I have never felt a depth of hatred as potent as for the incompetent, pompous fuck that was my boss, DK. Not Dr. Silver, not my graduate advisor Dr. Crisco, not even my father--and I will demean that man's name in eulogy and piss on his grave when he dies.

I started out in February 2012 working for his boss, on loan to DK to help him start up his lab. The first few years was a failed project involving correlating brain metabolites in 20 some odd subjects. At the time it sounded reasonable, but looking back I should have known it would never be publishable work. Then it was a year of learning a technique I cared nothing about, but pursued out of desperation. During this time, I also worked on a protocol for calorie restriction. The spineless son of a bitch would not say no to every investigator that wanted to add their own chunk to the thing. What was once a simple study became this vast, bloated garbage heap. Nearly three years after starting it, it still has yet to get IRB approval. That is pathetic, and despite my best efforts that is partially my fault, and it sickens me.

DK eventually got his own tenure-track position in March. That is when he started to lay down the white male patriarchy thick and hard. Even when I knew better than he did about something, and repeatedly told him, he would not listen to reason and insisted on doing it his way. Every set of edits for a manuscript drove home that he was pedantic, overbearing, and frankly pointless in changing word choices, grammar, and adding dozens of comments about anything that he did not completely understand.

He also obsessed over how other people perceived him. I have never known someone who was so afraid of other people, particularly his superiors. He simply could not say no. He took on projects from which he got no meaningful data, simply because it was expected of him.

I also cannot fail to leave out the get rich quick mentality that he presented on every idea. Regardless of the actual quality of a set of research results I produced, he wanted to send the work to some high impact journal. This classifier paper showing an incremental improvement in distinguishing MCI progressors to MCI stable? How about Cerebral Cortex or Brain? I had to restrain myself from laughing at him. That study with 20 participants that never got published despite being sent to 5 different journals? How about Cerebral Cortex? He was constantly trying to scramble for attention, fame, and fortune.

My favorite anecdote has to be the Allen atlas debacle. This thing is a visualization tool that allows one to look at gene expression in specific brain regions. He saw this presented at a conference. He sent me this long e-mail about how absolutely mind-blowingly revolutionary and fantastic this would be, how it would transform his lab, how I HAD TO DROP EVERYTHING I WAS DOING THREE WEEKS BEFORE I WAS LEAVING AND SUDDENLY DEVOTE HOURS TO FIGURING OUT HOW IN THE FUCK TO USE IT.

I told him no, he or my replacement could do it. His response was to hold one of my existing papers hostage. He wanted to "take advantage of" the method because it was so goddamned revolutionary. So it HAD to be incorporated into that paper somehow. When I figured out a way, he baited-and-switched me and then said that he wanted X, and when that was not proving to work out he wanted Y.

I was trying to do Y today, my last day.

But I gave as good as I got. I kept publishing with my old group. I never included him on any of those publications, despite this angry conversation I had where the fucker had the gall to demand that I do it because--somehow--I had magically absorbed knowledge from his ego-phallus that somehow enriched the paper. I also set things up in such a way that he or my replacement would need my input to do much of anything with my existing projects. If he pulls out the asshole card, or does not do anything the way I want it, he gets to do it on his own. That Allen brain shit he obsesses over like a fan girl? Same deal. Let JM try and spin his wheels on that, sure, but I am the only one who knows how to really do it.

And data management. I left no documentation. Any attempt to do anything with my existing data will look like a confused rat's nest of contradictory dead-ends and false-starts. Because that is how I designed it from the get-go.

And his performance review is going to be a treat. It depends on how I feel at the time, but I can suggest he falsified and fabricated some of his data. In the science world, that is grounds for a full-blown investigation. It would hamstring him for months. The only thing that keeps me back is that I still have some existing papers I need to publish with him. But it is tempting. It's the least I could do.

So that was my time at NIA. I would say I have never been happier to leave a job, but I am emotionally pretty numb about it.

Good riddance to the NIA. Good riddance to DK. I hope he gets hit by a bus and bleeds to death.

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