Dear flowers, thank you to everyone who has written and sorry that I do not have the time to reply to everybody individually. I was not aware how broad the problem of bad habits in flow cytometry was. From my experience I know that people in many cases do not care about how to interpret flow data. They have some numbers and that is all they need. Controls? Too expensive! / The graphs are plotted in a way that you can get wrong conclusions? Who cares? In paper so and so they did it the same way! / The settings are completely wrong? So what? They show what I want them to show! / You got the wrong statistics! Statistics? What is statistics? People just use the machines, if possible with kits, and nobody really cares what’s behind. I thought this problem was due to the fact that here (in my university/ country (please do not look up where it is or I may get in trouble) there is a complete unawareness of what flow cytometry is and how it works. But how shouldn’t it? There are no flow cytometry meetings, no flow cytometry user groups, no flow cytometry courses and no working flow cytometry societies (That is what I experienced until now, would be very pleased to find out that it is not the case). Now I start to realise that the problem may have spread also to other places and I am not alone to feel bad about such things. As Mario showed in his email there may be ways to educate scientist to a correct use of cytometers. My concern for the moment is how to educate students. If they are well educated, once they grow up there may be no more need to educate scientists. Unfortunately (for us) for students cytometry is just a tool they need and not the topic of their study, so they mostly do not want to invest too much time in that. A short course or the reading of a few chapters in a book should be enough. So in very short time they usually have to face at once how to use the acquisition software, to understand what they are studying and then they should also understand the principles of cytometry, including such topics as compensation which even some “experts” do not manage to understand after years of working in the field. Usually they just can cope with the first two things. They certainly understand what they are told about cytometry but very soon they will have forgotten it because of the big working load. Brains have limits. (In my courses I try to do the theoretical part only weeks after the students begun working with cytometry, so they really can appreciate it and relate it to their work). Later, when a problem comes up or something should be published they usually just look up what has already been published and do it the same way. (Cytometry books are mostly not available in a normal lab and the people around do not know more than the students themselves). Following the discussion how little papers seem to be correctly done, it will be impossible for them not to do the analyses in a wrong way. What I would like to have is an easily accessible online resource where everybody can look up how results should be presented. It should be presented as easily as possible showing how to do it (good examples) and how not to do it (bad examples). I feel the examples should be taken from published literature so the students do not have the feeling to view constructed examples which are never found in reality. This database should not contain as much as that one risks to loose the overview and it should also not be accompanied by theory, just by references where to look it up. I would very much like to have a checklist with sub-checklists, like Mario was writing about. This could be used as a scaffold to construct the database of good/bad examples. This scaffold would be published on the web with the option for everybody to make direct changes or comments (Such tools exist e.g. http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki? WikiWikiWeb ) in order to make it grow very fast to be a useful tool. Probably the best would be to have two databases, one for the students to look up (without the confusing comments) and one for us to work on it. Disagreements on topics could be discussed on this mailing list or on ISAC Meetings. I think such a database might have the chance to be used more and more by the scientific community to look up how to present their own data. But shortly back to Mario’s lists. Why do such lists not exists, as it seems so easy to make them? Or is it just me who does not know them? Claudio ======================================== Claudio Vallan University of Berne claudio.vallan@dkf7.unibe.ch
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