Science is a cruel mistress

When I realized I wanted to be a scientist many years ago, I didn't really know what I was getting into. In school we learn about all of the amazing things that scientists have brought to us: DNA, antibiotics, light, electricity, and a million other everyday items. In very rare cases are the many scientific failures mentioned, the only case I can think of is when penicillin was discovered. If you remember the story, the scientist was trying for months to find an antibiotic and accidentally left his moldy orange near his experiments and realized that he had discovered something.

These cute stories are meant to make science interesting to young students and to make them seem neat. However, this is a lie. Science is hard and you spend more time failing and not getting anything to work than you do getting great results. No one eats their lunch in the lab and fortuitously gets better results because their food got into their experiment. If you eat in the lab here is what happens: safety gets ticked off, you could get ants, you could kill yourself from chemical exposure, or you could contaminate your experiment. So that is not how to set up an experiment.

I find myself realizing that grad school was not about learning anything particularly applicable to life it is about learning to fail with grace. I learned to take my failed experiments and evaluate them for flaws and then try again, here is the hardest part you then repeat that step about a million times until it works. There tends to come a point when you throw in the towel and say I am going to live to fight this fight again tomorrow... what happens right after you say that. You would be correct if you guessed a HUGE breakthrough. Now after this you have two choices bail or stay. Sometimes you bail because you just can't stand the sight of your science other times you know that if you leave whatever is working will not work tomorrow.

I have learned all of these lessons first hand already but it seems that I am doomed to relearn these lessons over and over throughout my post-doc. It is one thing to know that you could fail at something it is something else entirely to know that the odds are not in your favor and they are so far out of your favor that if it works on the first few tries most people (myself included) will not believe these results.

There is no toll you can pay in science to make things work better no method to guarantee your success in your experiments so much of what we do is a black box. I often refer to this a science voodoo, where yours will be different from everyone else and there will be no rhythm for what works.

I am tired of failing at science I just want something to work and for myself to believe it. If we are putting our hopes out there I would like for these experiments to give results that make a little sense. Sometimes I hate science, why didn't I just get an MRS degree?!?!? Probably because it would have made me crazy.