hamster wheel

I would really like to get some meaningful data.

If the research question was "what happens when you add A to B," I'm currently stuck on getting enough A and B to put together. It's monotonous, but necessary, and it makes me feel like I'm on a research treadmill: working, but not moving forward. I guess as long as I'm not falling backwards off the treadmill, it'll be an improvement from last year already.

There's a lot of little things that need to be taken care of before I make any REAL progress... like figuring out what the normal patterns of gene expression are in the frog before I go in and mess it up with chemicals and the like. Since I'm currently in this stage (normal expression), I don't feel like I'm really contributing anything until I can go in and mess it up. And when I say "mess it up," I expect to see some dramatic changes.

...which is really not how science is supposed to work. Just because we think something is going to happen doesn't mean it will. And just because something happened, doesn't mean it's important (statistically significant). Several times last year, I'd get mini panic attacks when I got my results and they were contrary to my hypothesis or weren't significant enough to support the hypothesis. So next time I do things, I should probably stop panicking afterward... unless the results are skewed because the machine died (knock on wood).

Going back to making progress, if I look at what I did last year and how many times I had to do that obnoxious cloning experiment, I guess I can say I got stuff done. The only thing is that I really don't want my research progress to be broken down into years...


I really need data.