Oh, what a beautiful mornin'
For some reason, the weather was gorgeous in Boston today -- 87 degrees and sunny, with a breeze blowing in from the ocean. I wore a sundress and flipflops and pearls and listened to "I Enjoy Being a Girl" (yeah, from the Gap commercial) on my pink iPod and danced around the lab. And I was gleeful.
There was a point today, when I was electroporating 40 aliquots of competent bacteria (very tedious), Albert was miniprepping plasmids from our endlessly stubborn yeast (even more tedious), and Albert's lab tech Cliff was preparing the pipette tips for the whole lab (also tedious), and I looked around at the three of us, lost in pure tedium, and I thought, "I love the lab."
Santiago Ramon y Cajal said "You should abandon science... if your soul isn't flooded with the emotion of anticipated pleasure when approaching the long-awaited and solemn moment of the fiat lux." And while getting a beautiful result does make me want to do cartwheels, I love science just as much on days like today, when there's so much drudge work still to be done on the two-hybrid assay that the end isn't even in sight.
It's just such a beautiful thing to, in the words of Nobelist Peter Medawar, "work very close to the frontier between bewilderment and understanding." Even if most days all you feel is the bewilderment part.
There was a point today, when I was electroporating 40 aliquots of competent bacteria (very tedious), Albert was miniprepping plasmids from our endlessly stubborn yeast (even more tedious), and Albert's lab tech Cliff was preparing the pipette tips for the whole lab (also tedious), and I looked around at the three of us, lost in pure tedium, and I thought, "I love the lab."
Santiago Ramon y Cajal said "You should abandon science... if your soul isn't flooded with the emotion of anticipated pleasure when approaching the long-awaited and solemn moment of the fiat lux." And while getting a beautiful result does make me want to do cartwheels, I love science just as much on days like today, when there's so much drudge work still to be done on the two-hybrid assay that the end isn't even in sight.
It's just such a beautiful thing to, in the words of Nobelist Peter Medawar, "work very close to the frontier between bewilderment and understanding." Even if most days all you feel is the bewilderment part.