The last couple of days in the lab have gotten pretty intense for us journalists here at the MBL. One day on genetics/gene discovery (mutagenizing yeast, growing them up at different temperatures to identify temperature-sensitive mutants, etc), yesterday on molecular biology (PCR, restriction digests, gels) and today, protein purification (lots of centrifuging today, Western blotting and mass spec tomorrow). The light microscopy from last week was fun, but this is the stuff I’ve been really looking forward to.

While the experiments we’ve been doing have been a bit contrived, meant to be just exercises that give us a flavor for the techniques and technologies, it’s still been interesting and insightful doing first-hand the things that I’ve spent years just writing about. The experiments that I can explain in one or two sentences I see now take weeks/months/years of painstaking work in the lab. A few things have struck me as a nonscientist about the work and culture at the bench:

* how much of an art experimental science is and how treacherous it can be; experiments can fail at any time and what makes one person more successful with a particular protocol than another can be, well, hard to understand

* how much room for error and uncertainty there is

* how much of science has been based on trial and error

* how much intuition/hunch, perseverance (dare I say, faith) and just plain ego is involved in pursuing your ideas through weeks and months of failed experiments (but beware of dogma!)

* how doing science at the molecular level involves defining almost like a whole new reality. We all know what a table and chair look like, but biologists must define that the grey blob under the microscope is in fact a healthy yeast cell and not something else, that those bands on a slab of gel are bits of DNA and that the white pellet at the bottom of a test tube coming out of a centrifuge is purified protein. For those of us who don’t live in that micro/nanoworld everyday, we have to be told, like children, that ‘this blob is a yeast cell’ and like children learning from parents, we have to take their word for it.

* how much gratification can be delayed. Us writers are used to our work paying off in a publication within hours or days (except for book writers, of course). Scientists have to slog through much longer periods of time. How they sustain themselves, I don’t know. How they, particularly young scientists, stake their careers on the prospect that the idea/project they’re pursuing might not work out in 6 months or 3 or 5 years time, I don’t know. One of my fellow fellows put it well when she came right out and said to our instructors: I don’t know why you do this job! I’m certainly glad I chose the journalism route.