When I came into the HHRF program, I had extremely naive and overblown ideas of how much I would be able to accomplish. Retrospectively, the idea that I would definitely have some kind of concrete results is almost funny now. Ever since entering the second half of the program, I’ve been kicking it into high gear (or at least as high a gear as I’m able to manage). Since then I’ve really had it drilled into my head that science is extremely hard. You have to manage the conceptual side, with ideas and terminology and acronyms. You have to be able to keep up with the current discourse, and constantly be on the lookout for new data that can make you view your experiment in a new light and consider it from new angles. And of course, there’s the technical side, where your experiments not only have to work, but you have to manage all the protocols correctly. And then there’s just plain luck and whether you happen to have that on your side.
Running 5 experiments simultaneously alongside each other is hard, or at least it is for inexperienced me. Counting and plating cells in tissue culture for 3 hours straight is not only hard, but makes me feel like my brain is liquifying. Having an infection blaze through the incubators and make people throw out parental cells just straight up sucks. Research is hard in every way that I expected and in infinitely more that I didn’t expect at all. It seriously boggles my mind that this is where the theories printed in my textbooks all begin, with hours upon hours of manpower spread out upon thousands of people the world over, all trying to get a glimpse of the rules that govern our existence.
My PI explained what every scientist in the world is trying to accomplish by means of a brief history lesson on miRNAs (small noncoding RNA molecules), and how we are naturally limited in our study of science by what we have yet to discover. Every scientist that studied gene regulation before the discovery of miRNAs was missing a crucial piece of the puzzle– there was a layer of complexity that they were completely unaware of. In the end, all we can hope to do is eventually build up to uncovering all the pieces of the puzzle, and accept that there could always be something unknown affecting all of our results that we have yet to identify.
I mulled over our talk for a while after, and for a bit felt really conflicted. What he told me sounded seriously depressing– that all those hours of work could be going into papers that seem to explain the story, but are actually missing crucial pieces and are ultimately wrong. But ultimately, this is how we must progress. This is science, where we discover and rediscover and revise, so even if we are initially wrong we still step closer and closer to the truth. My project is two weeks from completion, and even if my data is confusing (is my hypothesis wrong, or is my data technically flawed?) and limited, I hope that I’ve made even the ittiest bittiest contribution to the story.
