Genetics graduate student Rima Adler reached the limits of her collegiality one evening last May, when she needlessly missed a concert by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Late that afternoon, she had stayed in the lab to help a physician colleague, and ended up spending three hours explaining the basics of the polymerase chain reaction and how it could help the young physician's analysis of their results. Adler ended up stuck in the lab until 9.30 at night, forgetting about her concert ticket. So she wasn't too thrilled the next day, when she heard the same colleague asking someone else in her lab at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, the same question. "I thought: what the hell am I wasting my time for?" Adler recalls. She thinks the colleague "didn't want to learn new things". It was a classic case, she says, of a physician "wanting to just get an answer" instead of taking time to properly understand a problem.
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