all (3 PhDs, many masters + final year underg) his students were spending most of their time
cloning, expressing, refolding and purifying
they did some crystallisation trials
but got no crystals

the sad thing i saw was that even they got good crystals at the end, the PI himself knew nothing about X-ray crystallography. They will have to borrow a crystallographer and put their own names behind his in the structure paper.