"It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young." - Konrad Lorenz

***

"these are what scientists really think about and discuss when planning experiements. These things were not taught to me as an undergrad, in texts, or anywhere else until i did actual lab work :

- do we have enough funding? where can we get funding? can we make the experiment cheaper?
- what's the impact factor if this expt is successful?
- is this in line with the institute (read: senior mgt)'s directions? will we get sustained support?
- how long does it take to do these experiments? whats the risk of failure? Can i graduate on time or get my contract renewed?
- which other lab is working on this? are they so far ahead we can't beat them even if we worked 24/7?
- can i get enough free labor (read: grad students) to work on this?
- will i have to work with that arsehole technician if i want to run this experiment?
- can i photoshop this to increase the contrast and make that band look more convincingly real?
- can i change my false discovery rate algorithm so that the difference between my control and experimental samples are more significant ?


etc

and when us grad students see a newly published paper, we look at that picture and have a good laugh about how many hours of photoshopping they must have done, and how many bad gels they threw away before selecting that one."