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I'd like to second Mario's comments about
the importance and success of creating
skilled flow collaborators instead of flow
clients.
1) We run a Facstar+ and a Facstar with an
8 year old standing policy that "the first
one's free" (some of your may remember that
ethic arising in more bohemian
insight-transfer relationships). When
someone needs flow data or sorted
preparations, they come and talk to us, and
we do the pilot study with them. As soon
as it looks useful to them and to us, we
train one or several members of their group
to do the flow work. We obviously watch
closely as the work progresses in order to
feel confident that our instruments and
their data are things we can remain proud
of, but we rarely have to interfere other
than to teach them a new trick. These
interactions are a lot more fun a)for us
since running somebody else's tubes is
brain death, and b)for them since flow is
exciting when you first start to appreciate
it and they gain their own confidence in
their results instead of trusting (or not
trusting) what the operator tells them
their results mean.
2)the instruments are used much more
economically, since each investigator
decides to invest their own time running
samples. How many times have you
understood that an experiment was a bust
after the first few tubes, and begrudgingly
run all 130 tubes "just in case." I hate
that.
3)Mario describes the optimized performance
of hardware in one of the great flow labs
in the world (kiss kiss), and we don't have
one of those. We climb all over our boxes,
rigging shit with chicken wire and tape,
lots of different applications, laser
configurations, sorting, cloning, kinetics,
CD workshop panels, (no clinical samples),
and still we teach each user to do nearly
everything with very few problems.
4)Sure, there are some idiots out there.
Still, if you pretend that their doing all
the work, they'll be happier if you show
them which little knobs they can turn and
they'll watch the pretty TV with more
interest and maybe they'll even figure
something out.
I'm convinced that better science results.
Later, Jack.
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