Biochemistry lab work is unstimulating. The only reason we haven’t gotten robots or monkeys to do all the pipetting (using a glorified eye-dropper to meticulously measure out really small amounts of liquids) is because it’s cheaper to just get undergrads to do it. I burn more neurons reading Calvin and Hobbes on a summer afternoon. I burn even more neurons on the weekends, but that’s a different story.

I love this stuff though. Sometimes, the conceptual brilliance of biochemistry outweighs the rote labor of running experiments; most of the time, it doesn’t. Masochism is a more important factor. Obsessive-compulsive disorder also helps. A couple centuries ago, someone infatuated with rituals and record-keeping could join the clergy and spend hours playing with beads and all manner of ornate metal vessels for a holy cause. Now, the cause is knowledge, and the beads are made of polystyrene, microns wide, and have fickle little buggers called DNA molecules attached to them. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not comparing science to religion. I’m musing on what makes me and other lab rats — er, aspiring experimentalists — tick.

Biology traditionally got a bad rap for being a little fuzzy and arcane. I wonder why. A basic lab procedure, the Polymerase Chain Reaction, calls for the following steps: add distilled water, add buffer solution, add DNA molecules, add primer (short DNA fragments), add nucleic acids, add DNA polymerase (a protein). After that you will end up with a drop of liquid twenty times smaller than a raindrop, and you’ll put the tiny vial into a machine, close the lid, hit some buttons and wait a few hours. It’s like cooking.

Only unlike cooking, things go wrong most of the time (for me it is like cooking). Even if you’ve torn out your hair taking precautions left and right, you’ll invariably end up with results that are completely unexpected, if not outright incomprehensible. Imagine following a recipe for a dozen blueberry muffins, and when you open the oven, you see one blueberry muffin, two strawberry ones, one dangerous-looking green smudge, and eight blank wells in the muffin tin. They disappeared! That’s what science is like.

So what kind of person loves seeing their muffins disappear? Well, the kind of person who also likes to track them down. I love thinking about the gazillion different ingredients I put in, why they’re there, and how a change in one of them could have screwed everything up. I can never fit all the details in my head at once, and nor can anyone else, but the fun is in seeing how much I can see, and how they fit together. Sometimes, though, the muffins get lost and nobody for the life of them can figure out why. Then, the enjoyment is all in the mixing and baking. That’s why we all have OCD.