab he had gone over to my boss and expressed total confusion.

He could not figure out why I was being nice to him and his first conclusion was that surely I wanted something, perhaps I had been fishing for a job.

Does he not get that some people are just good people?

My boss informed him that I would have had no motive to do that as I already had a very desirable PhD position starting in a few months. This just deepened his bewilderment.

I wish I could have seen the look on his face when he realized I had been nice to him for exactly no valid reason.

That is the best kind of revenge, the kind that does no harm and actually makes other think better of you.

Read on to see what the people in the comments think of this situation.

Yeah, sadly, this is likely true.

It was a little above my head.

Here is someone who enjoyed reading it.

This scientist loved the story.

DS9 was a great show.

Apparently working in a lab comes with drama.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.