Measure twice

Today in the lab we ran into a bit of a difficulty. We were out of a reagent called buthionine sulfoximine - BSO for short - which prevents the first step of glutathione (GSH) synthesis. I want to say Glutathione is an antioxidant present in all of your cells, but there might be some that lack it. I'll double check that later. That's not what's important. What's important is that we had to make some more BSO.

Now when you're working with cells you have to use things at very specific concentrations, and if you're repeating experiments you've got to use the same concentration every time, otherwise what's the point? So we scrambled to find where we had written the concentration of BSO in our lab notebooks. We found it, but turns out the concentration we had was for the cell growth media, not the stock solution, which means our cells got a super diluted dose of BSO and are probably going to produce way more glutathione than we want for this specific treatment group. So now the experiment is set back a week pretty much, all because we forgot to double check.

So what? Why is that important to you? Well the more I thought about it, the more parallels I found with every day life. We do things in our lives that require us to reproduce a formula or a series of steps, and often we get so comfortable that we don't double check ourselves. This is to say that if you're cooking something often you may not notice that you add slightly more salt each time until it tastes completely different from the original dish which you were attempting to recreate, or as vegans we often feel so comfortable in our reasoning that we forget to shore up any loose ends when explaining our choices to others. That doesn't help the animals in the same way that overly salty food doesn't help your blood osmolarity. So what I'm trying to say is, for myself I found it's not so bad to go back to the basics every once in a while, just to remember why we do the things we do. Even when we feel really confident, especially when we feel really confident.

It's ok to need help and it's ok to retrace your steps. 

Sometimes we need to take a step back, review our fundamentals, see how we have changed as people and how that relates to our choices and actions. Maybe you might want to back down the weights a little at the gym and work on form, or read some Angela Davis again just to remember that one clever turn of phrase that connects the whole racial, sexual and species equality argument you had in your head but can't quite articulate. It's ok to need help and it's ok to retrace your steps.