Lab work mantras

If you are interested in a career in Biochemistry, there’s just one piece of advice I have for you: make sure you like working in a laboratory, because that’s where you will spend most of your time! The theory might be appealing, but if you don’t enjoy the practical side, your excitement will quickly get overshadowed by a dire hatred of lab internships. Case in point: I just started my Bachelor’s Thesis. It consists of two months of lab work on a research project, and only after that do I get to write the report. And the thesis is not an exception, but simply the last of many stints in the lab I’ve had over the past three years. Be warned.

I’ve often heard that laboratory work is like baking. You follow a recipe, measure out specific quantities of ingredients, and put your assay in some fancy oven for a set amount of time. And afterwards—done! Now, let’s run a little thought experiment. Imagine you’re baking a cake:

• You know the recipe by heart and have followed it many times before.

• You understand the mechanisms behind the process and how different variables affect the outcome (e.g. more butter = moister, more baking powder = puffier).

• You follow every step religiously, double-checking before moving on.

• Your ingredients and instruments are state-of-the-art and probably cost more than your house; you protect them from contamination.

• You constantly monitor parameters that influence baking, like temperature.

With all this in place, your cake will almost certainly turn out delicious. But this logic doesn’t apply to lab work, and the comparison with baking falls apart. You can follow instructions with absolute precision and still never know whether something will succeed or fail spectacularly.

The truth is, science doesn’t work the way it’s usually shown to the public. In the movies, a scientist has an Eureka moment, runs into the lab, and immediately knows which experiment to run to confirm their theory. Reality is nothing like that. Those revelations are rare. It’s not normal to theorize about something and have it confirmed on your first try. In fact, it’s rare to even know what you’re going to find. We know the methods for many experiments, but usually have no idea which one will yield meaningful results. We know how to “bake,” but we don’t know what to.

Newcomers often become frustrated or disillusioned by this. Imagine opening the oven, ready for that carrot cake you’ve been craving all afternoon, only to find emptiness. Not great. Now imagine that instead of baking for two hours, you’ve been working for two weeks on that cursed PCR, tweaking every parameter known to humankind to optimize it—and it still doesn’t work.

Then comes the paradoxical twist: it’s only when you’ve lost that last hidden bit of hope you didn’t even know you had that something finally works. And you stand there, not so much ecstatic as relieved—it’s over, and you can finally move on to something else.

Eventually, you begin to understand. Science is a grind. It’s about constantly finding that your theories are wrong. But then you troubleshoot, adjust, and keep at it until some hypothesis finally holds up in practice. That success is the direct result of your effort and perseverance. And when it happens, you get an insight into some process of life that nobody else has ever seen. Nothing is as exciting as that—and it makes all the failures and daily grind absolutely worth it. Eureka.

Once you’ve experienced that moment, you loosen up in the lab. You let go. It’s not your fault when things don’t work; at some point, they will. You just need patience and persistence. You is kind, you is beautiful, you is important. Ommmm. Ommmm. Maybe sneak in 15 minutes of yoga between failed PCRs. Maybe a little guided meditation while your gels are running. It is all worth it.