On Friday 05 Feb 2010 12:15:16 am Pranesh Prakash wrote: > Science is many things to many people, but any lab-rat will tell you > that research is mainly long stretches of frustration, interspersed with > flashes of satisfying success. [The best laid schemes of mice and men > gang aft agley][2]. A scientist’s path contains leads to blind alleys > more than anything else, and meticulous experimental preparation only > serves to somehow mitigate the problem, if you’re lucky. *This doesn’t > work, that doesn’t work either and this technique worked perfectly in > Dr. X’s lab, why can’t I get this to work for me? My experiment was > invalidated by my controls; my controls didn’t work the way the controls > were supposed to work in the first place. I keep getting weird results > from this assay. I can’t explain my latest results in any coherent way*… > these statements are typical of daily life in the lab.
I read a paper on the frustration of reasearch maybe 28 years ago - I had summarized the paper on silk list in 1998 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/813 shiv
