“No, that can’t be right! That makes no sense at all! Is the machine broken? Maybe I mixed up the samples? Something is wrong here…”
Such you may think a lot when working in a lab: you carry out an experiment and expect to see a specific result but are surprised by a quite different turnout. This has already given me a few headaches thus far and it will probably continue to do so as I go into my PhD.
It is easy and convenient in these situations to go into denial about the validity of the result. After all it makes absolutely no sense, right? Well, but it does though. In the end, biology is just a mechanism. It simply can’t provide wrong results. The results you get are always right, your assumptions are just wrong. If your result does not match your expectation, then maybe you don’t understand the system you are working with. Or maybe you did not even really test what you think you tested because the experiment is not functioning in the way you think it is functioning. Fact is that biology will output precisely what it should output based on its specific state and a specific input. Your result makes sense, you just don’t see it yet.
Don’t get me wrong, of course a machine can malfunction, you can mix up your samples or mess up their preparation. All of this can lead to you misinterpreting your results, because they don’t reflect what the biology is doing. Avoiding these errors is what control samples and repetitions are for. However, if I wanted to be nitpicky, I could even argue that your results reflect not only the biology you are interested in but also everything that you use to interact with it. Under that premise your results really are always right, because they are the product of biology, experimental protocol and machinery in between. The bottom line is that biology makes no mistakes.
This might seem like a small detail and even obvious if you think about it. But still, once I wrapped my head around this fact, it changed the way I think about my experiments. Not that this improves my results at all… I do, however, feel like reminding myself that everything happening in biology is ‘correct’ in that regard brings with it reliability, humility and power for the discipline. If your expectations were matched: great! If not: not to worry. This just means that there are more secrets to be unveiled and more biology to be understood, as long as you are willing to revise your own hypotheses.