I’ve been in the lab today doing an investigation into the effects of toxins on seaweed. There are two different types of toxicant, one is a toxin that works on a specific bit of the seaweed and the other is a general toxin that just goes in with a metaphorical sledgehammer and wellies away, causing havoc wherever it hits.

This is my team’s (me, Sandi, Maria and Mark) water bath, full of test tubes of boiling water and seaweed that has previously been exposed to “compound Y” at different strengths – e.g. 40mg/l. The test tubes are marked with the relevant toxicant concentration. We did two types of test – one to see how much general damage had been done and one to see how much specific damage had been done to the seaweed’s photosynthetic abilities. These things stress me out terribly. I find working in the lab terrifying. Still, the team “done good” in as much as we got results that matched those of the two other teams who did repeat experiments also on compound Y and these were all different from the data found by the three teams who did compound X. Hurrah.

Now you’ll notice that I have credited the rest of my team with their equal share in our success?

I have to write a scientific report of the results of this experiment and I will be judged on a range of things. One of which is my intellectual integrity, by which I mean that I will have to make the report all my own work. I can’t (and wouldn’t even if I could) cut and paste someone else’s work into my report and claim it as my own. In fact, there are incredibly strict University rules about plagiarism and intellectual property theft. If a student gets caught breaking these rules, they get kicked off the course in disgrace. “Sent down” is what I believe is the phrase.

So, why then do the rules on plagiarism and intellectual property theft only work for students and not the lecturing staff? I have today, not for the first time, caught a lecturer blatantly stealing an image off a microstock website. I am particularly incensed because it was taken from the website that I sell my own work through and “it could have been me” getting ripped off. The bloody annoying thing is that it would only have cost the lecturer in question about £5 to buy it at the res needed and even worse, it was a crappy shot that could have been mocked up in a few moments and photographed on a camera phone.

I am so incensed. I hate the “one rule for them and one rule for us” culture but more than that I hate the fact that when there are so many “free” images available online – much of the content on Flickr is available to be downloaded free for example – why then deliberately choose a stock agency image? The person who did this can’t fail to see that the photographs are for sale and not for free downloading.

BTW on a less inflammatory note, did you know that Word changes the word "wellies" for "willies" automatically - good job I noticed!