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MCB 112's Sean Eddy Sued by Disgruntled Postdoc Jim Moriarty, PhD, for Hostile Work Environment

Professor Sean Eddy at Forum
Professor Sean Just Railing on Moriarty
Cambridge, MA - James Moriarty, PhD, spent seven years perfecting the art of genome-wide transcriptome analysis. Colleagues recognize him as an RNA-Seq expert, a solid amateur golfer, and a leader in Jupyter-Notebook-based scientific inquiry.
 
To direct supervisor and Professor of MCB ("pure Math, statistiCs, and proBability”) Sean Eddy, however, Moriarty “wouldn’t know a p-value if it killed him” and “brings the relative number of high IQ gene transcripts down 100-log-fold TPM in any room he enters.” 
 
Moriarty accuses Eddy of libeling him in the background section to each week’s MCB 112 problem set, as “retribution for not dressing up in Sherlock Holmes-themed cosplay for Eddy's 50th birthday.”
 
In “Homework 7: The Adventure of the Ten Arcs and the Goblet of Fire” (screenplay by Aaron Sorkin), for example, Eddy writes:
 
“Moriarty, a senior postdoc who is at best a below-average golfer, has never heard of statistics, math, or numbers. After plating bacteria he takes a Crayon and waves it in the air like an imbecile until he gets the attention of Holmes. Between teaching an incredibly successful biological data analysis class and failing to install R packages, Holmes is contractually obligated to help Moriarty quantitate, qualitate, qualify, and quantify, his bumbling experiments. Given Moriarty is a stupid pile of bricks, what is the log likelihood that our colleague Student has a crippling gambling addiction? Also, mixture models.”
 
Moriarty mapped these poorly veiled insults to himself using kallisto and now seeks significant monetary damages. Charges against Eddy include “delaying breakthrough research on the cancer-causing Arc locus,” mishandling years of research from collaborator Wiggins, wage theft for forcing undergraduates to unwittingly analyze experimental datasets for free, and randomly replacing the contents of test tubes around the lab with chicken nuggets and egg yolk because "they looked like typical chicken and egg problems."
 
Leading the investigation is Eddy’s arch-rival Inspector Lestrade, a fictional Sherlock Holmes character by day and cutting-edge RNA-Seq researcher by night. 
 
“My expectation is a maximization of damages,” Lestrade told reporters, “And I'm confident I'm right because I overhead someone saying that they overhead someone saying that a TF said that during office hours."
 
At press time Eddy released the following statement: “I never k-meant to marginalize Moriarty’s feelings. In all maximum log likelihood he is instead Seq’ing to dataFrame me by sampling mean phrases out of context, which Gibbs inaccurate results of what I expressed. Moriarty, you’ve mixture self up. It Bayes repeating that I will exon-erate myself and put you in your Laplace since you are intron-sically incapable of winning. If this were a problem set I would certainly Markov points FASTA than you can’t count to 3. Prepare to get your posterior calculated, normalized, and kicked, just as God intended."
 
Image credit: Harvard Gazette
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