Late Night - I'm Too Old For This

There was a documentary on PBS the other night about grad students at Columbia University doing the PhD program. They were doing x-ray crystallography, which even among molecular biologists borders on voodoo, and the program did a wonderful job of conveying the difficulty, frustration, and determination that science requires. In x-ray crystallography, proteins are crystallized, then x-rayed to determine their shape. I think we all assumed that once the genome was cracked that all of biology would be evident from there. Unfortunately, not only is sequence information a lot more complicated than we thought, but the sequence of a protein tells you little about how it works. Protein seqence is very much like beads on a string; imagine that the beads are magnetic and spontaneously clump up into a complicated three dimensional shape. That's what a protein does soon after its assembled; and it's this shape that determines how works.

So, imagine now that you are a young scientist, wet behind the ears, stars in your eyes, and you decide that your project will be to determine the three dimensional shape of ONE protein. That will be your life for 5-6 (7?) years. This requires isolating the protein (not necessarily easy), crystallizing it (voodoo - any number of conditions can create a viable crystal, but it rarely works the same for even related proteins), and then measuring the x-ray diffraction of this crystal using the world's largest microscope, a synchotron. THEN, IF, after years of trying, you get good crystals, you get to sit in front of your computer wearing 3-D glasses using complicated computer programs (more voodoo) to determine what the structure is. Did I mention that molecular biologists are among the most superstitious of biologists? That it is not unusual to find shrines to the gods of PCR in labs? X-ray crystallography makes PCR look like a three year old pulling a stuffed rabbit from a hat. It's the David Blaine of molecular biology.

THE POINT of all this is that people actually manage to make it through grad school doing this. In the documentary the one student of the lab who solved the problem (and subsequently published in the journal Science, maybe the second most important journal in science, depending on with whom you're arguing) succintly summed up what drove him. Obsession. You - just - can't - let - it - go.

So now imagine me, at a quarter after 10, sitting in my old lab. I'm thinking that I am definitely too old for this shit. I'm exhausted and fighting a cold, and darling Brian and Hannah are sleeping at home. I could have spent the evening planting vegetables or doing any number of homebody activities that I am shocked to discover I like doing (making cushions? Refinishing furniture? Mowing the lawn even?) I'm not even getting paid to be here. The crazy thing is that I have experiments that I didn't finish before Hannah was born, they are SO close to being done, and I - just - can't - let - it - go.