A
long time ago, right after I finished my postdoctoral training, I took a job
with a large pharmaceutical company to see what earning a decent salary felt
like. One day after I'd been there
for several months we had our first crash program where we all were supposed to
drop whatever we had been working on and turn our efforts to solving a big
problem related to developing a new product. Not to be technical, our organic chemists had developed 25
steps of a complex synthesis of a new antibiotic. They were stuck on the 26th step, so they turfed the problem
to someone else, the group of biochemists and bacteriologists I was in. My job was buying a bunch of enzymes
from Enzymes R-Us (to be honest, the company was named Sigma, but doesn't
Enzymes R-Us have a certain ring to it?), and testing all of the enzymes at
random to see if any of them could make that elusive 26th step happen.
A week or so later the enzymes arrived
and it was time for me to do something to earn my paycheck. The day before I
ran my first experiment in this crash program, I stuck my head into my older
and wiser colleague's office. He
had been helping me adjust to life in the real world, rather than the ivory
towers of academia, by giving me advice on what was expected of scientists in
this setting. I asked something
that translated into: "Should I just go through the motions, or should I
do things very carefully, like I was doing a real experiment?"
