The Emancipation of Bio Protocols

Welcome to biocritic.blogspot.com!

Biologists world-over have put up with the tyranny of bad protocol writers for decades and it is now time for the madness to stop. The posts on this blog will introduce readers to what biologists have to put up with all for the love of the subject (or in some cases, for the sadistic pleasure of their advisors).

The methodology adopted to distinguish the good protocols from the ones that can cause brain damage is this:

1. Protocols will be chosen at random in the realm of molecular biology. (The target is one bad protocol per day.)
2. They will be coded up (at least tried to code up) in the language BioCoder (which incidentally is the best (and only) protocol-describing programming language in the world).
3. Missing steps or information will be denoted by a question mark ("?" aka "QM").
4. The more QMs ("?", "?", "?".. you get the drift) a protocol scores, the more it indicates that the person trying to code up a protocol feels like a monkey who has just had a lobotomy (read "it is an ambiguous protocol").

So if your protocol reads anything like a page from a _________(your-least-favourite-novel-with-incomplete-plot's name) novel, be scared. Be very scared.

(Note: The previous sentence will receive a penalty of 1 QM because of ambiguity.)

Until next time,
VisualAcuity.