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Asked by anon-358315 to Rosa on 20 Mar 2023.
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Rosa Sanchez-Lucas answered on 20 Mar 2023:
Hi Jasmine,
Sorry for the delayed reply. Usually a project is too big and you can have some mistake without mess up the complete thing. However, some errors like concentrations or bad greenhouses conditions are too common. The important thing is to detect them quickly and repeat the wrong part. I remember once that we needed to count flowers in flowering period but it was Easter break and we couldn’t access because we forgot ask for access permission…We needed to jump the fences or lost the full year…We jumped
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Comments
Sam commented on :
laboratory experiments are very often quite complicated and it’s quite easy to make mistakes, mix up samples, add too much of an ingredient or that sort of thing. Also, some of the chemicals we use are very expensive, so it can be quite stressful setting up an experiment, and getting stressed only makes you more likely to make mistakes. I used to get quite nervous about making mistakes, and this didn’t help me.
I learned to focus more on what I was doing, and if i did make a mistake, instead of panicking, i would make a careful note of exactly what I had done wrong so that I could check later to see if it had had an effect on the experiment, very often it did not. This helped me be a lot calmer in the lab, and so i made fewer mistakes.
Sharon commented on :
Hi Jasmine- a late reply. It’s quite hard to mess up a whole project ; usually a project can be divided in several subparts with their own technical approach. I have made mistakes during an experiment. Even if I have followed the method very careful and I know that chemicals and material is expensive, a mistake can be made.
I usually plan and write everything in a lab note book. I often do experiments in duplicate if possible so I don’t lose weeks of work. So if I notice that I make a mistake, I learn from it and adjust to prevent this in future. And that is what science requires, open to learning.