Derek Lowe offers another Law of the Lab, and it's a good one:
Today's law is: You are in real trouble if someone knows more about your project than you do. That's a realization that hits people at some point in their graduate school career - preferably not much past the midpoint. It marks the transition from being a student to being a working scientist.
Back in grad school, I had a slightly different spin on this. I used to say that getting a Ph.D. requires that you become the World's Leading Expert in something that nobody else cares that much about. It's a cynical spin on the same basic idea: the important thing is really that you be the World's Leading Expert in whatever it is that you're doing, because if you're not, you're not doing the job right.
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That is what my PI tells me - at the time of the defense, there will be nobody in the world, him, included, who will know my stuff better than I do. If I can remember what my stuff was...
This is quite timely. I just got the preliminary speaker list for a conference I'm attending. The speaker right before me is presenting a talk in which she is discussing similar data to mine but from a different organism. I also think she may present the same model I will to explain her data. That said, my stuff is cooler because I think I go beyond what she is doing (judging from the titles, because they do not provide abstracts on the website).