![\"\"](\"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/HeLa_Circles.jpg\" "\\"HeLa_Circles\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe tissue culture incubator is currently plagued \u2013 not with aliens, but a random vibration or resonance that causes our cells to sporadically seed in perfect concentric circles. As a biologist, I haven\u2019t the foggiest what sort of vibration or energy could cause these amazing patterns \u2013 I leave that sort of thing in the capable hands of the mysterious physicist and mathematician types who drift in and out of our lab, collaborating with my colleagues on building virtual cancers and online epithelial layers and God knows what else. (For all I know, they\u2019re busy crafting the perfect virtual post-doc, one voxel at a time, who can pipette 24\/7 without sleep, social life or access to a vending machine carbon source.)<\/p>\n
But for us real-life biologists, such vibrations can have serious consequences. The cells within the circles are confluent, when we\u2019d rather have them in growing exponentially without neighbors \u2013 but that\u2019s the least of our worries. Apparently vibrations strong enough to disturb the seeding pattern can wreak havoc on the biochemical processes within. The boss even offered up a few doom-and-gloom anecdotes about the time he was a post-doc and the entire lab\u2019s experiments went into free fall when a new lift was installed next door.<\/p>\n
To me, all of this is just a more visible-than-usual reminder of the unavoidable fact that it is impossible for any experiment to ever be replicated with the precise conditions of the previous. If you run three identical Western blot experiments, you\u2019ll get slightly varying band intensities. If you read about an experiment in a paper and try to reproduce it, it doesn\u2019t always work. Apparently the most trivial-seeming things can have strong effects \u2013 such as the pH of the water mains used to feed the Milli-Q water polishing machines. Minute changes of temperature and humidity \u2013 air-co in Texas versus a sultry summer London lab \u2013 are bound to stretch the boundaries of what scientists like to call STP: standard temperature and pressure. I once had a colleague in grad school whose experiments failed miserably for years until the one fateful evening she decided to stretch her legs and took her bacterial tubes along for the ride; the corridor was several degrees cooler than the lab and the rest was history \u2013 and a mighty fine Nature<\/em> paper if I recall correctly.<\/p>\n But I don\u2019t see this as a bad thing. Instead, I find it infinitely reassuring. When you open up that next issue of Cell<\/em> and see three back-to-back papers from three different labs all reporting the same general finding, you can be sure that the phenomenon under consideration must be remarkably robust. People often complain that science is wasteful, that having a dozen labs working on the same thing is inefficient and nonsensical. But it\u2019s not until you see the same results half a dozen different ways that you truly know you\u2019re onto something.<\/p>\n So bring on those HeLa circles. My knockdowns still worked, so I know my biology is strong enough to withstand vibrations, aliens and whatever other subtle variations the environment might throw up.<\/p>\n Nasty referees, however, are another matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Crop circles are so last century. In our lab, HeLa cell circles are all the rage: The tissue culture incubator is currently plagued \u2013 not with aliens, but a random vibration or resonance that causes our cells to sporadically seed … Continue reading