The Euphoria of Science

These last two years have been a real hard pull, science wise. I feel like I don't have enough/ energy to make headway. Every step has to be learned, and it is slow. I take heart in the fact that most people accomplish little until their last year- the rest of graduate school is just training and laying the ground work for that golden time. But it is frustrating have little hope of anything going right for the next couple years.

But, I was caught off guard today when, miraculously, Something Worked.

I have been doing a genetic screen which involves a lot of registering dead cells. "Yup, this tells us nothing," "this is meaningless," "nothing to be learned here," "check" "check" "check." This is high risk project Dr. Boss gave me to fill in the time when the drug screening was slow. Screening for drugs is low risk, if you do it right you are guaranteed to get something. Dr. Boss had asked in the morning if there was anything to tell the collaborators during his conference call today, so I told him I would check on some things. I've been about ready to can this project, when surprisingly some of my cells were Not Dead today. This is Awesome. This is so awesome I made myself leave the room and come back and check again. This is so exciting I made someone else look at them to be sure I wasn't fooling myself. And then I went upstairs and did some incredibly mundane work that I felt fabulous about because Something Worked. Now, this is very preliminary, and there is about a year of follow-up to do here. But I haven't had so much as a hint of preliminary excitement since starting this, so I was ready to Explode with Excitement!

Finally, after I told half the lab and they were all convinced that these cells are Not Dead, I told Dr. Boss. Now, when it comes to collaborators, Dr. Boss is a blabbermouth. So I told him how very preliminary this was, and that I knew I would follow this up, but I thought he might like to know. And he very coolly wrote out the result to tell the collaborators, who had a million extra ideas to try because this is So Exciting! And even though it is some of my least favorite science, I don't care! Something Worked!!