Entering the Lab

Today I woke up with a terrible pain in my back. What's more, a headache. I can stand a backache. But both a headache and a backache? Not so much, especially since this was my first day in microbiology lab.

Now, I've had experience with labs. I had the misfortune of taking genetics lab last semester, one in which we had to breed several strands of Drosophila melanogaster and hope to God the results corresponding to what good ole Hardy Weinberg said that they should be. We stored the buggers in about seven inch long plastic tubes, with bright sickly blue media, a toothpick, and yeast, and all plugged up with a Styrofoam stopper (I wonder how long it's going to take for all those things to decompose). At any rate, we ran out of them midway during the semester and so had to use wax paper, which didn't adhere or ventilate properly; we had to attach the pieces with rubber bands and poke perfectly sized holes in them with a toothpick (too big = escaped flies, too little = dead ones). On top of that, one entire fly tube was supposed to be in the 37 C incubator - and what inevitably happened to them was that we all waited until the end of the semester to count them and they turned into crispy critters - impossible to count. As you can probably tell by now, there was a good deal of guesstimation that went on in that lab.

Not like that was very different from my other labs. I also took physics lab, placed in a group with one person who knew what they were doing but got too irritated to bother, another person who was stoned full time and never had any idea what was going on, and one last person who was too shy to say anything at all. We ended up always being the last group finished, despite my constant efforts to keep everything together. The results would often be very different from what was expected, and so there was a lot of "fudging" of numbers - one critical skill any scientist should possess.

My general chemistry lab was the same deal, roughly. Mixing chemicals, hoping your results were at least somehow similar to what was expected. I don't remember that lab being particularly strenuous, although titrations will eventually make you want to break something.

In the end, a lot of these labs were left to luck - what's supposed to happen versus what actually happens isn't always a difference of how good you are at what you do or how closely you adhere to instructions. My experience as a lab rat - colloquially used as another term for a person who is eternally in a laboratory - has not only taught me how important luck is in the lab, but also how big of a role it plays in life.

So, if you will kindly join me, let us enter the lab and the experiences it entails.