Skip to main content

Be ready to fail, if you wanna be a Bio-technologist!

Fail??? "Oh, come on, you should not say like this", is this what you are feeling, after looking at this title? If so, don't worry, I'm not meaning this in a negative way as you think.

"Everything in life has ups and downs. What about this field of Biotechnology? It's not preferred by many students. Yes, I agree, it is not like the IT field, you can't find a perfect job after completing just your under-graduation, even if you find a job, that won't pay you much. So, obviously, people will go for areas which would give them a bagful of money.

"You think, Biotechnology is worthless then? you say, you won't get paid?", is this your next question?
If so, I'm not saying that.

Biotechnology, here, you can achieve heights only after years of enthusiasm and work in your laboratory. It's not the matter of earning money. This field is for people who want to achieve or discover something which is in your own body, in plants around you  in animals and in all living things around you.

And, now, we came away from our talk on failure. Why I mentioned like, be ready to fail. It's because, you won't succeed in most of your experiments in a single attempt! And, that's why I asked you to be ready.

When we try to clone in our lab, we repeated the ligation step twice, we tried different vectors even. And at last we succeeded, it's not like debugging a  C or C++ coding where you could look into the coding with your naked eye, you have to trouble shoot something which you can't see with your naked eyes! Looks difficult? But, it won't be, when you love this beautiful field - Biotechnology.

Failures will become a part of your life and you will enjoy your success which comes after every failure. And, the moment see your experiment giving positive result, ah, that is happiness, the real happiness. Only you would feel this, if you were a biology person! (or a person who has maximum interest in any field.

Every little thing you do in your lab will fail, but, don't worry, it'll be followed by a success!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Lowry Assay Principle and procedure

Though there are several protein assays available, the most preferred one in many laboratories is "Lowry assay". It is effective in the concentration range of 0.01 mg/ml to 1 mg/ml. And, as an additional info, the paper published describing the procedure and principle of Lowry Assay is the most cited paper in the scientific history. (Feeling like, "Wow! I want to publish one to compete with Oliver.H. Lowry"???  :P) Why Lowry?   Though there are several other protein assays, mostly Lowry assay is used in many laboratories. The reasons for preferring Lowry are: sensitivity of the assay, highly reproducible, cost effective, easy to perform. Biuret assay is generally used for higher protein concentrations like tissue samples but, Lowry for less concentrated samples and hence used in most of the molecular biology laboratories where there will be need for assaying comparatively less concentrated protein samples (in most cases where we attempt to produce enzymes). Oth...

Sea Butterfly!

Neih hou!  Don't roll you eyes wondering what it is! "Neih hou" is how you say "hello" in Cantonese. Guess what, I am in Hong Kong and therefore the language Cantonese. I came to Hong Kong this summer as an intern before officially joining as a PhD Student. This is my second experience abroad, far away from home, new language, new culture, I expected me to have a "really" bad cultural shock, but, actually I experienced only 50% of what I expected. For a girl who have used the marina beach only for eating "sundal", bikini in beach was a shock (FEEL FREE TO JUDGE ME!). The first time, I went to the big wave beach here, I was the only one who was totally covered, when everyone was enjoying their Beer, I was slowly sipping my lemon juice (THE ODD ONE OUT!). I realized how beautifully different the world outside is! There is no single standard for right or wrong, it varies in different countries, in different regions around the world. And it ...

Fire in the lab!!! BE CAREFUL!!!! A Lesson learnt!

   That day, we were working in our lab under laminar air flow chamber. we were streaking our plates with E.coli. For sterilizing the loop, we were using 70% ethanol. We also sterilized the L rod which we used for spreading , using the same Ethanol.  One by one, we started streaking and spreading. I completed my turn, and sterilized the L rod by dipping in ethanol once and shown in flame, and placed it in a tray.Mam instructed, " Ethanol will catch fire , if you place the hot rod over it" . One of my friend, did spreading after my turn, she too dipped the rod in ethanol, flamed the rod and instead of placing in the tray she misplaced the hot rod in the ethanol plate!!!! " oooo... fire fire..." immediately ethanol caught fire..!!! My friend who misplaced., she started crying... Mam shouted, " hey girls, guys run out of the lab...," as the tube which carries LPG for the flame was very close to fire. Suddenly, our lab technician acte...