Question: What is the hardest thing about being a cell biologist and how did you overcome that struggle?

Dawn Lau answered on 15 Jun 2016:

When you work with cells, you’re working with living things…so sometimes your experimental cellular model just dies for no reason at all. Or maybe it responds to a particular drug dosage in a bizarre way. Basically, because we’re working with a living organism, results are less reproducible than if we carried out our experiments using artificial proteins. And in order to prove that your science is correct, it’s extremely important to be able to reproduce experiments. This problem of reproducibility is even greater when you work with animals, as they have even more variability than cells! There are steps you can take to increase how reproducible your results are. You can keep standard protocols and equipment, you can note down every little variable, and be extremely careful with changing any factors between experiments. However, there is always a little bit of random chance when you deal with living cells and animals and there’s not much you can do about it!