Nothing is certain in a life of a scientist. Being in this field for more than 7 years, I have experienced that things don’t go right all the time in a research. And Murphy’s Law is a lucid evidence of anything that can go wrong, will go always wrong. For the past couple of months, I have been experiencing the manifestation of Murphy’s Law in the following scenarios:
1. I will be running stacks of PCR plates, all of sudden there will be a power outage that screws up the whole set
2. Only on peak period, the samples that need to be centrifuged urgently, the centrifuge rotor will malfunction and locks the tubes inside
3. My master mix cocktail volume runs out low when it comes to the last few samples just prior to loading into the thermal cycler. It happens to any experienced researcher also.
4. I just take a few minutes of a busy day to check my email and read online paper, only to be walked in by the superior to ask about the current project updates
5. The laptop will be working fine throughout the day, not until the moment I am generating the final genomic analysis results dataset
6. If I have forgotten to switch off the instrument I was working on one particular day, that’s when the lab manager makes her inspection
7. Worst case will be precious samples collected from field comes to lab in browning condition and that will be the only samples available since the plant has been felled off.
I didn’t even know about Murphy’s Law until I got into this research career. Only when I first encountered this dilemma in my undergraduate project that I realize Murphy’s Law is certainly reflected more in a life of a scientist rather than any other profession.
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