Insignificance

Here it is, another post with reference to a song title (Pearl Jam again, but I am slightly biased these last weeks since I am listening to their Athens concert over and over).

But insignificance has a meaning in this case. It is meaningless in science so I struggle against it but it keeps occurring with a disturbing persistence.

It often happens in research, that enthusiasm decays exponentially. You come up with a brilliant idea, then you formulate a satisfactory theoretical model, you implement it with a bit of a sloppy programming, you validate it against unreliable experiments and end up with insignificant results. You just can't help it.

Nonetheless, I am satisfied with myself. In my case, this Friday produced results that are less insignificant than already published ones so I can go on to read my papers for this end of the week with no guilt whatsoever. Nucleosomes are somewhere out there (or to put it better somewhere in there) waiting for someone to locate them. I am close to that but it is Friday, Medya just invited us over to her office to have some chocolate she brought from the Netherlands and I am in the middle of three books that have reached their peak of climax...so no more nucleosome predictions for this week!

Jokes aside, science can be stimulating. In fact most of the times it is. It just needs a bit of the right perspective like everything else. In the same way our girlfriends will never be perfect but we still love them, or in the way we normally hate our work but sometimes find it interesting, most important of all, the way our favourite football team is crap most of the time but we never dare forget the good moments the guys in green and white (or whatever the colour) have given us, doing science is equally appealing in a masochist way. We struggle against all our misfortunes, waiting for that 0.5% increase in sensitivity, that positive control that does not proove to be a total disaster, that protein finally making its shy appearence in the form of a dubious band on a polyacrylamide gel.

The right perspective comes in knowing that these moments appear with a rather small frequency, linearly diminishing with the increasing stress of expectance (and that IS the only significant scientific fact my experience would fully support). The right perspective is to keep in mind that if progress was linear we would be not working in science because it would be as meaningless as a factory production line. It is understanding that if our results actually MEANT progress this world would have been a better place since centuries and it is all about realizing that we are just playing around with everchanging concepts and theoretical constructions that probably won't be here when are children decide to do science. People have become rich, famous and reknown not because they discovered some ultimate truths about the universe but because, at their time, they were clever and brave enough to put forward a new concept that explained a certain problem. In the end, all it takes is some guts and some time off work to think "out of the box" for a while.

So maybe, I ll take the rest of the day off to come up with a weird, uncompromising and extraordinarily strange theory about why these bloody nucleosome predictions are so insignificant!