Persevering over failed science experiments

While it is certainly true that science requires a degree of intelligence, there is one often overlooked factor that truly separates the winners from the losers: the ability to not give a sh*t.

This is especially true for people doing laboratory bench research that requires hours and hours of hands-on experiments.

The ability to not give a sh*t does not mean that you should not care about science. In fact, you need to absolutely love science and pay special attention to your experiments and results. What I really mean is that you need to learn not to give a sh*t when science is not going the way you want.

Lab work is hard and frustrating. Most experiments do not conform to an expected hypothesis. I myself spent two painful years fumbling around in the lab until I finally figured out the best way to perform a specific scientific protocol to study adult neural stem cells. There were countless times when I felt frustrated and questioned my own abilities.

Those times of frustration and shedding blood, sweat and tears were not fun. But, as a post-doc once told me in a lab, “You have not experienced real science until you truly struggle.”

I believe that running into problems is very much a part of character-building for anyone who is considering science as a career. Many undergraduates who just began doing lab bench research are less likely to run into trouble, as they are guided by an experienced post-doc or advanced graduate student.

However, the real science begins when the undergraduate student is given an independent project in which he or she has to figure out everything for him or herself. By everything, I mean everything from coming up with the research question and hypothesis, designing experiments to test the hypothesis, doing the experiments, analyzing the data and writing the paper.

Before coming to Hopkins, I had independent projects to work on. Although I had massive amounts of work to do, most of the experiments went by rather smoothly as the protocols I needed to perform were well-established in the lab. Great, no major issues.

When I came to Hopkins, I wanted to continue my research interest in neural stem cells, so I delved into a project to investigate the influence of stress on development of stem cells in the hippocampus. Although this project was also independent, the big difference here was that I had to establish everything myself, coming in as the first person in a circadian rhythms research lab to seriously study adult neurogenesis.

Suddenly, everything was not so smooth any more. I knew my question and hypothesis, but I had no clue how to conduct the experiments. How much chemical compound do I inject? What markers should I use? When should I perform injections? I read dozens and dozens of papers to find the answer and spent an enormous amount of time in the lab — 30 hours per week during the school year — trying out the experiments.

At first, I really thought that I had made a mistake. I questioned why I should continue running myself into a wall, regretting that I did not choose an easier project to do.

Two years later, I realize that this time of struggle was some of my most valuable time spent doing undergraduate research. Struggling in the lab by myself taught me to be more resilient and learn how to solve problems. Most importantly, these difficulties have shown me the blood, sweat and tears that go behind the beautiful figures in scientific papers.

To do science well, it is necessary to learn how to embrace the struggles in the lab. When your experiments come out well, it will feel much more wonderful.