#sighence

The thing I haven’t heard anyone really put into words about doing science, is that it makes you finally admit to yourself that you hate science. You love science. You like the idea of science. You like talking science and thinking science. You love science, before you have to do lots of science. You now know you need countless hours in the lab in order to achieve any semblance of science.

Before, it didn’t seem to bother you. Rock up, do some lab work, read some papers, roll home, no worries. It soon turns into to: rock up, stay in the lab all day, forget to drink water, go home, think about lab work, sleep.

glow.py

You have this identity that’s tied to you: you’re a scientist. It gives your life meaning: you're contributing to something bigger than you. I guess that's why it's​ so hard for you to finally admit that to yourself. You do science. It’s what you do. You work incredibly hard. No one works harder than you. You work weird hours, you go in on weekends, you stay late. You do what you gotta do. It doesn’t matter because experiments don’t work anyway, statistically speaking. Science is tedious, repetitive. The biological kind of science is unrelenting due to the high level of biological variation. It’s a grueling nightmare that fills you with sadness, because even though you know your experiments probably won’t work and it will most likely be a waste of time, you go in anyway. Because you can’t not. This is what you do. You have tunnel vision, and all that matters is science. Your stdin and stdout.

This is your career you’re trying to prime! It’s gotta work! Otherwise, what else are you going to do? You’ve got all your sample that took a lot of mastery to prepare on a trajectory that’s sped up its entropic decay. You can’t half-ass this and you know it. Science’s biggest problem is the sunk-cost fallacy. You’ve invested so much time into this research or idea - let’s be honest, this dream. You can’t see it, not really. ‘It’s so close to working’, ‘a few more months’, all unjust justification. By no stretch should science be instant gratification, but the low level bosses have been slayed. There’s no more decent loot in these chests. Sure our new spawn point is closer to the next dungeon, but we still have to go through the swamp of restriction cloning and over the bridge of protein expression to get there.

It will destroy you and you’ll get nowhere. You know you’ll feel bad when your experiment doesn’t work, but you know you’ll feel worse if you don’t even try. The thing about science is most of the time it’s not getting bad results, it’s getting the experiment to reliably work so you can actually collect results. It’s tweaking, modifying and sometimes completely rebuilding the rube-goldberging apparatus you’re blindly testing the universe with. Designing a method that will give you not a positive result, but a result that is true. That is what science is really about. That’s where the finesse comes in. Be it a quick and dirty proxy measurement or an elegant way to quantify something. That’s really the only way to ‘get’ science. It’s to understand what isn’t working, and why it isn’t. For that, you need controls. Your controls tell you what is going on with the experiment. Is the experiment working? How do you know? Have you included a sample you know works every time? What if you get a false positive? Do you have something you know won’t work every time?

I enjoy the intellectual buggering that is planning experiments, and I’ll run them, but I don’t have to love it.

Controlzzzz

I hate science because it exposed me. It unironically tests me daily, on an unrelentingly per-experiment basis. I wonder if it uses me as negative control, because I always seem to fail. It tests my love for it and I don’t need stats to know how insignificant it is to me. It's challenging to devote yourself to something that doesn't love you back.

I don’t know what I hate more, going into work, or leaving.

#sighence