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Best-Kept Secret of the Lab: Few Things Go as Planned
The classic progression of hypothesis, experiment, results, and publication that school children everywhere learn in middle school is wrong. At my lab bench anyway, a more standard routine typically includes the following: a guess (somewhat educated), experiment, contamination, experiment, PCR machine breaks down, experiment, Why won't this work again?, experiment, experiment, experiment, etc. And although I am relatively new in the ways of research, I know quite a few more mature scientists who also recognize this phenomenon. I recently appealed to one friend via e-mail concerning my frustration. He replied: "Sometimes, or most of the time in my experience, lab work does not go as we expect. Only once a month, perhaps once a year, do I get a result that is what I predicted." Huh? Once a year. I almost feel like someone should have told me this before I began a career in science. But perhaps this notion is one a newcomer to the field can only fully appreciate through experience, experience being a euphemism for continual technical and mental error. The Science of ErrorsWorking as a technician for some time now, I have consistently felt utterly incompetent and ineffective. Protocols have the annoying tendency of never working the first (second, third) time I attempt them. Wild type animals insist on occasionally, and for no particular reason, acting mutant, and vice versa. Experiments that work beautifully--no, flawlessly--the first time never work again. Gels in my hands feel a profound proclivity for the unswept floor.Assuming quite logically the cause of these aggravations to be my own newness to the field, I failed to hear the talk around me of scientists experiencing similar problems. When I finally began to eavesdrop, however, I realized that my personal inexperience was only mostly the cause of my difficulties. I relearned, unforgettably this time, what science teachers had been trying to ingrain in me for years: science is based on trial and error, and scientists make a multitude of errors before they can even begin to uncover the truth. Basic science creates, by its very nature, an environment in which surprises, miscalculations, and undesirable results are accepted and even expected. If research consistently proceeded flawlessly, scientists could skip the experimentation part of the equation and go straight from hypothesis to publication. And though this might be fun, too, the fact remains that life is so complicated that attempting to decipher it takes great amounts of time, as well as a willingness to be wrong. Occasionally, Things Go RightScience and medicine seem vastly different in these respects. In effect, scientists painstakingly create the infrastructure of knowledge that physicians then implement in creative and innovative ways. While it is trusted that medical doctors make few mistakes in their application of basic research on human beings, scientists revel in the infrequent times when things do go exactly their way and an important finding results.How do scientists do it? How do they persevere despite continual setbacks? Since the discovery of scientific truths takes enormous amounts of time and energy, scientists must be extraordinarily patient. Whereas doctors often see the results of their actions relatively quickly, scientists must wait a comparative eternity for their work to be realized. A scientist can travel a single path for years just to find out that not only was he or she following a false lead, but that someone else had already found the correct path--and published it. A scientist then has to be mentally tough and truly love the work that he or she does, as well as possess a great deal of intelligence and puzzle-solving creativity. But one of the most critical characteristics of a good scientist is the ability to play many different scientific roles concurrently. First, a scientist must have the capability to create an elegant experiment and set up and amend a practical protocol that will critically address the question to be answered. Second, once the scientist's experiment is set loose and the laws of nature take over, the scientist must become a catalyst, putting substances in the right place at the right time and using suitable reagents to solve the problem at hand. Third, as the experiment runs its course, the role of the scientist fluctuates between that of a catalyst and that of an observer. The scientist must scrutinize the proceedings and results of his or her created world. It is in these observations that the geniuses are differentiated from the mediocre scientists. Life will always proceed according to natural laws and mechanisms, but it is up to the scientist to search out and discover these inner workings without prejudice or preconception. What one does with these observations is exceedingly important. If Alexander Fleming had absent-mindedly thrown away his moldy, contaminated cultures, the lives of millions of people may never have benefited from penicillin. If Edward Jenner hadn't noticed that milkmaids almost never contracted smallpox, the vaccine made from the cowpox virus may never have been produced. It is all in the observation of the expected and the unexpected that a good scientist comes to be. If a scientist dwells too long on his or her supposed setbacks, nothing new and interesting may ever come of the research. A good scientist takes the good and the bad and tries to learn from both, instead of simply throwing away results that don't fit the preconceived paradigm. Reachable GoalsPersonally, I have felt humbled by science from my very first day in the lab. I was impatient, hurried, clumsy. I wanted immediate results and when they didn't come, I felt frustrated and annoyed. I felt like I could never finish anything I started. I could never complete a task, either because it failed or because a million problems emerged along the way that I had to deal with first.Over the past year, however, I have both become more accustomed to working in a laboratory and changed my expectations for my research. Previously, keeping the ultimate goal of the lab in mind--such as curing cancer or understanding Huntington's disease--was paramount. Now I have realized that this mind-set simply makes me irritable and impatient, for the obvious reason that I will never accomplish such a goal in a time frame that is structured in days and weeks rather than years and decades. Now I concentrate on the smaller day-to-day tasks that I can actually complete with success, keeping that larger goal slightly out of sight in the back of my mind. But despite this improvement in my sanity, I nevertheless have to concede that researchers everywhere are still subject to the law that nothing in science ever goes exactly as planned. And if it did, something must have gone wrong in the process. History has repeatedly proven that unforeseen disruptions in the pursuit of knowledge have led to some of the world's greatest advancements in science. According to history, then, I'm well on my way to becoming the world's next Marie Curie. --Rachael Moeller, a research technician in the Anne Hart lab at Massachusetts General Hospital |
