Whenever my cells stop behaving (read: living) for more than a day or two in a row, I naturally seek help from others in the lab. Of course, when this happens to someone else, I have a stock set of answers: change the profusion, remake your solutions, check that the set-up is stable, etc. When I seek help, I get the same stock set (with the exception of one person recently suggesting I profuse a small rodent with my saline solution and see if I can still extract living tissue from the animal: a bit extreme, but would certainly test whether my solution is total poison - something that seemed extreme at first, but I'm actually considering doing next week if things don't start working).
What I am wondering today is: why do we ask for help at all when the answers we get are the same we would give? Do I really expect to have someone come up with a new fix to the same old problem? Of course I know I need to remake solutions and refresh the profusion lines. I guess I just hate doing it as much as everyone else does, and we are all really just asking for "advice" because being told what we already know by another person gives us the impetus to do it.
9 years ago
1 comment:
W00T, another physiologist! Added the RSS reader right away.
When we've had this problem in the lab, we also try all these things, even to the point of buying DI water one time, worried that the milli-Q was off somehow.
Of course it never helps, instead the phase just passes, and we never learn what the problem was.
As for asking, you can never be sure that someone out there doesn't have a little different way of doing something that might help. Especially if they come from a different lab or different subfield. That's the power of the crowd so to speak.
Post a Comment