Most of life in the lab, to be completely honest, is not at all exciting. I pipet things into tubes, mix them together, and move them into different tubes with other things.
There is a peace to be found in these mindless tasks, so long as they are a means to an end; the problem, however, is that after countless time spent on this monotony, I don’t always get a result. For some reason or another, the Western comes out blurry, or my cells become contaminated, or I accidentally vacuum them all up into the waste container, and suddenly I have nothing to show for hours of work.
Of course I learn something from every one of these heartbreaking errors, but I become frustrated because that’s not the kind of learning I like to do. I prefer to ask questions of the information that’s been laid out before me. I pride myself on open-mindedness, on creativity, on a thirst for knowledge. Hand-eye coordination and patience, however, are not my strong suits.
That’s why, in my opinion, what’s exciting about working in a lab is what happens once all the lab work is done. After hours of mixing and waiting and pipetting and waiting some more, when I finally have something tangible to examine, to ponder, to discuss. I love lab meetings for this reason; I am given the opportunity to sit back and examine the evidence painstakingly gathered by everyone else, as well as to consider its implications for my own work.
As a scientist it’s difficult not to become emotionally attached to a hypothesis, but I get most excited when the result I’ve reached is unexpected. It is then that I am forced to question everything I know, to look back upon my own evidence as well as that of others before me in order to formulate my own ridiculous hypothesis. Every once in a while I find myself power-walking through the lab (far less carefully than I should be) to get to my PI’s office. Breathlessly I present ideas I’m sure are revolutionary. She listens patiently and then presents me with the multitude of papers that all considered the same idea years previously. And so I am challenged on a daily basis to dig deeper, to search more widely, to think outside the box. That is what is so beautiful about the scientific method– wrong or right, there is always an answer to be found. We just have to ask the right questions.
I fell in love with science a long time ago. He is fickle and unforgiving, surely, but he just might be my prince charming.
