Comment on "The Top 10 Worst Things About Working in a Lab"

I recently saw an article on the Science Careers website called "The Top 10 Worst Things About Working in a Lab", written by Adam Ruben. Ruben is a very talented writer and has done a great job with this article; it's both amusing and informative! Here's the link: 

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2012_01_27/caredit.a1200012

I thought I would comment on a few of the "Top 10" that Ruben has discussed in his article:

"10. Your non-scientist friends don’t understand what you do."

All scientists have to agree about this one: there is so much to investigate and so many questions to answer when working in a lab, which means that your project should be extremely narrow and specific; however, this also means that only you and a few other scientists will understand what the project is! Even when two scientists from completely different fields have a conversation, they need to start out with some basic explanations about their research before getting into a more complicated discussion. In any case, even if your non-scientist friends and family members do not understand what you are studying, that doesn't mean they cannot appreciate the work that you do or even understand a basic explanation of your research. I think it is actually quite crucial that scientists learn to explain their research so that non-scientists can understand, as well! Even just practicing how to describe your work in one sentence is a challenging but rewarding experience. It's also important to realize that if your research is not going to immediately solve some human disease, then it's necessary to explain why your work is still relevant. However, I believe that, as a biologist, understanding the complexity of all living things is extremely relevant to begin with!

"7. Sometimes experiments fail for a reason. Sometimes experiments fail for no reason."

It's definitely hard for a non-scientist to understand that things just don't work, and you simply don't know why! Since we are constantly performing experiments with many different variables that could account for something "not working", and we don't have the privilege of being able to see all of these variables with the naked eye, troubleshooting can be extremely time-consuming and arduous. However, this can help explain why repeating experiments multiple times is so crucial, simply because something could work and then not work and then work again, so you need to know if a result is actually "real"! An optimistic point of view would also be that even if you get a negative result when expecting a positive one, this could still be an important finding! The difference between hypothesis- and exploratory-driven science lies within this logic, as well.

"6. Your schedule is dictated by intangible things."

Scientists never have had and never will have a regular 9 to 5 job - on a daily basis, we are not dealing with other people who work from 9 to 5; we are dealing with things that need to incubate for 6 hours or timecourses that need to be examined every 3 hours, which means that a normal work schedule is not likely!