Coping with laboratory mistakes

If you've just made a mistake in the lab and are wondering if you're really cut out to be a researcher, then this post is for you. I just want to gently and kindly remind you (and myself!) that talented and proficient people make mistakes. Pro golfers hit bad shots. Pro basketballers miss baskets. And pro scientists sometimes add the wrong reagent. Mistakes don't make you a failure as a researcher. Being a pro does not mean that you'll never make an error; but as a pro, you'll know what to do when you do make an error. As Kevin Kelly once quipped in an article entitled 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice: Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes." (If you haven't read the whole article, you really should; it's excellent). I think this is really good advice. As a researcher, you're bound to make mistakes occasionally, but you can recover from them. And sometimes, you might even discover something you would never have discovered otherwise (like my friend and colleague who added ¹/₁₀ of the required amount of a reagent to reaction that we did routinely in our lab and found that it worked just fine; it would have been a real money-saver to make this a permanent change to the protocol, but I don't think it was ever updated).

So, next time you're in the lab and add K₂HPO₄ instead of KH₂PO₄ to your buffer, don't question your ability to be a researcher. Instead, calmly think of the most graceful way you can recover from this, and then do that.