A perfectionist's nightmare.

I haven't been blogging for the past week because I've been in the lab trying to get our evolution experiment up and running. We are running experiments similar to batch culture evolution on SmallandFastUnits (sfus). Without going into too much technical detail, the aim is to see how genetic change occurs over space and time given a change in environment.

I have faced three challenges this week. Preventing cross-contamination between environmental treatments and within replicates. Our results are useless if a genetic change has occurred and we can't tell if it arose de novo or because of experimenter error. The second was realizing that experimental evolution is a perfectionist's nightmare. Unlike field experiments where there is no illusion of control, the lab has the appearance of a place where all variables can and should be considered. I have now let go of this absurd expectation of myself and others. You can control as many variables as you want and spend all the time in the world trying to control the laboratory environment, but then you never actually finish anything. The last challenge was the most difficult - dealing with my lab technician.

The first challenge led to me restarting our experiment twice because contamination of two kinds hit us in the middle of it. The first time I encountered the contamination I was truly surprised. This is because the technique we used had been used by a lab down the hall in a previous experiment. Apparently their sterile technique was less than sterile. The question I have is, if we found contamination in our stuff, they must have had contamination in their experiment.

Finally, the lab technician, who started in January is just out of his undergrad. I fully understand that a lab technician is a transient position, but I think that now is a great opportunity to train and get a slight edge over his classmates in the PhD programme. Plus, there is the chance to get his name on publications. But things aren't going as well as I wanted.

Today, I finally had it. This morning I came in (6:30am) to carry out my part of the experiment, but I had no idea if he had completed his part yesterday evening. Before the experiment started, I made a checklist and a template that we could use to communicate since the different parts of the experiment required us to be in the lab at different times. But he hadn't written anything down. Not on the sheets I provided, nor in his lab notebook. Secondly, I had given explicit instructions about how to carry out his part to avoid cross-contamination. But when I came in there was evidence that he had taken an easy route and risked the entire experiment.

I am totally aware that I can be intense and I know I have really high expectations of myself and thus of others. At first, I planned on leaving a bunch of nasty notes around the lab this morning. But I very quickly realized that if I were in his place, this would just piss me off and make me even less interested in the job. So instead, I took him out for coffee and I asked his whether he thought his job was challenging and what I could do to mentor him better.

Now I can only keep my fingers crossed that this "coffee talk" worked.