Entitled coworker tries to take credit for my research,

but I end up making him look stupid in front of the boss.

I work in a fairly prestigious biology lab on the East Coast,

where we study various pathogens.

I was trying to isolate a certain bacteria from samples containing a wide array of species

in order to infect mice with the strain under various conditions.

While doing research to see if there were mediums that were selective for the target bacteria,

or if there were any antibiotics that my target was resistance against,

that would kill anything else, I ended up with various ways to isolate the bacteria,

using a process I thought of myself to test the efficiency of each isolation method.

Before starting my experiment, I ran it by my coworker who is a seasoned immunologist of 10 years.

Let's call him Dan, who trained me in working with bacteria when I started the job.

I'll probably rant about Dan in another post.

He thinks my idea is great and gives it the green light.

And for the next two months, I'm running the experiments,

calling biotech slash pharma companies for quotes on their products,

that I'm using to isolate the bacteria,

and end up with a big spreadsheet that contains both the efficiency and the cost-slash benefit

analysis of all the methods I came up with or found.

I show my results to Dan and he's a static.

Although he mentions that it's likely going to be a while before we use the data,

and make a decision on the isolation method due to us waiting on samples to come in,

...