Science is a fickle mistress. Anyone who’s been in the game as long as I have knows that experiments work only occasionally, and streaks of bad news are inevitable. In fact, I think it’s the mark of experience when you can derive genuine pleasure from an experiment with a clean negative result; that is, one that disproves your hypothesis or otherwise fails to advance your work, but at least has the good grace to do so irrefutably, with perfectly behaved controls. Because after all, this situation makes a nice change from those countless other times when something’s just gone wrong – when you suck your precious cells right off a glass cover slip during a wash, say, or pipette a chemical intended for well A into its next-door neighbor. Or worse, from the times when you are convinced you didn’t make a single mistake, but the results are nevertheless ambiguous – like the perfectly blank Western blot film that taunts even competent biochemists on occasion.
Still, a scientist cannot live by clean negative results alone. Although you know full well that the ride is supposed to be bumpy, and have long since developed a thick skin from a thousand little failures and disenchantments, you still, sometimes, let the bad patches get to you. So it was for me last week when, looking down the microscope, I quickly assessed that an entire week’s work – upwards of 18 hours’ hard graft – had all come to nothing. At that moment, I experienced the strong desire to walk out of the lab and never come back. It doesn’t matter how instinctively you know that the effects of disappointment are only temporary and will eventually to be swept away by that rare experimental success. At that moment, you want out. Badly.
After that black spell at the microscope, I took the Tube home. As I sat there, surrounded by near-catatonic commuters, my eye was suddenly caught by a recruitment advert for MI6 Secret Intelligence Service:
Would a scientist make a good spy? I briefly toyed with the idea of a career change. The poster invited me to remember what the last person who’d left the carriage looked like: true, I’d idly watched passengers straggle off at Westminster, but couldn’t for the life of me recall a single face or outfit a mere thirty seconds later. And this is a person who spent literally months looking at millions of cells with the sole purpose of distinguishing differences. Best not to give up the day job, I thought, even though the point was probably moot: they don’t even trust we non-Euro resident aliens to vote in local elections or become civil servants, let alone don a black balaclava and abseil down some enemy building under a new moon or slip truth serum into a high-ranking foreign diplomat’s martini.
Fortunately, the black clouds disperse just as easily as they gather. Today, for no reason whatsoever, things started to look up. I went into the tissue culture suite feeling fully recharged and eager to redo my failed experiment. I took simple pleasure in harvesting my insect cells, counting them in a glass hemocytometer, seeding them into their circular wells and introducing the double-stranded RNAs to silence particular genes over the week. I spoke about my most recent results at the lab meeting, hearing a ring of confidence that has not been evident for some time, and sensing people responding positively to my manner. I didn’t even mind opening up Adobe Illustrator and rejigging those figures yet again for a recent Major Revision decision – in my gut I know we’ll get it in third time lucky.
For the moment, everything’s all right again.
Sing it, Frankie:
That’s life, that’s what all the people say.
You’re riding high in April,
Shot down in May
But I know I’m gonna change that tune,
When I’m back on top, back on top in June.
[grin]
Ah, those “clean” results. Few and far between. I remember that feeling… or the feeling of seeing a significant p-value fall out of an analysis, or a pretty-looking curve (drug binding, folks, I’m not talking about lab personnel here).
Would it make you feel even happier to know that my copy of Experimental Heart is currently between books by Nicholas Wade and Francis Crick, and only one more step removed from Charles Darwin and a book that includes a chapter by a certain Dr. Grant?
Well, maybe not.
Also, I love your use of “suite” to describe the tissue culture area… makes it sound very glamorous, in an MI6/James Bond-y kinda way.
Good to hear you’re on the up again. Funny old thing, the life in science… how brittle we all are.
Damn. I was wondering what to do with this box of Milk Tray.
Back to the office in the morning, then.
Thanks, Wintle, but Darwin is probably rolling over in his grave.
I’m sure being a spy is not as glamorous as it’s portrayed in the BBC drama ‘Spooks’. For example, I don’t think one would still have unsmudged lipstick after being tortured by Al-Qaeda for ten hours. But just look at me after a few hours in tissue culture…it’s carnage.
Wow…it seemed to take 5 minutes to upload my last comment, and it ended up with an Internal Server Error/Time-out. But actually the comment did upload. In fact, I left a comment on Richard’s blog ten minutes ago that my browser claims is still trying to be uploaded, but it’s actually there too. Is this happening to anyone else?
Yes. Everyone.
See, I told you I’d make a lousy spy.
I interpreted the poster as meaning the last person to get off the carriage when it stops at the last station, and I thought: “How are you supposed to see them? You would have got off before them!”
And speaking of lousy spies: I’m watching the current season of The Amazing Race (a show where teams travel around the world) and one of the teams is a pair of “undercover agents”. Yeah. Not anymore they are. Next time they’ll infiltrate a band of bank robbers, or whatever these people do, I can just imagine the criminals’ reaction: “Hey! you’re those undercover cops from TV! Oh. Crap. RUN!!!!”
See, there’s another reason why scientists would make bad spies. They’d be so busy analyzing the logic of instructions from HQ that the perp would get away before they realized what it was they were actually meant to do.
Last year MI5 advertised for a scientific advisor. I thought about applying. I can’t tell you if I did apply of course and I certainly can’t tell you if I got the job; more than your life is worth.
Not that I’m spying on your comments or anything…Apologies for the continued delay when you submit a blog comment. This is now with IT and should be resolved in the next day or so along with the other more serious issues that have been flagged up. I’ll post more details in the feedback forum later.
Ha! That MI5 job was looking promising until I got to the part in the advert that read, “The successful candidate, expected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society, will be able to fit their academic research around their role.”
Which narrowed down the pool quite a bit. I wonder who they got, and whether it’s secret?
(damn, my session has expired. Copy comment onto the clipboard, sign in, note that the submit button had vanished, delete comment, refresh page, paste comment back in, hit submit. Sigh.)
I wonder which member of the scientific Great and the Good will be signing up to be Special Friend to the men with the exploding cigars and invisible ink?
I’d suggest David Colquhoun but I don’t think he’d want the job.
I could see Martin Rees being an excellent spy, as he’s so charming and urbane.
“The successful candidate, expected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society, will be able to fit their academic research around their role.”
Sounds like they already have a candidate in mind. The SIS are subject to the same employment laws as everyone else, it appears.
(Do they really want an FRS? I mean, what?)
It is a bit odd, the FRS requirement. Perhaps the position is more for gravitas/figure head/PR purposes than for anything practical. Otherwise I can’t see the point of this stipulation.