Health Science Reviews

by Mpai Mollo

At the beginning of the semester, I wrote down a list of the expected outcomes of my Honours project. I added this to the list I had made at the beginning of the year of things that I hoped to achieve by the end of the year. Some of the items on the ‘expected outcomes’ list included: completing all the objectives laid out in my research proposal, observing clear trends and relationships between variables, and being able to draw reasonable conclusions. Some of the things I added onto the ‘hope to achieve’ list included more… idealistic imaginings, to put it liberally. These items ranged from mastering skills such as tissue culture and other protocols necessary to carry out my objectives, to possibly finding novel data and publishing my Honours’ thesis. As the semester progressed, it became increasingly clear that some of the points on the latter list were not just highly unrealistic, but completely unattainable.

My first few weeks of lab work consisted of making hydrogels upon which I would seed my cells. I spent three weeks repeating cell culture every third day due to recurring contamination of my cells. This got so bad to the point where I started thinking that I was infected with something and was passing it on to my cells. Eventually, the cells stopped getting contaminated and I thought the worst was over. At last, I could start running tests and assay because the cells were finally growing normally! But my relief was short-lived. The following week was spent repeating cell culture once again as the hydrogels that the cells were being seeded on were now showing signs of infection. I fell to my knees, shaking my fists at the sky, cursing every type of bacteria I could think of. It was decided that I would throw away all the stock solutions I had made and just start from scratch and hopefully those persistent infections would go away for good. After making everything anew, both the gels and the cells seemed to be ready for me to actually start running tests.

Setting up the various assays also took some time as I had to find and modify existing protocols as these assays had not yet been established in the lab wherein I was working. At this point we had 4 weeks left until the first draft was due and I was yet to run a full experiment. I set up 3 different experiments that were going to run over a period of 7, 10 and 14 days so that I could collect my final results and still have time to write (and rewrite) various drafts of my thesis. With everything set up, all I had to do was wait for the respective length of time to pass for each experiment before collecting the data. I wish I could say that I collected my data, and every result was exactly what we expected, that I had the most beautiful images of my cells and generated perfect graphs with curves that had an r² value of 1. I’ll give you one chance to guess what happened as I was halfway through my 10-day experiment.

As you can probably tell, my original research project had changed dramatically from what had been proposed at the end of May to what was achievable within the 14 days left of the research project. I was having a very hard time reconciling this in my head and on several occasions contemplated whether this degree was even worth it. I had the Einstein quote about insanity running through my head constantly, and would often jokingly (well, half-joking) tell my friends that I was going to stop showing up at the lab because I felt like I couldn’t seem to get anything right. It took a lot for my supervisor to convince me not to panic and that the world wasn’t going to end just because we didn’t complete every objective in the proposal. He often reminded me that Honours projects rarely go exactly the way they are planned and that this was the core of what being a scientist was about- improvising, adapting and overcoming.

As difficult and challenging as this year has been, I have learned more in these past 9 months than I did during the last 3 years of undergrad. I have learnt that not everything will go as planned and that is not a train smash. I have learned that one of the most important characteristics anyone in the STEM field can have is resilience, to keep getting up and trying and trying and trying again even when you are on your fifth failed experiment. I’ve also learned the importance of community and having support systems in place for the really bad days when you are only leaving the lab at 1am. Being able to share the struggles faced during this project with friends, family and even the PhD students in my lab who have become like my  older sisters, is genuinely the only reason I was able to make it this far.

So yes, it has certainly been a memorable year for reasons good and bad and I cannot say that I would do it again, but I can say I sure am glad I was able to go on this journey and I would not change that for the world.