Science: when things don't go as expected

I spent the first two weeks of May in Samoa as part of the Rheumatic Relief team. Basically it's a group of cardiologists, sonographers, and BYU students that visits Samoa every year to screen schoolchildren for rheumatic heart disease and educate the kids on how to prevent it. I was "adopted" into the group at the last minute so I could do a side project looking for a correlation between a skin disease called impetigo and rheumatic heart disease.

Pros of this situation: I got to travel to Samoa for free.
Cons: I basically had no idea what was going on.

I eventually adjusted to jet lag and the schedule. Every day, we woke up early (which was actually made easier by the jet lag) and piled into vans to visit two or three primary schools. We set up all the screening stations, lined up the kids, and sent them through the stations. First to check in with their name and birth day (there was a boy named "Christmas" and guess what--his birthday was December 25!), then to have their heart listened to--first by stethoscope and then by echocardiogram. Children marked as at risk were then sent to be tested with a larger echocardiogram machine and more detailed examination. At the end, each child picked out a backpack, some school supplies, and three books each.

choosing books

The first day after we finished our screenings for the day, I came back to the hotel to extract DNA from some of the samples I had taken. DNA extraction is a pretty simple process for organisms without cell walls like you and me; it only requires a really fast shakey machine (called a vortex) and a really fast spinny machine (called a centrifuge). So a couple other BYU students and I started by placing our little tubes onto the vortex, plugging it in, and watching as... all the tubes flew out of their holds, the vortex began to smoke, and the air began to smell like burning rubber.

the burning vortex

After half an hour of trying to tape the tubes tightly onto the machine and airing out the room, we were no closer to getting the vortex to work without setting fire to our room. Then someone pointed out that we didn't have a converter and the voltage in Samoan outlets might be too high. We borrowed a converter and our problems were solved.

The same was not true about the centrifuge. The thing just wouldn't even open! We tried prying, waiting, contacting the manufacturer (who told us the motherboard was broken), ordering another machine (shipping takes two weeks), rewiring the machine to bypass the motherboard (we couldn't figure out how to undo the screws).

Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Basically, our only backup plan was: (A) find a centrifuge somewhere in Samoa, or (B) tape our tubes onto a bicycle wheel and spin it around really fast.

At the end of the day, we did make Plan A work. It was practically a miracle that we found Dr. Seuseu Tauati and his lab (the only one in Samoa) had a microcentrifuge. I spent all day of the last three days extracting DNA and praying the samples were still viable.

the lab; pretty simple but I felt right at home.

There's still some ten thousand dollars worth of sequencing to be done before we determine whether the samples contain any useful data. About half of the samples have quantifiable amounts of DNA, and that's a plus. I feel cautiously optimistic.

But the first rule of science always seems to be that you never really know what you're doing--you have an idea of what should come out the other end of your experiment (aka a hypothesis) but the beautiful thing about hypotheses is that they're often incorrect or incomplete. As one of my favorite professors says, "As soon as you know what you're doing, it's not science; it's engineering."

My laboratory experience has been characterized by about 95% failure. Vectors don't clone, or they clone backward. PCR fails. DNA extractions yield too low of concentrations, but you only realize after you've finished extracting all thousand library samples. Sequence results come back messy.

Crazy, but I actually really enjoy troubleshooting. It feels like a puzzle with lots of moving pieces and lots of resources to find the missing piece. I was actually pretty excited to break into our centrifuge or rig up a bicycle centrifuge.

Real life troubleshooting has been harder. This last December, I applied to 10 PhD programs, including U Penn's Bioengineering Phd Program. I had been talking with a professor from UPenn for a couple of months about her work and she seemed excited to have me on the team. She even sent me a grant for an upcoming project she wanted me to work on and I was thrilled about it.

I was invited to interview at 5 schools, including UPenn. I spent 7 weekends in a row (this includes 2 conferences) out of town (while still doing full-time school and part-time lab work). I got rejections from 2 of the schools and acceptances from my 2 backup schools, but there was still UPenn left and I loved my time there interviewing.

city hall in Philadelphia, a city I'm still in love with

And then I didn't get in. The professor emailed me back and said she had decided I wouldn't be a good fit.

That same weekend I heard this news, my husband, who decided almost on a whim to apply to law school about 6 months before application due dates, got into Stanford.

Wait what?!

Troubleshooting this situation was a lot more complicated and heart-wrenching. It is a lot more complicated and heart-wrenching. But I try to remind myself, it's just troubleshooting. It's just science. I had a hypothesis, I thought something would work one way, and it didn't, and that's valuable information that was worth the sacrifice.

So far, troubleshooting has involved finding a job working at a lab at Stanford and getting excited to be at Stanford. It was a good decision. It's going to be awesome!

Stanford Law School admitted student day

Also awesome is the variety of opportunities now open to me, opportunities that I may or may not have found without the soul searching I've been forced into. I've started volunteering for an upcoming NPO, Elect Women Utah. I started a blog. I made a resolution to read one scientific article a day. I contacted some random guy who gave a Ted Talk on innovative medicine that I was interested in (he didn't answer). I've weighed out pros and cons of online masters degrees vs in person masters degrees vs PhD vs just giving into peer pressure and going after an MD. I'm going to keep going after what I love and what will help the world!

To science!

via GIPHY