[Fordrus]

I agree the the posturing is not the essence of the infection, and didn't mean to communicate that. It does make wading through papers substantially more difficult, however, and that is a sincere and severe annoyance, though the tendency to hoard knowledge for fear of being scooped is a greater one.

Your comment about reagents from one manufacturer failing while another succeeded brings back fond memories of trying to make our own botulinum neurotoxin to study neurons- and the rest about hoarding institutional knowledge reminds me why I tried to get out of that. I was one of those ambitious undergrads, but I permitted myself to wilt under the insanity of a system in which I KNEW that a partnered laboratory knew exactly what to do, but they were forbidden to share the knowledge because of politics. By the time I had cut through the wasteful uselessness, I discovered that the only sane person there, one who had been willing to share knowledge, she had actually DIED.

And so I merrily skipped over to the bioinformatics department, which has issues as well but in which I was able to manage them fairly effectively. :D