Motivation FAIL

I was just psyching myself to finish up the last of the dissertation...when my email popped up to say that the ManuBeast was rejected "declined" (PhysioProf tells me that this is not the same thing).Fuck.Some of the reviewers' critiques were pretty reasonable, and I now have data in hand to address most of them.However, the major catch-point for all of them was that they weren't convinced by one key piece of data: that a particular gene was *not* expressed in our tissue of interest. It's kind of important to our findings that this particular gene is not expressed, and I've gone to great lengths to show that it is not, complete with a very solid obvious convincing positive control. They still don't like it. Negative results are tough, but if we need to show that the gene is not expressed, then listen folks, you're going to have to be happy with a negative result. They don't seem to be unconvinced by the positive control, they just don't believe that this gene is not expressed because it makes sense that it would be. PEOPLE, LOOK AT THE FREAKIN' DATA PLEASE.The editor has "declined" our submission based on the reviewers' critiques but offered to let us resubmit if we think that we can address the reviewers' concerns. I do have other data to bolster the central finding of the paper (which is not actually about this gene, however the non-expression of this gene is important to our conclusions), but I was hoping to put some of it into a second paper. And there is no way to demonstrate that the gene is not expressed without showing that see, it's not there. Look at the positive control - there it is! Look at the experimental samples - not there! Since this is the major sticking point, I'm not sure that I can be any more convincing about this. LOOK AT THE DATA!! I know everyone expects it to be expressed there. I did too when I started this project. BUT IT ISN'T!!! (And that's why it's interesting.) See?!?!? You can see it right here!!What worries me is that even if we go to another journal, this field is small enough that we're likely to get the same reviewers. As I said, most of their suggestions are reasonable, but if they're going to be irrationally hung up on this gene that is not expressed, then I don't know what else I can do to show them that it is NOT EXPRESSED.Grrrrr.Will try to put this out of my head so I can finish Chapter 3 and get the dissertation submitted in the next couple of days. This is really hard to do right now.

Labels: Motivation