the type i love to hate

Warning: slightly geeky science rant to follow.

When I was in graduate school (in the #1 program in my field, which doesn't mean a thing if you're in a bad situation), I had the worst luck. My advisor and I would make what we thought was a reasonable prediction about the protein I worked on. I'd do a series of experiments, and... well, I always got a negative result. My protein does not do this. Neither does it do that. Nothing in which the publication world has a single iota of interest. I wasted several years going around this cycle, especially those years that my advisor made me feel unworthy as a scientist, and I eventually quit graduate school.

I currently work in a staff research position. I have a master's degree, but it's not necessary for my job. It's a nice, cozy place to be for the time being, while I think of what I want to do next in life. Which, honestly, I haven't a clue about. But as things go, it's fairly dead-end.

Today, a few of my colleagues and I went to a seminar given by one of the guys who runs our lab. Now, while Mark is a great guy, I realized today: he is among the lucky ones, the type I love to hate.

All through the talk, the experiments and results he presented so elegantly fit all of the predictions. They came together as a great story, and made publications in big-name journals. People with two copies of the common gene needed dosage N of coumadin to thin their blood; people with two copies of the rare gene needed dosage 4N of coumadin; and the people with one copy of each? Well, they looked like they needed darn near close to 2N. How elegant a story is that?

And I sat there thinking... Mark, you give a great talk, and you seem to be a great scientist, but... would I be in his position if I had better luck in graduate school? Would I have gotten less frustrated if a mere one of my series of experiments followed a single prediction I'd made? (I never, ever got a single positive result, in three years' work on this particular protein.)

Worse yet... Mark is just a few years older than I am. Sigh.

But do I regret being a grad school dropout? Mostly not... if I'd stayed in grad school, I would've missed the whole amazing SillyCon Valley experience, which was training of its own. Still, I'm jealous...