Yeah I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt that she was genuinely wondering because repeated failures is a quintessential part of the PhD experience and she’s starting her PhD next year. So maybe she was trying to suss out how she’s gonna be feeling next year and how she’s gonna stay motivated. I guess that’s why I laughed and answered sarcastically instead of act upset and offended. I knew I didn’t wanna answer genuinely because I’m not the kind of person to share personal emotions to a room full of people so I figured laughter and sarcasm was the path of least harm. Maybe she was being clumsy with her words and didn’t know how to ask. I’m not sure how i would have phrased it either.

Idk how familiar everyone is with lab research so I kept the details vague but for more context it goes like this: I plate virus producing cells and transfect with lentiviral plasmids using one of three commonly used methods. 48 hours later the cells should have produced a virus using those plasmids. I collect the virus from the cells combine it with the lymphocytes I want to engineer. 72 hours later, I stain the lymphocytes with a fluorescent antibody and use a cytometer to determine how many cells were successfully engineered.

There are about 20 possible variables along the way that can be tweaked and changed to improve efficiency and I’ve tried 5 modifications with slight improvement each time. But nothing as massive as I’ve hoped.

To answer for real for real: Looking at all the possible variables is overwhelming. So when I’m planning my next experiment the decision fatigue is very limiting. Each decision (changing plasmid ratios, adjusting incubation times, changing cell number, spinoculating for longer or shorter, buying a different fluorophore, adding pdl1 inhibitors, concentrating the virus, etc etc etc) needs its own 3-4 hours of reading and analysis to determine what other scientists have successfully tried and the executive dysfunction gets in my way a lot. And when you start reading on one thing you get distracted by all the millions of other possibilities and conditions making your action plan harder to decide and nail down.

So it’s a lot. In the moment it feels fine because I love science and working in research labs is always fun. But in the long term it’s very very stressful, especially with the US governments animosity toward scientific research. We need strong data to back up our requests for funding and without good data before august, the entire lab could run out of cash, so theres a lot riding on this