In one of his first few lectures of 7.05, Professor Yaffe pointed out one of the most frustrating aspects of research in the life sciences: almost everything is colorless. Most laboratory procedures involve pipetting one clear solution into another clear solution and hoping that the resulting clear solution is doing the thing we want it to do. Color changes that indicate that something has worked or that something has gone horribly wrong are difficult to come by.
The other aspect of biological research that can be frustrating at times is that everything takes a really long time. When we expressed FKBP12 in E. coli, we had to wait several hours for the bacteria to grow. When we did the small molecule microarray screen, we had to wait an hour for the proteins to bind to the slide and then another hour for the antibodies to bind to the proteins. Combined with the colorless solution problem, the extensive amounts of time required for these lab procedures often leaves me worried for hours, or even days, about whether or not my experiment worked.
Of course, for 20.109, the long waiting periods are great, since starting one procedure on Tuesday will usually make it ready to complete by Thursday, but the slow nature of the research is a significant change from the lifestyle I’m used to. Having spent the first 18 years of my life living in New York City, I can get really annoyed by things as trivial as people who are walking too slowly in front of me, elevators that take more than a few seconds to arrive, cars that decide to stall for even a couple of seconds in front of the bus I’m waiting for (yes, I have actually verbally expressed irritation at this), or almost anything that makes me feel like I’m wasting time. Patience has never really been my strong suit.
In another way, however, 20.109 is more similar to my experience at home than in other classes at MIT. My high school graduating class had 55 students, and the largest class I took in high school had only 17 students. One of my favorite aspects of the class, which was also something I liked about my small high school, is that Noreen, Maxine, and Leslie know all of us by name and actually make an effort to get to know all of us. Having fewer assignments to grade means that they actually have time to give personalized, constructive feedback, which, as my high school English teacher always said, is a necessity for teaching students how to write.
Getting to know the instructors has also made my experience in the class much more enjoyable not only because they are much easier to approach with questions but also because they’re all more than willing to talk about interesting science, regardless of whether it’s 20.109-related or even the research they did in graduate school. Knowing them as interesting people makes me more excited to go to class every day and encourages me to talk to them more outside of class. In fact, on several occasions, I have gotten into such interesting conversations with one of the instructors about something completely unrelated to 20.109 that I almost forget that it’s a conversation between an undergraduate and a PhD.
But I digress.
The research process is somewhat similar to submitting an assignment and waiting several days for it to be graded. There is a long period of uncertainty before getting the results. What makes lab research different, however, is that the result is usually binary: either it worked, or it didn’t work. What’s nice about research is that if my experiment didn’t work, I can just do it again. The flip side, of course, is that doing the experiment again could take several days.
Neither of these facts, however, have changed my opinion that life is incredibly cool. In the end, it’s extremely satisfying when my experiments finally work. Looking through the small molecule microarray slide image and going through all of our hits was so exciting that it almost made me forget how long it took us to get there. With enough experience, I hope that even I can develop the patience to get to the end of an experiment without too much stress along the way. It just takes time.
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