I don’t know about you, but when I have a hypothesis that bodes particularly well for fame, glory and high-profile publication, I am far less likely to believe in it. Somehow, it’s always the mundane that seems the most plausible. This is not, I suspect, down to the lofty notion that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Rather, it’s more like a superstition. In other words, some things are just too good to be true.
Spot the difference Polka-dots are all the rage in my hypothesis
I’ve been fiddling around with this interesting hypothesis since Christmas, reading a lot of background literature, making a few new molecular tools, running some pilots and gradually ramping up the experiments to test it. And today, I settled down in front of the microscope to look over the results of my first really big experiment. Human cancer cells, genetically manipulated and then frozen forever by formaldehyde into a snapshot of their seething, immortalized life, stained midnight blue, cherry red, emerald green and that elusive fluorochrome Cy5, which, with a maximal emission at 670 nm, is nearly impossible to see with the naked eye, so you have to let the computer do the honors and take on faith that the signal is real. (Somehow, I don’t tend to trust signals unless I can see them under the oculars; CCD cameras can make light of even the most dim background staining if you are not careful, but the eye is seldom fooled.)
Even after all these years, I still get very excited just before the results of a major experiment. This afternoon, I slowly nudged the electronic stage from well to well, forcing myself to take it slowly, peeling away each variable in my carefully crafted test. All was silent and dark in the little room, just the opening and closing of the shutter and the purr of the filter cubes rotating from channel to channel. My labmates have a running joke about which is better to look at first, the boring controls or the bottom line – I’m afraid I always force myself to start with the housekeeping and save the pleasure (or more likely, pain) for last. So there is that delicious anticipation as the stage whirrs towards the verdict, as the bright colourful shapes swim into focus in their sea of velvet black – anticipation, and the bracing yourself for that crushing disappointment.
Today, Dear Reader, the news was…good. Everything is consistent. No assumptions have crashed and burned. I am not convinced yet, not by a long shot – but I am one step closer to belief.
Ah. Yes, I force myself to look at the controls first. At least then you get to see if it’s worked technically first, before the disappointment or thrill of the hypothesis testing.
Ah, nothing so noble in my case. For me I suspect it’s more just masochism.
Cautionary yay!
(I’m also jealous. It’s complicated.)
Thanks, Eva. I’m jealous of it too — because I don’t quite believe it and I want it to be true but can’t help thinking it’s not, really.
Heh. Complicated.
I think I’m getting lab-sick already. sniff
Click on the handy link for tissues.
Definitely controls first. Otherwise you might think you’ve seen some amazing protein upregulation… and then realise your loading was way, way, off.
That happened to
mesomeone I know a few times during the first year of my PhD…Did I tell the story of how one of my films came out of the developer and the bands showed me exactly everything I wanted to see and I rushed downstairs to tell my PhD supervisor and —
it transpired that the film was upside-down and all the negatives were positive and vice versa?
Even to this day I never go to my boss with hot data until I am absolutely sure.
‘oops’
There’s an ad campaign in London at the moment for women to be careful about getting home after a night out, which features snapshots of scantily dressed binge drinkers doing silly things like sleeping in shopping trolleys. Its strapline is “Some things you only do when you’re drunk”.
Well, “some things you only do when you’re a PhD student”.
Except that instead of shopping trolleys, the shaggy lab sofa is the most likely spot you’ll find yourself in the morning after yet another “night in”.
I’d like to get a lab hammock for the microscope room. Nice and dark and warm in there.
shaggy lab sofa
cough. You’ve read Experimental Heart then?
Quit misrepresenting my magnum opus, Grant, or I shall have to rap you on the nose with a rolled-up copy of Nature.
Not yet, but if one of those is indeed prominently featured, I’d suggest emphasizing that in the back cover when the mass-market paperback edition comes out.
“You’ve read Experimental Heart then?”
Wasn’t that By The Sea?
Jenny, someone I know (no, really, it wasn’t me this time) once spent 6 months working on what looked like a very exciting new lead, but couldn’t replicate the results of a previous student in the lab, who’d got an amazing EMSA result in her last week. The PI was all mad and frustrated with my friend, but then one day they suddenly realised that the old student had inverted the film when she labeled the lanes, and all the results were backwards.
You know, you can add polka-dots to those cells with Photoshop (or GIMP if you’re a starving
studentpostdoc).Not that I’d condone such behaviour, you understand.
Hey. There’s a sofa, and it sags ; and there’s shagging (off-screen, though).
Cath, that’s a terrible story — what an amazing waste of time. This reminds me of a friend who’s currently grappling with a similar situation, without the backwards results. He was hired to follow up on the final glorious result of a departing postdoc, but after nine months and about ten times more experiments than the dearly departed even attempted, it’s clear the initial result just isn’t true. The lab head is resisting: somehow the lure of a glorious one-off result is more convincing than nearly a year of serious graft to the contrary. I think of the wasted time and effort and this really upsets me: but I guess it’s also down to the researcher not to let himself be exploited by someone else’s wishful thinking.
I think I’d rather be hyper-resistant to believing hypotheses, as I am, than the opposite.
Hey, Richard, those are real polka-dots! I only use Photoshop to make my Cy5 staining look real.
Coool. What are those dots?
Jenny and all – the Nature Network downtime was partly due to that fish. Who would have thought it?!
Ouch, Jenny, but sometimes those poor postdocs have been hired precisely to let themselves be exploited by someone else’s wishful thinking.
Anyhow, I agree with the “controls first so you don’t get too needlessly excited” approach, seconded by the “do it again before you get even more excited” approach, and congratulate you on your first step in your soon-to-be deep-seated faith. 😉
oh, the story(ies) Cath and Jenny told aren’t too different from what I have. A nice result from a bacteria and then, lo and behold, when the post doc leaves and someone else continues it turns out that the bacteria is not the species long believed… somewhere in lab a contaminant was purified and worked with.
Somewhere there I picked up the “maybe more than one person should look at the plates every once in awhile”, just to make sure?!
..to clearify, it wasn’t in my lab or anything but it was one of those stories told to me when I started my PhD so I could see the good thing about “getting my plates checked in lab by someone else”
“clearify” – isn’t that what happens during phage lysis?
I’ll get my coat (protein) now.
Richard> yeah yeah… I might have mis-spelled that one. My defense? I worked with phages in my phdtime 😉