I woke up today morning after going to bed in the wee hours of the morning( thanks to OIS and FACS). Running into the lab as I was late and had tons of stuff to do, I prepared all my material for immunisations.
Halfway through my first few immunisations I realised that I had got the wrong vaccine. Damn! Went back despondent having already mucked up my experiment a little bit, I realised that I had made a big mistake in my dose calculations some days ago. A vaccine I had made up days ago was of a dosage 10 fold less than the intended dose.
I was devastated!! I had got some interesting results earlier and I did not know whether I had used this wrong vaccine in that experiment. If I had, the entire experiment was a mess and a disaster. The next two hours of immunising was shrouded by a blanket of gloom and despondency. I wanted to go back home, enough of all these mistakes, how could I explain this away. I was two years into my PhD, how could I make such a stupid mistake?? It was the longest couple of hours. I made new experiment plans, but realised that this would probably be the end of my scientific career. Disaster!!
All these negative thoughts and emotions washing over me, I finished my immunising and immediately rushed to find my lab book. Had I made the biggest blunder ever?
Thank GOD! No! I had not used the miscalculated vaccine dose for the important experiment. I was saved! Relief flooded me and the world looked much rosier. I bantered with my colleagues, chatted with people. The world was looking up. I will go home in jan not October.
Oh that fickle mistress - Science!
2 comments:
Oh yes! The follies of a fellow scientist! :) at last..
Just yesterday I was helping a new graduate student in our lab with some experiments. She had 2 sets of ages to study different aspects of neuron development. In one set, the experiment worked and the control failed, and in another the control worked and the experiment failed! In this case failure simply means that after tissue transfection with fluorescent protein, the cells in the brain tissue fail to light up. So the tissue might be nice and healthy, but by random chance (and it happens), no fluorescence! So after 4 weeks, neither sets of experiments is interpretable....
and Life goes on :)
Bidisha.
dear boy, relax :)
go to blackwells on sunday and read a book and drink some coffee. u deserve the break. and all will be well.
Post a Comment