See, I Love This Stuff
Yesterday did not start out well. I woke at 8, decided to get going quickly, woke again at 9, got going at 10, and did not really start doing anything productive in the lab until noon. (This last bit is probably an exaggeration: what I did before I started actual benchwork was probably more valuable than I give it credit for. Dealing with e-mail and making calls and checking up with people and so on is important, even if it does not directly advance the thesis work.) I spent what seemed at the time like an inordinate amount of attention on the desiccators, which to be honest looked really grungy; two of the three look much better now, and with any luck we will not have to worry about the sodium hydroxide pellets going off again before we need more Reynold's lead citrate. I did not expect much more of the day, though, because not only were things going slowly, but my friend and lab-mate had invited me to join him at a pub at six, putting a theoretical cap on how much time I would have in the lab.
As seems to be usual, things turned around magnificently by about mid-afternoon. I had finally gotten around to taking seriously the notion of optimising my reactions with a known control. While this sounds like an obvious first step in science, I had written it off early on when it failed to work: I was getting results (I thought: they were all false positives) and the thing that I was trying was known not to work reliably. However, I have learned a bit since then, and one of the more important lessons has been a change in attitude. So I tried a control reaction, and the results were not quite what I expected. This was at around five-thirty, when I should have been leaving for the pub, but my curiosity was piqued, and I went back to the computer to figure out what was going on.
It was amazing: my calculations had been off, and I had actually been getting better results than I was expecting! Not only that, but I could write off two of my primers as not being effective: on the one hand, they did not select against bacterial contamination, and on the other, they failed to amplify anything from the control sample. Previously I had learned to adjust my reaction size to get more and better product, and the control reaction gave some further suggestions as well. I could not tear myself away from the computer as I figured out one thing and discovered another, even knowing that I was late for a fun time with friends.
Science is enthralling and thrilling and addictive when it works. Even when it does not work, the promise of it working is enough to goad one along. I love this stuff. Oh, and although I arrived at the pub late and soaked (the rain was intense last night), I still had a good time there as well. Things are going well.
As seems to be usual, things turned around magnificently by about mid-afternoon. I had finally gotten around to taking seriously the notion of optimising my reactions with a known control. While this sounds like an obvious first step in science, I had written it off early on when it failed to work: I was getting results (I thought: they were all false positives) and the thing that I was trying was known not to work reliably. However, I have learned a bit since then, and one of the more important lessons has been a change in attitude. So I tried a control reaction, and the results were not quite what I expected. This was at around five-thirty, when I should have been leaving for the pub, but my curiosity was piqued, and I went back to the computer to figure out what was going on.
It was amazing: my calculations had been off, and I had actually been getting better results than I was expecting! Not only that, but I could write off two of my primers as not being effective: on the one hand, they did not select against bacterial contamination, and on the other, they failed to amplify anything from the control sample. Previously I had learned to adjust my reaction size to get more and better product, and the control reaction gave some further suggestions as well. I could not tear myself away from the computer as I figured out one thing and discovered another, even knowing that I was late for a fun time with friends.
Science is enthralling and thrilling and addictive when it works. Even when it does not work, the promise of it working is enough to goad one along. I love this stuff. Oh, and although I arrived at the pub late and soaked (the rain was intense last night), I still had a good time there as well. Things are going well.