Starting when the job's half done

I did a lot of work on the CIHR grant proposal in July, because I was aiming for a Sept. 15 deadline, until I realized we could easily afford to defer it to the Feb. 28 deadline. This makes the job much less daunting.

So I spent part of yesterday reading over what I'd written last summer, and some of what I wrote for the previous proposal (2001). A big part of the work will be organizing what we already know into a coherent story.

It's scarily easy (for me) to forget results of past research. For example, in previous posts here I've speculated that the purine repressor PurR might repress the rec-2 gene. But in the 2001 proposal I wrote that the previous grad student who had knocked out the purR gene had shown that it does exactly that! Now I need to go through his old notebook to find the data - if it's solid (his data usually was) I can include it in the new proposal or even in the purine regulation paper we will be writing.

Next day: The student was a careful worker, but this particular result wasn't very reproducible. That's probably why I forgot about it.