no free lunch

They say there's no such thing as free lunch. Someone has to pay. Normally, though frequently indirectly, it's the person having lunch. I've had my share of free lunches as a graduate student. Usually, the cost was in the lengthy talk one had to attend before the feast. More recently, free lunches have often been part of conferences that, even if they're interesting, can be excruciatingly exhausting. Turning the argument on its head (with severely stretched logic), it follows that you'll get something in return for hard work. That's how the world should work.

A while ago, my boss asked me and another research associate into his office and presented a little challenge. Collaborators of his, working on human homologs of a protein whose structure is known, wanted to get theoretical support for the idea that their proteins interacted wildly, forming all sorts of hetero-oligomers. Thus spoke the boss, Who can model putative dimer interfaces? While my colleague mumbled evasively, It's possible, probably, gotta check some servers, maybe, but I'm busy, must go back to my desk, I was more interested and replied that I'd look into this and get the computers fired up. This was half a year ago.

Since then I've had intermittent contact with a researcher at the Pasteur Institute that has somehow morphed into a collaborator of mine. I have also spent an ungodly amount of time learning about protein prediction and energy minimization software, which must be among the most cryptic entities existing in the world of zeros and ones. Processors have burned and gigabytes of files accumulated. At this point, I might have some numbers and be ready to make statements regarding the interactions in questions, but probably not with the sort of conviction and boldness that the collaborators had hoped for. I guess, overall, I haven't delivered what I had been asked to though whether that's the problem's fault or mine is not obvious.

I had started to wonder what good would ever come from this. Maybe it was just a big waste of time. Then, out of nowhere, I got a call today. The collaborator was inviting me to come to Paris for an exchange of ideas. They'll cover the train and the hotel and, I have no doubt, my lunch as well. In the end, there might even be a publication, if only I get my data in order. The work for the next two weeks is clearly laid out for me.