It’s all a bit dreamy

(First, Nenad, are you wondering where does
the title come from? And yes, you are right; I stole this from the legend of
one of your photos… )

"Automated unrestricted multigene recombineering for multiprotein complex production"

Nature Methods

Published online: 3 May 2009 | doi:10.1038/nmeth.1326

http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmeth.1326.html

It’s my first scientific publication
(containing the results of one of my master thesis projects), and it’s also an
important assurance for me: as a student who majored in theoretical physics in
my college and biological physics in my master program. I struggled for at
least 4 years in order to enter a molecular and structural biology lab as a PhD
student. If I count from my unsuccessful application to the biology department
of my college (Fudan University, Shanghai),
then it is 7 years. (In brief, the biology department of my college was my
first choice at that time, but my grade was not good enough to reach their
requirements (even though I ended as 7^th in the national high school
biology contest among students from Shanghai),
so finally I went to physics department, which was my second choice). During
these 7 years in the physics department, I was tempted by biology all the time.
Now I am more confident that I might be able to become a structural biologist
or biophysicist as I always want. But there are still many uncertainties which
bug me continuously.

 

I still remember clearly that I broke a 2L Erlenmeyer at the very first day that I
started in EMBL as a diploma student; and I guess this shocked my supervisor
quite a bit . In the first two months of my thesis project, I tried very
hard just for making cleaner minipreps or prepare usable chemical competent cells.
Currently, after spending about one year and a half in the field of molecular
structural biology, I have some experiences in molecular cloning and protein
expression in insect cells, but I still lack the very basic knowledge of
protein biochemistry and crystallography (my physics is really rusty now…), and
this worries me all the time. I know if I work as a maniac and do my
experiments strictly following the instructions of my supervisor and
well-established protocols, then there are always certain probabilities that
things might work. But I am also annoyed by the fact that I know very little
about the mechanisms lying behind all these biochemical and biophysical
techniques that we are using in the lab everyday. If I keep working like this I
might just end up as a good benchworker. And it seems totally impossible for me
to find the balance between bench work, literature reading, and scientific
writing. My unsecured feeling even became a little bit stronger after the
advance online publication of this paper. I think I am just too paranoid
sometimes…

 

I know I am really lucky and I am very
grateful to my supervisor and colleagues for their kind help and suggestion
during my thesis projects. I know that I wouldn’t be able to achieve anything
without their helps. And I am also very lucky in the sense that this project is
very methodology oriented; it probably made my life much easier as a diploma
student with no previous experience in molecular biology.

 

Now I am slowly entering the protein world
from the DNA world that I am more familiar with. New experiences will be
accumulated and new barriers will need to be conquered. The feeling as a newbie
in the lab begins again…But I have to carry on since the road leading to more
profound understanding of the biological system is an endless adventure for me
and as what I just mentioned: I am tempted by biology, the science of life and
of living organisms, all the time.