The things I deal with are oh so secret. Could I ever imagine I would end up doing a
hush-hush project for my bachelor degree when I started taking
biology. Nope, don´t think so.
The people at my department, including myself, are going on some microbiology conferens in Finland in a month or two. Almost everyone are presenting their projects in one way or another, but not me. Oh no. My chief supervisor had quite a serious talk with me the other day explaining that if the hot-shots in our particular field of expertise happen to hear about the results I´ve gotten they´ll go back to their labs and start up experiments about the very same thing I´m working with just to be the first ones to get a publication.
At these moments I first get a feeling of being the James Bond, supersecret agent of microbiology. Then I just feel that the whole thing sucks, bigtime! Without all the hush-hush and the race for major publications science would probably progress much faster, since everybody could benefit from each others results.
But such a naive image of some jolly hippie-scientist utopia just won´t come true. So I´ll just sneak around at the conferense pondering upon my top-secret results and hope for a free martini at the bar, vortexed not centrifuged.