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Asked by oolevityoo to James, Jayne, Kara, Sharon on 23 Mar 2011 in Categories: Your Research.
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Sharon Sneddon answered on 23 Mar 2011:
Hi Oolevityoo,
Actually, I’ve done both of the things that you mention, apart from it wasn’t algae I put in the freezer instead of the fridge, and you are right, it’s REALLY frustrating, especially when you realise that you have no-one to blame but yourself. I’ve done lots of other things like that, some examples of my most frustrating things are throwing away things by mistake (like DNA or RNA samples that you have just spent a few hours making), getting contaminiation in my cells, making a silly mistake in a calculations of how much of a certain chemical to add and then wondering why things don’t work, getting almost to the end of an experiment then realising you don’t have a crucial reagent! All very annoying!
I think the most frustrating thing I’ve ever done was the following ..
After growing stem cells for over 3 months in order to “bulk” them up as I needed a lot of cells for my experiments, I was replacing them back in the incubator. I had about 60 dishes on a tray and I dropped the whole lot. I actually cried as it had taken me 3 months to get to this stage, and I had not even started the experiment yet.I’d like to say that as I’ve got older, I do less frustrating things, but I’m not sure thats the case!!
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Jayne Charnock answered on 23 Mar 2011:
Hi oolevityoo,
Welcome to the frustrating world of research!!
There have been soooooo many frustrating incidents Ive lost count. Only yesterday an undergraduate student lost weeks of work in the lab because the marker pen came off the lids of all her sample tubes, i felt so sorry for her!
I think for me its worst when you are also under immense pressure to get something done- in the final week of my PhD i had to complete just one more cell culture experiment. I was very stressed as i didnt have long left before i had to hand in my thesis but i really needed this last set of results. I worked late that Friday night, then went home, and then travelled back into work the following day (I live about an hour away and was frustrated because it was taking up precious time I could be writing!) Anyway, when I got there and found that the culture was completed infected with fungi- the placental sample from which I had isolated the cells for my culture was contaminated with the fungal infection ‘thrush’ 🙁 What was even worse was because it was a Saturday there was noone else there to cry on!
I went home sobbing, but had to just put it behind me and start again on the Monday. The second time round it all worked perfectly 🙂
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Kara Cerveny answered on 23 Mar 2011:
oolevityoo — you’ve experienced the frustrating part of scientific research, and the part that most of us don’t talk about…we all make mistakes or we forget to do things. I think the worst thing that happened to me was I did an experiment that took more than three weeks of pretty concerted effort, and in the final stage, right before I was getting ready to look at the experiment under the microscope, I dropped the slides; they broke. I never got to know what happened with that experiment…and just had to start over.
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James Chan answered on 23 Mar 2011:
Hi there, sounds like you’re a seasoned scientist!
The most frustrating thing was spending several days setting up a giant experiment and then waiting a week to find out the results, only to find that the ‘stem cells’ were not stem cells at all! they were just rubbish cells that didn’t do anything and wasted a couple of weeks and a lot of hard work! but then it’s things like this that makes you more careful and better as a scientist, I suppose.
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