Lab Life: Beyond Experiments and Failures

Juggling with Gloves On You learn to move before thinking. One hand sets a timer while the other swirls a tube. Your eyes scan the protocol, and your mind rewinds to check if you've added the buffer. Something’s incubating, something else is cooling, and somewhere in between, your laptop groans under the weight of a half-finished analysis. It’s not chaos, exactly—but a rhythm that demands attention in fragments. There’s no single focus. Just a layered awareness, shifting from one task to the next, always balancing, always just a few steps ahead. Multitasking in science isn’t a convenience; it’s a necessity. You learn to do it not by choice but by sheer demand. Experiments don’t wait patiently in line—they crowd your bench, overlap, and call out for attention, often all at once. And so, you juggle. And yes, sometimes the rhythm breaks. You lose track of a wash step. Your gel runs out of buffer mid-way. You realize—too late—that you used the wrong tube, the one without protease...

  Incubate Overnight at Room Temperature: The Science of Procrastination Procrastination is a quiet thief of time. It sneaks in unnoticed, disguised as logic, reason, and sometimes even efficiency. In science, it wears a lab coat and whispers reassuringly, There’s always tomorrow. It often starts with a simple pause—a moment of hesitation before setting up an experiment. The rationalizations come quickly: I should double-check the protocol. I’ll get better results if I wait until I’m more focused. Maybe I should read another paper first. Before long, the minutes stretch into hours, and suddenly, the workday is over. That’s when the ultimate justification emerges, neatly written in a lab notebook: Incubate overnight at room temperature. On the surface, this phrase is a standard instruction in many protocols and a necessary step in specific experiments. But more often than not, it becomes a scientist’s way of saying, I’ll deal with this later. It’s an elegant way of postpon...