Today I finished one experiment and started another. That sounds like a logical progression, but really I started the experiment before I finished the one before it. I had gotten enough results from first one to know that I only got half the results I needed. I screwed something up with the other half, and I don't know what. You might say, think back. Did anything seem confusing? Well, happily (?), figuring out whether I screwed something up is not hard. Yes, I screwed something up. I screwed many things up. None of them really explain the fact that half of the experiment produced data and half didn't. HC and I have one plausible theory. In any case, I repeated the first half of the experiment today. I may never know what went wrong.
The picture above is an image of some of my results. They are part of the good half. There are two things a person might mean by "good results." One is that they get an answer to the question they ask. Here, I am asking, does this protein exist in this part of the brain? My question is answered. The bad aspect of the bad results I got was that they were completely uninformative. I did something wrong and didn't get any bands on my image. The other kind thing a person could mean by "good results" are results that agree with a person's hypothesis. It's understandable to have a pet theory, but, as MK says, you have to trust your data. If it's telling you something that's not what you expected, you need to re-think things. There's a middle ground of "good results," the kind that are confirming preexisting knowledge. Again, it's understandable to want your results to conform to accepted dogma, but if they don't, that's interesting too.
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