Health Science Reviews

by Anja van der Merwe

This year in honours has been a saga, starring me, as naïve as can be, a bunch of proteomics data that decided not to cooperate, and a stubborn colony of Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Ra that seems to sense my fear and simply refuses to grow.

My first semester was easy to tame and quite pleasant as result. This was mostly due to the invaluable help from past honours students, in the form of past papers and patient answers to my endless stream of questions. Subsequently, I developed a sense of bravado, thinking I was impermeable to all the stress and misfortune that had befallen Medical Biochemistry students in the past. Ignorance is bliss, is it not?

The second semester started innocently enough—I thought proteomics and phosphoproteomics would be a cool, cutting-edge approach. Furthermore, the little taste of lab work I’d had in first semester gaslit me into believing it was all very much in my control. Instead, it became my personal test in persistence as everything that could go wrong…did. The data? Complete chaos, and not corroborating previous findings at all. The only consistent thing was its refusal to make sense, as if my proteins were actively conspiring against me. All that was left was to keep on churning out results, like a hamster endlessly on a wheel, hoping at some point the results would be adequate to write a project about.

As if that weren’t enough, my H37Ra cultures apparently sensed my desperation and decided to stop cooperating entirely when I had to start growing my samples from scratch for the umpteenth time, or attempted growth curves in a desperate effort to produce valid-looking science for this beastly project. I’d prep the media and the culture flasks, set the conditions just right, and then—nothing. It’s like the M. tuberculosis somehow knew how much I needed it to work and took great joy in watching me stress out. Growing bacteria? Simple in theory. In practice? Pure science fiction.

Through all of it, I’ve learned that honours research is mostly about trying to stay optimistic while surrounded by scientific chaos. But I’ll give my honours project this—it’s taught me resilience, given me countless hours with my lab mates to bond over our mutual failures, and proved that sometimes, just getting any results at all is the real victory. Here’s hoping the bacteria will play nice next time around.