Superstitions and Science

 Superstitions* and science aren’t supposed to go hand-in-hand. Part of the attraction of science is the reliance on facts and solid experimental data. … More or less, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Superstitions, on the other hand are baseless, factless, wishy-washy – the opposite of science.

And yet, when I did hands-on science, I tended to have, let us say, rituals.

When doing experiments, I liked to arrange my pipettes and pipette tips in a certain way. I had a favorite microtube rack (orange!). I had a favorite sharpie (blue, fine point). When setting up an assay, I would pour microtubes out of a storage jar, and if an exact number I needed came tumbling out, that was super-good luck.

Reproducibility is a big deal in science – you want to minimize day to day variability when doing the same experiments. So, pipetting technique can matter a lot (and you would want to do it exactly the same way, otherwise that 1.5 µL can easily become 1.7 or 1.2 µL if you are not careful). And you definitely would want to use the exactly same set of well-calibrated pipettes, too. So some of that ritual-like daily set up makes sense – you would want to eliminate variability and control the physical set-up as much as possible. Some of it is fun – like, using only pink tubes for one type of assay and green tubes for protein purification, for example. Some of it is efficiency – if I have my pipettes arranged in a certain way every single day, I can grab the right one without even looking. But some of it was just… silly and yet compelling. Like, avoiding even numbers (except 10’s – those are good).

One of my co-workers (many, many years ago) had a little statue that he claimed helped him avoid having contamination issues when doing cell culture. I laughed at him. Guess what – I had a ton of contamination issues – I kept getting fungus in my media. Yes, I know, I know, coincidence, plus I was just learning sterile hood techniques, so it was my own fault. I got better at it – without the mysterious statue’s help – but I did develop my own set of “sterile rituals”.

Some of those rituals have “bled over” into my day-to-day life. When buying fruits or vegetables (like, apples, for example), if I need less than 10, I will only get prime numbers (5… or 7). Ten is OK, and so are 12 and 13. I will not be buying 4 peppers – only 3 or 5. When eye-balling salt for cooking, I count to 5 while sprinkling the salt (works OK most of the time!).

*Actually, I have a funny block about superstitions. I can either remember the word in English or in Russian. I can’t seem to remember it in both languages at the same time. Ah, “predrassudki” – here we go.