What they do not teach you in grad school

The past month I have had couple of requests for an inhibitor molecule that I discovered when I was a grad student. Not many bothered me about it for these past 20 years or so but ever since we published a paper showing its effectiveness against triple negative breast cancer cell line there has been increased demand for the molecule.  And it dawned on me (my advisor pointed it out to me actually as I am still naive about these matters) that I better get Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) signed before supplying the molecule.  As I do not work in the lab anymore and it is my students who make it, I have to protect their interests. Therefore, I wrote a letter to the VC (after all he has been tom-toming about how we should foster interaction between the industry and the academia) asking for legal help.  It snaked its way through the Registrar, the academic branch and finally the legal cell who sent it to the lawyer for advise. Finally, the paper came back to me. Yes, I need a MTA and I should the needful.  I stared at it blankly and then I called up the legal cell. Very politely they told me that I should draft the MTA and send it to them through the VC.  They will go through it and let me know whether it is okay or not.  I was about to tell them that I am not a lawyer when it dawned on me that I am a lawyer, an accountant, a manager, a teacher, a researcher, a scientist, an editor, a writer....In addition, it is also my responsibility to get money in for research.  Unfortunately, the graduate school does not prepare you to be anything except being a scientist. The rest of the skills you have to develop yourselves and if you are in an Indian University, with no help from the administration.
As it happened, I googled, picked up few MTA available on the internet, and put my own version of MTA together.  The legal cell approved it.

Orphan train by Christina Baker Kline

I picked up this book at the book fair.  The book claimed that it was #1NY times bestseller.  That should have warned me.

But first the history:  The orphan trains transported many children from the East Coast to Midwest in the US between 1854 and 1929.  It was organized by Children's Aid Society in order provide home (?)  to many orphan children.  The family that took in the child had to provide education, home and food in return for labor, though a lucky few were adopted. Of course things never worked out as imagined. So many children ended up in bad situations and changing homes many times. In many cases, their names were also changed- thus erasing part of who they were.

Christina Baker Kline uses this as the background for the story she tells in her book "Orphan Train".  The book was page turner- I finished in in three hours.  It was also cliche-ridden and I could predict exactly what was going to happen as I turned the pages.   She uses two characters- Molly, who is for all practical purposes an orphan and is living in a foster home, and Vivian, who was transported in 1929, after she lost her home in a fire, to Minnesota.  Molly has to do  50 hours community service as she was caught stealing a book from the library and her boy friend, Jack, gets her work in Vivian's house where she has to clean up the attic. Molly, who has been into many foster homes, has developed a thick shell in order to protect herself,  unravels Vivian's story for an English assignment and in the process finds herself warming up to her.  The ending was bleah...kind of abrupt, unrealistic...almost as though the author was ticking all the right boxes. 

It was a good one time read.  I got to learn some history but this is not a book that I would re-read.