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Asked by Milly to Neil, Martin, Leonie, Ciorsdaidh on 6 Mar 2018.
Question: What has been your least favorite experiment?
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Neil Keddie answered on 6 Mar 2018:
I once spent 5 months trying to repeat an experiment [to make a sugar from simple building blocks in 1 step] an American group had published in a Science journal, making sure I did everything exactly as they described. It never worked, not matter how careful I was and how precise I kept the conditions.
After all of this time and still not getting the product I was soo frustrated! Then a month later my supervisor was talking to someone from that American group at a big chemistry conference in the USA. It turns out they left out a critical detail from their method!! We changed our method to include this detail – then finally it worked. We’d moved on to other ways to make the sugar by then, so it still feels like wasted time I’ll never get back – but that can happen in research.
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Martin McCoustra answered on 6 Mar 2018:
As a PhD student, I spent a week tuning up a laser. However, the output of the laser was of such quality that I couldn’t use it to make the measurements I wanted. In the end I had to de-tune the laser a little to do the measurements! Sometimes perfection isn’t always what to aim for in terms of experiments. Rather just try your best with what you have.
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Leonie Bole answered on 6 Mar 2018:
Hi Molly, that is a great question! And one which I can answer all too easily…
Last January, my supervisor asked me to do a reaction to make a compound containing lithium and zinc – according to her it should only take a few hours and it would be no problem to make. As the old saying goes “if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again”…well, I did try again and again…
Finally I managed to make this compound, 6 months later…I celebrated when I managed to get it and ran to tel my supervisor. Safe to say she was happy!
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