I realize:
One of the things the public thinks of scientists is that we do experiments to discover certain things and that these experiments always work. If it turns out one way, we know something. The experiment turns out another way, we know something else. We do this for a few hours each day, then go home.
The fact of the matter is that experiments contribute to anxiety and unhappiness through three major pathways:
1.) They don't work. That's right. Most experiments just don't work. You did it all the way you were supposed to, but you forgot to do the voodoo dance, or you didn't understand that when the protocol you're holding says "incubate five minutes at 65 degrees" that actually your boss's copy, or your colleague's copy of the protocol, that line is scratched out and now reads, "incubate at 40 degrees for 6 hours." You didn't know that, and you didn't do it, and your experiment failed. Good luck digging through and finding out why.
2.) The experiments work just well enough to look like they worked, but don't work well enough to clearly interpret what they are showing you. Is that really a secondary DNA fragment that was amplified in that gel lane, or is it just a blip of ethidium bromide that didn't dissolve well in the gel and now just looks like a DNA band? Choose wisely, if you ignore the band and it was real, you'll mis-genotype 5,000 fish, miss the recombinant that was a mapping breakthrough, adding an entire year to your PhD. Good luck trying to repeat the experiment - if you have to spend the next day fitting in the repeat experiment to your already-busy schedule, the boss will yell at you, and it'll just look like crap the second time, too. Go with your gut, and pray to Sweet Jesus™ that you choose wisely.
3.) The experiment works, but tells you something that disproves, or makes completely useless, your PhD thesis or the research you've spent a half-year doing. That's right. You spent 6 months purifying milligram quantities of your protein of interest, attached it to an affinity column in order to see what proteins bind to it in a pull-down assay, and then discover that your protein interacts with at least four hundred and fifty-seven different late golgi proteins. Then you do a two-hybrid experiment and get the same 457 positives. Just walk away from that one, hombre. It's tough, but it's like a doomed relationship: it might be all you have, but it's absolute garbage.
And then you become a post-doc and this crap somehow doesn't happen to you, or you get smart enough to avoid projects involving mind-numbing problems like these.
The fact of the matter is that experiments contribute to anxiety and unhappiness through three major pathways:
1.) They don't work. That's right. Most experiments just don't work. You did it all the way you were supposed to, but you forgot to do the voodoo dance, or you didn't understand that when the protocol you're holding says "incubate five minutes at 65 degrees" that actually your boss's copy, or your colleague's copy of the protocol, that line is scratched out and now reads, "incubate at 40 degrees for 6 hours." You didn't know that, and you didn't do it, and your experiment failed. Good luck digging through and finding out why.
2.) The experiments work just well enough to look like they worked, but don't work well enough to clearly interpret what they are showing you. Is that really a secondary DNA fragment that was amplified in that gel lane, or is it just a blip of ethidium bromide that didn't dissolve well in the gel and now just looks like a DNA band? Choose wisely, if you ignore the band and it was real, you'll mis-genotype 5,000 fish, miss the recombinant that was a mapping breakthrough, adding an entire year to your PhD. Good luck trying to repeat the experiment - if you have to spend the next day fitting in the repeat experiment to your already-busy schedule, the boss will yell at you, and it'll just look like crap the second time, too. Go with your gut, and pray to Sweet Jesus™ that you choose wisely.
3.) The experiment works, but tells you something that disproves, or makes completely useless, your PhD thesis or the research you've spent a half-year doing. That's right. You spent 6 months purifying milligram quantities of your protein of interest, attached it to an affinity column in order to see what proteins bind to it in a pull-down assay, and then discover that your protein interacts with at least four hundred and fifty-seven different late golgi proteins. Then you do a two-hybrid experiment and get the same 457 positives. Just walk away from that one, hombre. It's tough, but it's like a doomed relationship: it might be all you have, but it's absolute garbage.
And then you become a post-doc and this crap somehow doesn't happen to you, or you get smart enough to avoid projects involving mind-numbing problems like these.
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