Erika Update #6: A taxonomy of emotions in science

Science is an exercise in acquired taste

People have many motivations for doing science. I do it because I love how it makes me feel. 

A brief taxonomy of emotions in science:

• Finding a diamond in the rough. In science, you find a tiny corner of the universe that has been overlooked and learn so much about it that you come to understand how absolutely amazing and wonderful it is. It can be glorious to have polished off a little pebble you found until it shines. Only you know how awesome this pebble is! Science is an exercise in acquired taste. It is delightful to indulge. It can also sometimes feel lonely that these tastes are shared by so few.

• I know a secret. Once you find your corner you are part of a secret society of a very, very small number of people who can hope to understand how a tiny part of the universe works. And you will occasionally find yourself knowing something that nobody else has ever known! 

• I blabbed a secret! The best feeling ever is promptly telling absolutely everyone about the secret you just learned!

• Agency. I’ve talked before about the awesome responsibility of picking what to work on after you realize that you can learn… anything. If you have a question, you have all the tools you need to make the universe tell you the answer. It’s just you and the universe, there is nothing stopping you, you can do it. It is incredible.

• The thrill of the chase. Slot machines in Vegas are calibrated so that the payoff rate is juuust right to keep you hooked. I often think that science is similarly perfectly calibrated. It is hard and doesn’t work, and it does so exactly often enough to give you a truly insane endorphin rush when you finally get it right.

Actual footage of how exciting it is when the science works!!

Above is a snapchat I sent during the creation of Erika Update #6, linked below. I remember I had come in to lab on a Saturday morning to check my plates before going to pilates class on Newbury street. I had been trying for weeks to get phage propagation to depend on both an engineered tRNA and an engineered ribosome, and I finally got it! This was the first of a few defining emotional moments for me in grad school. There were so many feelings on seeing these plaques: awe and relief (I can’t believe it finally worked!), resentment (I can’t believe it didn’t already work?!), agency (holy shit… if I can get a virus to depend on a tRNA that decodes a non-canonical codon and an orthogonal ribosome then who am I and what else can I do??). It was intoxicating.

I’m on the lookout for more emotions to add to my taxonomy. If you can think of any I missed, let me know. Comments on substack + twitter DM all get to me

Erika Update #6

Here’s Erika Update #6 - 2018 4 19 - phage cloning

In this update, I’m struggling with the fact that phage genomes are pretty complicated. They’re very compact, and often the promoters and terminators overlap with other genes. Sometimes, even the genes themselves overlap! Expression of a gene from a phage genome is inherently not insulated. Because of this it’s not obvious how to best encode a gene such that it messes with the adjacent phage genes the least. This is especially true for tRNAs and ribosomal RNA, which both have a lot of secondary structure that disrupt the regulation of nearby genes.

In this update, I’m testing a bunch of different flavors of expressing both a tRNA and rRNA off of the M13 phage genome. I’m looking for a design that is capable of plaquing in four different strains: pJC175e (positive control), a strain of bacteria that requires the phage has a functional qtRNA (7D29), has functional rRNA (5c), or has both (7DO29). I got THREE designs that have a yes in the ‘both’ column!

Where’d it end up?

As usual, none of this made it into any publication, this is all just behind-the-scenes work. Although a derivative of ESP4s1B was used for some rRNA evolution data I presented in my thesis.

Want more?

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Tell me more science emotions - leave a substack comment!