Just thought I’d share with you what this whole, glamorous science thing is really like. A highly skilled monkey could probably do my job, but it takes a special type of mental fortitude to stare at a screen of numbers for several hours and not totally detach from reality.

*Updated, per request*

I synthesize and characterize Palladium nanoparticles. As part of the characterization, I record the absorbance of ultraviolet and visible light as a function of wavelength and time, which is what you are looking at above. I also take nifty little pictures of the buggers using an electron microscope (a glorified camara with about 8 electronic lenses and a CCD detector just like the ones used in digital camaras), and occassionally get to play with bad ass instrumentation like Brookhaven Nat’l Labs’ NSLS, which essentially does the same as that first experiment but uses x-rays instead of light.

This had me laughing so hard I cried and nearly peed my pants. It’s called EPMotion!

And the best part: it is not a spoof. It’s on the company website:

http://www.eppendorf.com/int/hawkpopup.php?contentid=13

We’ve all heard these one liner jokes:

“Liquor? I don’t even know her!”

and

“Poker? I don’t even know her!”

Well, I’ve finally found an analogous one-liner that suits us geeks perfectly:

“Super colider? I don’t even know her!”

Dorktastic, isn’t it? I overheard it at a bar, used by a non-physical scientist in response to his physicist buddy’s talking about supercoliders and accellerators.

Borepatch sent some some URLs with some interesting commentary about science in the USA and overseas. There were some passages that brought to mind other soundbytes and generally popular comments, conceptions, and misconceptions I’ve heard. Some of them are vague and prolific, some are humorous. I thought I’d share. The first is from this blog, which I think I will be visiting frequently from now on…

“No ground breaking work has ever been done by people who know their place in the world and are content with it.”

That kinda rings a bell, but there are exceptions, like accidental discoveries. I wouldn’t call my work groundbreaking, but I have made a few interesting discoveries that went something like this:

Boss: (looking at my data) that’s interesting, what made you decide to do this experiment?

Me: I f***ed up my other experiment, and it looked kinda cool, so then I f***ed with it s’more, on purpose, with controls.

Here’s one of my personal favorites

“The most exciting thing to hear in lab is not “eureka”, but “that’s funny.”

This one is not always true, sometimes we don’t want things to look funny or interesting, we want them to work the way we would expect them to work, according to how we think science works. It can be really really not fun to try to figure out why data looks funny. 90% of what I do is trying to make something works the way it is supposed to, so that I can then apply my system to new unknowns. This is exciting in some ways, and very unexciting and frustrating in other ways.

I don’t think very many non-scientists, or more specifically, non-physical scientists, are aware that physical science as we know it today is very young. The evolution of quantum theory and it’s application in the way we “see” atoms and molecules occured in the 1900’s, and to some extent is a continuing venture! Before the 1900’s, scientists had ideas, and they performed experiments which turned out to be in close accord with quantum theories that later developed, but no one really had a clue as to the structure of the atom, the principles that governed the movement of electrons, until wave-particle duality surfaced. Point is, we as scientists have only recently – decades ago – learned of ways to probe chemical, phiysical, and biological systems, and are still coming up with novel instruments and methods.

Groundbreaking work is fun and exciting, to think about, to read about. What’s not apparent, unless you read the original publications themselves, is the extent to which groundbreaking work shows that science works the way we expect it to. If you are a non-scientist, have you ever wondered how these science guys know that they have made such a discovery? How was it proven? How is it shown? In order to show that something new has been discovered, scientists must first show that it is not the usual bucket of worms, and that involves going through a whole lot of the usual buckets of worms to show that science is working the way we expect it to work, and we are not missing any important variables. Sometimes, the big discovery of an experiment is merely a new variable that had never been tested. Anyone who has done research can tell you about that last one. Experiments will work one day, then they’ll stop working for what seems like no apparent reason, because there’s some variable that no one has tested and hasn’t included in prior controls. That, or the chemicals went bad or the instrument broke.

Einstein is famous for saying that “if we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called ‘research.’”

A big misconception about scientists is that we know what we’re doing all the time. Another big one is that we’re all geniuses. I cannot stress enough that, despite the fact that there are geniuses out there – in science and in other fields as well, scientists are not all super-intelligent people – we just know a whole lot of equations and mechanisms that most people don’t understand due to science involving large amounts of math and abstract concepts. I tell this to my non-science friends all the time. I also tell them that I know a lot of dumb people who have PhD’s. It seems that many non-sciencetists are very interested in science, and that’s all well and good, but they also seem to think that being a scientist means I’m super smart.

“Wow, you must be really smart,” is a phrase I hear a lot. I used to find it annoying, often times thinking wow, this person doesn’t have a clue about what science is. I also don’t think I’m all that smart, or I am, I’m probably only smart about chemistry. But sometiems I like to take it in stride and get a little laugh out of it, Man, let me tell you, I’ve done a lot of stupid, stupid things (and yet random people still think I’m smart! what does THAT tell you about the general populace and other assumptions people may make!).

It seems that many non-sciencetists are very interested in science, and that’s all well and good, but they also seem to think that being a scientist means being very smart. Why is that? We live in a society that popularizes the exploits of modern technology: cable internet, camera phones, Bluetooth chips in everything. Science touches our lives on a day to day basis, and most people would probably agree that the proliferation of science into society is hard to escape without forsaking modern society itself.

Due to the growing demand and popularity of technological growth and the sciences upon which technology is based, science has become increasingly prevalent in the media. I have to be careful here, not to dis on the media too much for the way science is portrayed. Shows such as CSI and its spin-offs really are fantastic propaganda for science, but I find that the science and scientists are grossly mischaracterized. Labs, as they are portrayed in the media, resemble the starship enterprise more than they do actual labs: rooms filled with stainless steel and blinking lights, machines that go BING! Or there’s the other extreme, the laboratory stylings of Frankenstein, Jekkyl, and Hyde, with beakers and test tubes, and brightly colored liquids flowing through distilling columns, all willy-nilly.

Despite satisfying our desire to draw more science into our lives, to feel more connected to modern technology, the media’s portrayal of the scientist is disturbingly detached. This has resulted in the dehumanization of science and the scientist. One of many misconceptions is that scientists aren’t people, like we’re some kind of super-beings, geniuses, or otherwise freakishly isolated from normalcy.

Very few scientists I know would argue that they are completely normal. Working on the cutting edge of science places some big impositions on lifestyle. My boss never married, doesn’t have any kids. This is not an uncommon trend for reknowned academic researchers. Another common trend in academics is failed marriages, sometimes multiple failed marriages. It is hard to live in the outside world and excell in science. Excellence in science is also a requisite; it is hard to merely work in this field and be content with one’s place in the science world becuase money is granted for cutting edge work, and is hard to come by for much else. Even working as a worker-bee at a small company, you can bet that the company needs to get the pay-dirt for the queen bee, lest funds be cut. The queen bee, you can bet, doesn’t sleep much, and lives deeply immersed in the highly competitve grounds of cutting edge science. There are exceptions to this illustration, take patents for example. But patents eventually expire, requiring more ground breaking work be done, thus the queen bee’s always have their whips ready at hand.

I know a few scientists who have been made slightly crazy by work in this field. One such person was my mentor in the lab when I first began working. He insisted that I come in to work at 7 a.m. and on weekends, and made warey comments when I did not. He got his PhD in two-and-a-half years, describing the feat as 50% luck and 50% blood, sweat and tears. He post-doc’d for 3 years, and became a faculty member at the age of 28. Others, like my boss, are too in love with their work to consider much else in the world beyond lab. Kinda funny, this reminds me of some of the skaters on the ice show, who clung to the belief that life beyond the show was no more than petty details.

One of my friends is a crazy theorist. When I said crazy, I mean crazy. He is a bonafide loon, but I love the guy. This is how he views his work *lame science humor warning*

“If you’re a theoretical chemist, you spend your whole life studying theoretical chemistry, only to prove that you don’t actually exist.”

I replied, “well, only if you’re a very good theoretical chemist.”

To which he said, “I already don’t think I exist anymore, so I must be good!”

Yes, science does make a lot of strange characters, but that doesn’t mean that all scientist are devoid of normal desires and habits. I spend a lot of time last summer in sports bars, watching the Sox games with some other people from the lab. Occasionally, strangers would approach and start conversations. When they found out that we were all PhD students and studying chemistry, they looked shocked.

Strangely, most of us like to and can in fact relate to non-scientistsWe wear t-shirts and jeans, drink beer, and go bowling. We talk about non-science related things, music, sports, darts, video games, movies. We have hobbies, like shooting, or golfing, reading non-science books (god forbid!), and cooking and baking. We’d like to have more normal, or perhaps I should say heterogenous lifestyles, but we don’t have a lot of time or energy to explore the outside world. Still that doesn’t stop us from trying new things on occasion, wanting more, taking interest in what goes on around us.

…unless, of course, you’re my boss.

I said there’d be some humor here, right? One of the things I love most about my job is going to seminars or occasions and observing some of the older scientists interact, to hear them describe their life’s work. I recently attended an occassion honoring my boss’s old boss, who won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry. Winning the Wolf prize, so they say, is the most prestigious award next to the Nobel, and, so they say, typically preceeds being awarded the Nobel. Al, my boss’s old boss, who is in his late 70’s, gave a brief speech. Here’s what he said in regards to rumors about winning the Nobel prize.

“I don’t know if I like all this talk about the Nobel Prize. Ranking that would be just slightly below your expectations in sexual performance; I’ll try very hard!”

“Excuse me, do you know where Dr. Iverson’s lab is?”
“no clue, sorry.”

I don’t even know what floor his lab is on; the entirety of my graduate research is basically contained within the same 4 rooms in the building.

Today I have been running, literally scampering at a brisk pace from room to room with samples for the “hell experiment”. My legs ache, my feet ache, my head aches. Only an ignoramus would declare that science is all brains. Some say science is art. Let me tell you, this stuff can feel downright athletic. 6 hours into the real meaty part of the experiment, I finally have time to sit down. I put my feet up – and it feels soooooooo good.

T and I are taking online quizzes to kill time. Although I sometimes decry the mindless wasting of time, I honestly don’t think I have the functional capacity for much else at the moment. I’ve had 6 hours of sleep over the past 2 nights – combined. I forgot how f***ing aweful sleep deprivation feels. Must be one of those things that gets harder with age (and that’s why, should I choose to quit gradschool, I will not be going back at any time in my life). I’m 26 and already this is not how I want to run my life anymore. I live like a college student, with a lot less of the careless fun parts. I will tell you this, forgoing sleep like this… you still get the “3 a.m. giggles”. just not at 3 a.m. In my current state, I’m finding these online quizzes to be pretty funny.

The moon is beautifully full and it feels like it could be one of the last cool nights (75 degrees) of summer before the hell heat of august rolls in. I get in my car and head back to campus. My car, Roxanne, “the fuckus” feels like it could break down any minute (don’t worry baby, I’ll take you in for your 90k check up soon – next week – maybe)…or maybe it’s me. I’m sloshing around in the sullen attitude I’ve acquired during the day, probably having some part to do with the angsty-hater coffee break I took with T, part because there are still roaches in my house and the front office closed before I could tell them to send the exterminator tomorrow (thursday is bug day), part because my brain feels fried already and I still have the worst part of the “hell experiment” ahead of me. and it might have something to do with the 6 cups of coffee I’ve had since 6 am. that, and I hate driving and I think my car is shaking…but again, that might be the coffee.

coffee. smooth, bitter, nerve jolting, conducive-to-cynical-discussions coffee. T and I took a hate-on-the-government coffee break. T is bitter and hates grad school, and is quitting…to go to law school. We hate on the adminstration’s shrouding of the CIA leak, of the 911 report and how it took an absurd amount of time to assemble due to administration bullshit like executive privilege claims. T and I swoon at the idea of a transparent government. We will probably never see one, because administrators would have to answer to the people for all the shit they put their hands in, the fuck ups, everything, and that would be scary. but it would be grand to behold – a philosopher king, a reluctant ruler. the best person to have in charge, of course, is the person who is reluctant to rule and doesn’t want any power. power can be taken away. it’s unfortunate that people have apparently lost the ability or will to control the government, because that’s the way it was supposed to be.

T and I wonder about the next depression. It will inevitably hit, T thinks. I wonder if it already has. I wonder, when history looks back, when will it determine that the depression began?

I hate driving extra bad right now. I-183 used to be so much more desolate in the later hours, everyone already having left the metropolis. I bet this resounding traffic has something to do with the gas price factor: everyone takes the bus into the city now. It’s getting ridiuculous – sometimes it’s hard to find a seat, even before or beyond the rush hour – I can’t remember it ever being this packed before: the entire aisle is jammed, the air doesn’t circulate even though the crank the ac, and it smells like BO. It’s like being in mexico. Now’s the time, I’m betting, when everyone is running their after-work errands, since they can’t stop and pick up groceries on the way back from work – the bus doesn’t make grocery store runs. I wonder what things will sink next in the depression. I wonder if the depression will ever end, or if, when history looks back, it will deem this as the beginning of the end of the industrial age. or maybe the end of the world, if what’s left after the industrial age crumbles falls into such darkness and disintigrates into the poisoned planet. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll see the apocolyptic collapse of the industrial era and if what lies beyond will be smokey, dark, and metallic…like in terminator 2. God, I’m sullen today. I wonder if it’s the moon, giving off an eery vibe. then again, my mother let me watch terminator 2 when I was 10 years old – it kinda made a strong doomy impression on me. Or it could be me.

When I was little, I thought the end of the world would come when the sun exploded. When I was 4 years old, I learned the sun was a star, and caused quite the tizzy little quarles with fellow pre-schoolers when I told them that stars are actually round. Then, when I was about 6, I learned that stars can die, that they can actually explode, and eventually may become black holes. My parents quelled this fear in me by telling me that the sun won’t explode for several millions of years. I guess I never stopped wondering about the end, or at least my end. there was the fear of being eaten alive by the aligators under my bed (fiction), dying in a volcanic erruption (after reading about pompeii, I devised emergency escape plans for me and all my stuffed animals). Then I saw T2, and have ever since been sure mankind would hasten the end upon themselves.

I pull into the parking lot outside Welch. Risdorf, another chem grad, is walking out just as I walk in. I wave hi, roll my eyes and make the “shoot me in the head please” gesture.

“what’s wrong,” he asks as we pass eachother
“going back to work at 10:30pm,” I say, over my shoulder.
“So?”
“Yeah. exactly.” That’s pretty much how it goes. Risdorf is a fifth year, and he’s jaded. when do I get to be jaded, I wonder at the moon. probably never, I answer to myself. I suck badly at being jaded. I’m an excellent whiner, however, and I’ve been told I’m highly entertaining when I’m angry or drunk. Sometimes, I think, I’m just trying to entertain myself.

I go into lab, all the lights are still on. I wonder who else is still at work – Welch hall never sleeps. I need to change the water in the 4 liter tank which holds a membrane-sack containing my nanoparticles. The dialysis proceedure, the purification of the particles takes 24 hours – I started the experiment this morning with a perfect synthesis. The water needs to be changed half-way through, replaced with fresh water to draw out the impurities – salts and such. I grab an unused 4 liter tank and march accross the hall to the water filter. The tank slowly fills and I do pot du berrets and pirouettes across the floor and around the side of the room, checking my form in the glass that shields the chemical hoods. Not bad. I grab my water and head into another lab. Approching my sample in the hydrogenation hood, my eyes narrow in on the hydrogen tank regulator – and it’s like tunnel vision – the bad kind – the kind that has ominous theme music. The regulator reads zero with 12 hours to go. I mess with the valves and the hydrogen line and outlet to encourage the last bit of hydrogen to flow. I watch as the bubbles grind to a halt. flatline. mother. fucker. It’s not the worst screw up, at least I get to sleep tonight, it would’ve been way worse if the tank had run out tomorrow, but still, the day’s work gone to waste. Buuuuut, my samples might still make it if I can keep air out of the water. Either way I wont find out until tomorrow morning. I need something to cover my tank. I find a large erlynmeir flask. the semi-round bottom makes a decent fit on the tank. other creative uses of chemistry glassware: flower vases, hookas, and bongs. Just for kicks, I snap my gloves off like a TV actor playing ER doctor who just lost a patient. And so it goes. I feel stupid, potentially having fucked up my samples. I should probably grab a new tank and start over tomorrow anyways. This – by the way – is one of the reasons why a PhD takes 5 years on average to complete.

It’s midnight, I’m going home, I could probably still call Alex before I go to bed. Goodnight, nanoparticles. Goodnight empty hydrogen tank. Goodnight.

…alright, Roxanne. I have to live to repeat this stupid day, get me home.