Focus
Student Scene
January 17, 2000
Scientists Have to Be Lucky in Their Work—and Work for Their Luck
By Heather Morehouse
Meet Amy, a third-year graduate student in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at HMS. She works hard performing experiments with the hope that one day her results will give her enough of a story to be able to publish a paper or two and write a thesis.
Meet Nate, a twenty-something actor living in New York City. He goes from audition to audition with the hope that one day he will make it onto Broadway. What do the two have in common besides earning less than $20,000 a year? They are both waiting for their "lucky break."
When I first began graduate school I knew that it would take more than Nate's amazing talent for him to realize his dreams. New York is overflowing with talented, aspiring actors and actresses. He would need to be in the right place at the right time in order to come to the attention of the right director. He would need luck. What I didn't know at that time was that I would also need luck in order to achieve in graduate school. I thought science was a rational, logical endeavor in which results correlated with effort. Now I know I was wrong. In science, there is a significant component of luck. Scientists are not immune to the uncontrollable factors of life.
Science Becomes Art
Luck plays a role in daily experiments. Many techniques, solutions, and reagents go into them. On Monday, I perform an assay and it works. On Tuesday, the same assay does not work. It's not that the results were meaningfully different. I got incomprehensible data or no data at all. Somewhere in the 30 steps of the experiment, something went wrong. It may or may not be my fault. I may never even know the cause.Take "cloning." In textbooks or in the classroom, cloning appears easy and straightforward: cut DNA piece number one, cut DNA piece number two, and paste them together. That's it. The reality of cloning is quite different. Occasionally, it works just as it should. However, it often doesn't.
Sometimes, you can figure out why it didn't work. You made a strategic or technical error. You fix your error, retry, and it works. Frequently, though, you aren't able to figure out why it's not working. You understand the principles behind cloning, and you're quite sure you followed them. You don't think you made a technical error (like forgetting to add the paste!—a common oversight), but you repeat the experiment extra carefully, and still it doesn't work. You can declare yourself incompetent or just unlucky. After four years of graduate school, I would argue the latter is most likely. Choosing the latter explanation certainly makes graduate school less painful.
You shouldn't spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure why your cloning was unsuccessful. You have to just get it to work. The solution? In my lab the solution is "Margaret's Magical TE." TE is a buffer used in cloning. There is something about Margaret's TE that is special. The efficacy of Margaret's TE most likely can be explained by luck rather than skill because TE is easy to make. Perhaps when she made her TE the water was especially pure. Or perhaps the water had just the right impurity to help the cloning work. Nonetheless, there is something that makes Margaret's TE a hot commodity in the lab.
The Shadowy Elements
There are so many variables in our experiments that we cannot control for all of them. Scientists generally triumph over these uncontrollable, unidentifiable, and unknown variables in experiments by working methodically and by repeating experiments over and over again. Scientists also "control" these unknown variables by maintaining a healthy superstition. We insist on mixing reagents in a particular order or using a particular brand of test tube even though theoretically these factors should play no role in the outcome of our experiment. The unidentifiable variables of our experiments drive our superstition. Our superstition is based on the scientific method.Luck also plays a considerable role in our overall scientific success. One year ago I was working on a gene that had no known function. So little was known about the gene that it didn't even have a name: it had only been assigned a series of letters and numbers in the genome database. All I knew was that it was remotely related to other genes studied in my lab. My job was to figure out what YGL241W was doing in the cell.
I performed a wide range of tests with the hope that at least one would yield findings that would direct me to hypothesis-driven experiments. I spent months getting inconclusive results. I may have spent many more months doing the same thing—or possibly even have left graduate school—if it hadn't been for a stroke of luck.
I had a meeting with my thesis committee to discuss my "progress." One of my committee members recognized this jumble of letters and numbers as a gene that he had worked on almost a decade before. His preliminary studies of the gene perfectly complemented my limited knowledge. The implications of this coincidence were obvious to us, and we immediately knew what hypotheses to test. Within four months, I knew at least one function of the gene, wrote a paper, and knew that I would indeed graduate someday. Many of my classmates have similar stories of serendipity.
Luck in the Real World
Those students who haven't yet had any luck can be quite frustrated. They are used to working hard and getting rewarded for their efforts. In undergrad the reward came in the form of an A. In the working world the reward was a promotion or money. The frustrated student should remember that luck really is just statistics. Pump enough quarters into a slot machine and you will hit the jackpot. Do enough well thought-out experiments and you will eventually get a result.Graduate school of course isn't all about getting enough results to graduate. Most graduate students are eager to contribute knowledge to their field of study. Many strive for their work to help in the battle against human disease. Here, too, luck plays a role.
Recently, a group of students at HMS gathered to study and discuss what scientists and management at Biogen had done to develop and produce Interferon beta 1-a. Interferon beta 1-a is a pharmaceutical that helps thousands of people with multiple sclerosis. In the students' discussions, it became apparent that Biogen's success couldn't fully be explained by an analysis of scientific and managerial decisions. Later, Joseph Davie, senior vice president of research at Biogen, described to students how careful planning, smart people, and "a great deal of luck" went into Interferon beta 1-a. Biogen seized opportunities that fortuitously presented themselves. As Louis Pasteur once said, "Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind."
My friend Nate continues to sneak out of his day job and go to auditions. Amy continues to work into the night. With perseverance, skill, and a moment of luck, success will come.
Heather Morehouse is a fifth-year graduate student at HMS in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program in biological chemistry.