转载自个人MSN空间

(First, Nenad, are you wondering where does the title come from? And yes, you are right; I stole this from the legend of one of your photos… :P)

"Automated unrestricted multigene recombineering for multiprotein complex production"
Nature Methods
Published online: 3 May 2009 | doi:10.1038/nmeth.1326
http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nmeth.1326.html

It’s my first scientific publication (containing the results of one of my master thesis projects), and it’s also an important assurance for me: as a student who majored in theoretical physics in my college and biological physics in my master program. I struggled for at least 4 years in order to enter a molecular and structural biology lab as a PhD student. If I count from my unsuccessful application to the biology department of my college (Fudan University, Shanghai), then it is 7 years. (In brief, the biology department of my college was my first choice at that time, but my grade was not good enough to reach their requirements (even though I ended as 7th in the national high school biology contest among students from Shanghai), so finally I went to physics department, which was my second choice). During these 7 years in the physics department, I was tempted by biology all the time. Now I am more confident that I might be able to become a structural biologist or biophysicist as I always want. But there are still many uncertainties which bug me continuously.

I still remember clearly that I broke a 2L Erlenmeyer at the very first day that I started in EMBL as a diploma student; and I guess this shocked my supervisor quite a bit :P . In the first two months of my thesis project, I tried very hard just for making cleaner minipreps or prepare usable chemical competent cells. Currently, after spending about one year and a half in the field of molecular structural biology, I have some experiences in molecular cloning and protein expression in insect cells, but I still lack the very basic knowledge of protein biochemistry and crystallography (my physics is really rusty now…), and this worries me all the time. I know if I work as a maniac and do my experiments strictly following the instructions of my supervisor and well-established protocols, then there are always certain probabilities that things might work. But I am also annoyed by the fact that I know very little about the mechanisms lying behind all these biochemical and biophysical techniques that we are using in the lab everyday. If I keep working like this I might just end up as a good benchworker. And it seems totally impossible for me to find the balance between bench work, literature reading, and scientific writing. My unsecured feeling even became a little bit stronger after the advance online publication of this paper. I think I am just too paranoid sometimes…

I know I am really lucky and I am very grateful to my supervisor and colleagues for their kind help and suggestion during my thesis projects. I know that I wouldn’t be able to achieve anything without their helps. And I am also very lucky in the sense that this project is very methodology oriented; it probably made my life much easier as a diploma student with no previous experience in molecular biology.

Now I am slowly entering the protein world from the DNA world that I am more familiar with. New experiences will be accumulated and new barriers will need to be conquered. The feeling as a newbie in the lab begins again…But I have to carry on since the road leading to more profound understanding of the biological system is an endless adventure for me and as what I just mentioned: I am tempted by biology, the science of life and of living organisms, all the time.

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