I stride into my lab, grab my white lab coat, squeeze on purple gloves, and whip out my lab notebook. “Did you eat your Wheaties this morning?” my mentor asks with a chuckle. Amy, the lab manager, and Adam, a surgeon, laugh as they greet me. “Time to roll” I say as my mentor and I start the day.
My day in the Poss lab is a wonderful mixture of multitasking, to-do lists, injections, PCR reactions, and constant running to and fro. In the morning, I head down to the fish facility where I set up timed fish matings to collect fresh embryos for injections. While the fish are mating, I load up an injection needle with the solution that I will inject into the embryos. Then for 3-4 hours, I inject hundreds of embryos-the more, the better. Around 1 to 1:30pm, I stop. Injecting in the afternoon is not advised as the fish do not mate at the time and the cells would have already started dividing.
After a short lunch break, it’s time to run experiments. I set up a transformation (bacteria culture with desired target vector) while running multiple experiments involved with cleaning DNA and RNA. I scramble to finish one experiment so that I can load up the PCR machine while I run another experiment. Once the timer beeps for the PCR machine, I scurry to set up a gel to verify that my desired products were made from the PCR reaction. If it is a success, I can proceed forward with my project. But if not, my mentor and I try again, with a new approach, a new angle.
A day in my lab consists of many small victories and failures. There were several days when experiments kept failing, despite my meticulous following of all the protocols. But in these past 4 weeks, I have learned that the life of a research scientist revolves around patience, multitasking, and approaching things from a new angle. As one of the people exclaimed in my lab, “Research is not a work or a job. It’s a lifestyle.” And the odd work hours, the periodic lulls of 1-2 hour periods while waiting for experiments to finish, and working on weekends reaffirm the idea that research is definitely a lifestyle commitment, one that will surely be a rollercoaster ride of successes, failures, and everything in between.
