Keeping blind eyes on huge spores
In Sweden the tree
of feminism is such over-fertilized that it starts producing ugly fruits. In
science it is notable the most. Women are fiercely promoted to become
professors. Intellectual capacity and talent are not really important. So, the
results look (i) ridiculously and (ii) abusively to all normal representatives
of the female half of humanity. In the next few posts I’ll give some examples.
Someone might
think that the Department of Forest Mycology and Plant Pathology is an
unfortunate exception from otherwise exemplary university. One department is not an indicator of low
competence of the whole university. I thought the same. However, the Department
of Forest Mycology was the second place in the SLU, where I had a chance to
work. My acquaintance with SLU began with a research group from the Department of Plant Biology led by lady-professor D.
I was given a
task to study a sporulation-deficient mutant of a plan pathogenic fungi Verticilium longisporum. As you can see
from the name, this mutant fungal strain was unable to produce spores. Before the
mutant came into my hands, lady-prof. D’s group has been working with it for
quite a long time.
So, I got two plates: on one was a dark grayish-black fungus
(non-mutant, wild type) and on another – white fungus (the mutant form) (pic 1)
 |
| To mycologists: yes, fungi on my picture don’t look like the true Verticillium, but it was the best I could do lacking the drawing talent. |
Pic. 1
Work started
with transferring fungi on new plates. On this step strange things happened:
plates with mutant strain were covered with small white dots. Hmm… I never grew
fungi before, always worked with bacteria. But these white sports looked like
fungal mycelium growing from a single spore. (pic 2)
Pic. 2
At that time I
spent only few weeks at Sweden
and I was 100% sure that at Swedish labs only the high-level experts work. So,
if they told me that this was the sporeless mutant that means it was a sporeless
mutant and it simple must not have spores. By the other hand, I
was taught not to ignore the facts and facts in a form of white dots were
growing all over the plates with supposed sporulation-deficient mutant. Hmmm… I
showed strange fungi to lady-prof. D. She said with disgust: “Contamination!”
(damn foreigners simple can’t work well enough).
Ok! I repeated
the procedure with all possible precautions and made few control plates to
check for contamination. All control petri dishes were clean, but plates with
sporulation-deficient mutant were covered with snowballs again. We had another
meeting with lady-professor, and she again confidently talked about contamination.
Finally I asked one mycologist to look at white mutant under the microscope. He
found that supposed sporeless mutant was entirely covered with huge
well-developed spores. He said:” O! Such nice spores! What kind of fungi is
it?” I said:” Sporulation-deficient Verticilium
mutant” He immediately understood who the owner of these fungi was and that the
news about high prolificacy of presumably sterile fungi would made terrible
woman seriously unhappy. So he started babbling that he is not quite sure and it would be better if I consult someone
else. Seeing so much fear in his eyes, I promised not mention his name to the terrible
lady-professor.
On the next day lady-professor's eyes flashed with anger, when I told her that the beloved
sporeless mutant was actually the melanin-deficient one (pic. 3). Fungi just
lacked the pigment (were albinos).
Pic. 3
Lady-professor gritted
her teeth and gave me another task, which happened to be even more
amusing!
I must say, that
technicians in that department were brilliant. Then, it is even more puzzled
how such things could happen. The only explanation I have is that
lady-professor was as overweening as she was incompetent and being so she never
paid attention to the opinion of the lab personnel.
Now think! If in
the well-equipped lab, which for decades worked with the same fungi, people
could not distinguish between spore-less and spore-white mutants, then how many
potentially dangerous mutants did
they produce? How many potentially
dangerous forms did they fail to detect? By the way, they were all released to the Nature...
Good Luck for the mankind is that
this lady-professor worked with plant not human pathogens!
