When I was a graduate student in the 1980s at the University of California, San Diego, I worked in Ken Nealson’s group on a project to identify the gene(s) responsible for bioluminescence in marine bacteria. In one approach towards this goal, we aimed to synthesize an oligonucleotide probe that we had designed for a DNA screening experiment.
Dan Cohn is a human geneticist modeling genetic diseases at the University of California Los Angeles.
UCLA Orthopaedic Surgery
This synthesis involved individually adding nucleotides to a chain, and back then, we did it manually, so it took more time. However, one group developed dimers of some of these bases that could save us some time. We had a small sample of this precious resource that we were testing at the time.
One day, toward the end of synthesizing this oligonucleotide, I dried the sample into a powder using a rotary evaporator as usual. As I removed the glass vial from the evaporator, I dropped the vessel, and it shattered on the floor.
I froze, staring at the powder that was my synthesis product. I thought about what I should do and decided to take the chance that whatever was on the ground likely wouldn’t interfere with the rest of the reaction. At the very least, I could try to make the best of a bad situation.
I scooped the powder up and placed it into a new vial and finished the rest of the synthesis. At the end of the process, when we analyzed the product, it turned out that I had made enough of my target product to purify it for use in hybridization experiments.
As I think back on this example and many others, what I learned in each case is that you just must keep going. Sometimes you make mistakes and sometimes experiments fail, but you have to reset yourself and move on.
In the end, I got my PhD based on that work. Since everything worked out, I never told my supervisor, but I think I would have if things had gone differently. Now, thinking about if my own students had a similar experience and told me, I would probably ask them what they learned, not what they did wrong, and then plan for the next experiment.
This story has been edited for length and clarity.