Choosing

I'm sitting in the office area of the lab. Been here for about... an hour and a half now? I'm waiting for a protein gel to finish running. It should have finished over an hour ago, but the machine doesn't seem to be doing too well. Sigh. This is science. I know this is science. I might not like that this is science, but I do love doing it.

As a scientist, you live for the moments of excitement: this morning we spent twenty minutes huddling around the microscope, looking at some crystals. Maybe we had successfully crystallized our protein with calcium! Maybe we would get a structure! As luck would have it, the excitement soon died down: the crystals were hard, most probably potassium sodium tartrate (the salt used in the crystallization screen) and not protein (though we will X-ray them tomorrow to check for sure). Doesn't matter, those twenty minutes we spent checking the crystals were fun, hopeful. And the disappointment wasn't as bad as some might have thought. In science, you learn to expect disappointment, that's why success is such a celebration. I should have taken a picture really, the whole of our lab, all looking at a computer screen or directly at the plate, all hoping.

Now I'm writing this blog when probably what I should be doing is getting started on my Final Year Project Report. I don't know what's going to go into that report. It's going to be incredibly strange. A succession of failed or semi-failed experiments? There's at least some common thread, but I have no idea how to put it together yet. However, put it together I must, so I can finish my degree and move on to the next thing. The next thing being a PhD. Occasionally, I wonder if I was crazy to accept the offer. Yesterday I was in the lab, working, from 10AM to 8PM, and that's not even a particularly long day for most labs. How will I do this for four years? Somehow, I know I just will. What scares me even more, is the fact that I might want to continue doing this after. Once my PhD is done. The plan for now is to go into science writing, to become a science journalist and stop researching... but the thing is, research is fun. If there weren't pressure to publish or get grants, if you could (really) structure your days how you wanted, and work at your own pace, biological research would probably be the best job ever. You fiddle around with cool machines, you make solutions and gooey gels, you get to do stuff to animals (not everyone likes this, but some of it can be very fun and not painful for the animal, I swear)... It's fun. It's hi-tech. It's exciting. And you can discover new things. Who would ever want to stop?

Yes, the idea is to give up science to do what I love to do (what I don't get tired of doing, that is), writing. I love to write. I write almost every day, and if I don't, there are ideas in my head to be written down. I write when I'm sad, but also when I'm bored and stressed. I write when I'm angry. And I write because it makes me happy. It makes me smile. It makes me think of how ideas go from one place to another. But science is ideas. How to choose?

I probably won't. I probably will give up the "writing professionally" thing for doing it on my spare time, when I have a few minutes in the lab when I should be doing something else. Because, yes, I could write all day. But writing does not challenge me. It's pure pleasure.