You're an intern in a medical lab at a low cost clinic in what the city council refers to as an "income depressed neighborhood." This is sort of like saying the 2011 tsunami that hit Tohoku, Japan caused some "water damage." You've been working here for a few months and are getting decent experience, at least when the one microscope not stolen in the recent break-in is available. Mostly you grow cultures for identification. You've pointed out trying to identify the cultures growing in the bathroom might prove an interesting challenge, at which point you were told to just shut up.

You're on staff in a lab in a medium-sized hospital in the Midwest. You're gaining experience and saving up to pursue your doctorate at the University of Wisconsin. Working for the current Chief of Microbiology might help; he's an extensively published scientist who's even been featured in Scientific American. Unfortunately, he's also been featured on Wired.com for contributing to a paper by a now discredited ophthalmologist who claimed UV rays hitting contact lenses could cause "overheating of the eyeballs, kind of like sunlight through car windshields."

You're a doctoral candidate at a major state university in good standing with the faculty and about two months from defending your dissertation. Things are looking pretty good for you at the moment, assuming your dissertation mentor doesn't find out he was sick for two weeks because you accidentally put one of your bacteriology experiments in the wrong refrigerator next to where he usually keeps his yogurt.

You're a newly minted microbiology PhD about to start work at a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company. Your first project is working as a junior member of a research team developing a new antibiotic. If all goes well, your name will appear on the patent application and subsequent publication. Considering it's your first bit of post grad school work, you're off to a good start.

You have nearly a dozen patented research techniques and your name appears on over 50 peer-reviewed articles. You regularly consult with the CDC, FEMA, and are a regular guest lecturer at most of the top science schools in the U.S. and a couple in the U.K. Your latest publication is on a new form of antibiotic resistant bacteria you were the first to describe. Your teenaged children are not as impressed that you now have a disease named after you as you thought they would be.