Research

Friends and relatives often ask me about what I actually do in lab. I always have a hard time describing it: I move small volumes of liquids from one tube to another in hope of finding something exciting out about how our bodies work. When I think about it from an outsider's perspective, it really doesn't make any sense to me either. One of my close friends used to say that I was curing cancer. Even though my research has nothing to do with cancer, I liked that. It sounds important and I do know some people who are actively trying to do just that, of course it's all on a much smaller scale than people usually imagine.

Today, as I was doing a very frustrating and long experiment, I was thinking about all this. It involved standing in a refrigerated room for almost an hour and a half, moving small amounts of liquid from tube to tube. I was freezing, my hands were getting stiff, and I was wondering why the hell anyone would chose to do this. I guess at the end we all hope that what we do will somehow better the world or at least one person's life - at least that's what my qualification for a meaningful job is - but it's hard to see that when you're freezing your butt off in a large fridge. Of course much of what we know about our bodies and biology in general come from these types of experiments and back in the day, before we had advanced technology, research must have been a million times harder and more frustrating. I am just not 100% certain that I have the patience for this type of work on a day-to-day basis.

Out of 10 experiments I do, maybe 5 will have worked - since research is often very technical and a million things can go wrong along the way - and out of the 5 usually 4 will have negative results - as in impossible to interpret - and then the 1 that works usually is unreproducible. Today, the possibility that water might have a genome arose in a discussion during lunch, and while it is really funny to have these conversations, an experiment a friend did in lab suggested this. So she is now focusing on trying to figure out the sex of the water we have and see if we might be able to make water-babies :). (We actually do talk about things like this during lunch, but these nerdy comic reliefs are absolutely necessary to survive in the lab day after day.)

Without the great co-workers I have, I would not be able to survive for sure. Especially not without the lab outings and parties, biweekly happy hours and the amazing cakes that Janice bakes! And if you survive grad school and then a postdoc, which usually pays under the minimum wage, and become a tenured professor at a university, then you might be able to afford to live in a place that has a roof with this amazing view of Manhattan. (Actually, my boss's wife is a partner in a law-firm, so maybe there's really no point to this after all.)