{"id":763,"date":"2010-03-08T21:47:52","date_gmt":"2010-03-08T21:47:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2010\/03\/08\/in_which_i_ebb_and_flow\/"},"modified":"2010-03-08T21:47:52","modified_gmt":"2010-03-08T21:47:52","slug":"in_which_i_ebb_and_flow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2010\/03\/08\/in_which_i_ebb_and_flow\/","title":{"rendered":"In which I ebb and flow"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

\nStill, 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.<\/p>\n

\nAfter 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:<\/p>\n

\n\"Spy.jpg\"<\/span><\/p>\n

\nWould 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.<\/p>\n

\nFortunately, 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.<\/p>\n

\nFor the moment, everything’s all right again.<\/p>\n

\nSing it, Frankie:
\n
\nThat’s life, that’s what all the people say.
\nYou’re riding high in April,
\nShot down in May
\nBut I know I’m gonna change that tune,
\nWhen I’m back on top, back on top in June.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}