That Taiwan Feeling

“When a horse smells its stable, it’s difficult to stop him.”


It’s a nice quote from Arsene Wenger in reference to the title race that sadly turned out to be untrue as Manchester United went on to bottle the league, but that’s exactly the way I’m feeling right now.


You see, my work output for the past few months, from January to April, has been relatively lethargic, what with me only hitting the labs every other day, sometimes only two to three days a week. The rest of the time was spent staring at literature and knocking my head against the table repeatedly in the hopes that a solution would magically present itself to me. The prime reason for this was this huge experimental obstacle that I have been failing to overcome.


In a nutshell, my samples kept aggregating every time I put it through a dialysis procedure to purify it. An aggregated sample is of no use to me because all the downstream analyses require the sample to be water-soluble and also, it would suggest that my synthesis process wasn’t working.


In this period, I threw everything at the wall but nothing stuck. Nobody had run a dialysis process with nanotubes before, so I couldn’t get any tangible advice off the bioscience or pharmacy people. The process description in the journal articles that I found was also incredibly vague. My adviser understandably had no idea how to solve it because he had no experience in the bioscience field. So basically, like Taiwan, I was pretty much on my own.


And so, I became incredibly demotivated due to my lack of progress and my pace slowed down. The latter was also because my sample (insulin) wasn’t cheap at all. 50 mg costs RM670, and I went through them like water in an attempt to solve the damned problem. What was also not helping was looking at the calendar and wondering where all the time went. I went from telling people (when I was asked, of course) I would be finishing in December 2011 to January 2012 to March to July. Well, it won’t go further than July now because that’s the deadline I’ve set in stone (explained one or two posts back) in an attempt to pressurize myself into finding the solution.


And then, just like that, it happened. Last Sunday, out of nowhere, something just clicked in my head. The following morning, I rushed to the lab and immediately carried out the tweaked procedure and bam, it worked! It’s incredibly hard to explain to people what it feels like to finally get something to work: this sequence of epiphany followed by execution and sweet, glorious success. That’s exactly what I felt though, and a huge weight was off my shoulder.


As it turned out, the dialysis procedure was actually equilibrating the pH in my sample, bringing it down from 7.6 to 5.5. So, by discarding the supernatant from the aggregation and topping it back with a pH 7.6 buffer, I got the purified sample to solubilize again. It’s quite funny sometimes how simple the answer to a complex problem can be. It was the same in Taiwan last year as well, when I realized a simple application of heat to 85 C would disperse my starch solution after spending two months cracking my head over it.


So with that out of the way, I can immediately carry on with all the downstream analyses and wrap the project and, by extension, my thesis up. If all the analyses return favourable results, fingers crossed, I will be done by the end of June. There is still quite a bit more to go but the great thing is that the motivation is back again. That same feeling in Taiwan where I was eager for the next day to come so I could complete another run.


It’s that Taiwan feeling: the mad sprint towards my stable. I love it.