My Days in the Lab

My psychopharm' professor squinted at me from between his beard and his long hair. As a scientist and scholar, he liked to inspect, then dissect anything before his eyes, and I perceived myself as the current object of his analysis. I probably tensed a little. I then worked up the nerve to speak.

"Uh, Dr. Gilly..." I said, then paused, waiting for him to speak.

The pause must've carried on a little to long though..."Yes..." he said in a slight tone of irritation.

"You're basically impressed by my lab-work, right?"

Gilly's eyebrows rose in a display of both curiosity and annoyance, perhaps over a statement of the obvious. "Well, yes. Me and Dr. Scheuge both."

"And so you'd basically say that I'm competent enough to perform an experiment..."

His annoyance grew more overt. "You’ve already run experiments, John. Is there something you're trying to get to?"

I stammered a little. I wasn't expecting to get to my point so fast. "Well," I said "it’s just this: it’s is my senior year, and so after this, I'm either going to be a grad' student or a worker. In either case though, I'm probably not going to have a chance to do any really weird, wild experiments, and I didn’t want to leave my undergraduate years without having at least one...you know...'adventure in science.'”

Gilly grinned, perhaps in condescension of my intent as much as at my use of that last phrase, a slogan of science education common during both my boyhood and his. "...And the reason you're asking me?"

"I've done work with you!"

Gilly now spoke very slowly, as though speaking to someone too slow to understand his point: "No, I mean why specifically are you asking me? You've also worked with Dr. Scheuge and you did that one thing with your...what was he?...your 'developmental' prof'?"

"Well yeah, but all I've been doing with Schurge is crunching numbers, and the project with the other prof was actually a class assignment in Cognitive--"

"So, again, you've also done work with that prof.'" Gilly seemed pleased at an apparent refutation of one of my points.

"...Look, to me at least, you seem more open to new ideas. So I kind'a figured if I ever did something really wild, I'd probably have to ask you."

Gilly now grinned even more broadly, like a lawyer about to win a case. "...And the simple analysis of existing data like you've been doing with Dr. Schuege never gets that exciting, right?"

His question was at least a bit of a trap; after all, a scientist must put the pursuit of knowledge ahead of a search for even the most intellectual sort of thrills. I didn't fall for it, though. "No," I told him, "obviously, some of the greatest finds have been made by people just going through the scientific version of the daily grind. But I can spend the rest of my life crunching numbers. Like I said, this will be my one chance to do something wild. I'll admit it; this is for me."

Gilly took a moment to speak. Apparently the sheer honesty of my answer surprised him.

"So...are you hoping to create artificial life, or flat-line, or what?”

I still foresaw a set-up for rejection, and I was a little stymied. I hadn't quite thought the matter that far through. “I’m not sure yet. I know that sounds a little stupid, but I was hoping you’d have an idea.”

He nodded. "Well, I can run through a few drug catalogs and see what I find.”

He returned his attention to the reading on his desk. I didn't get up though; his answer just surprised me too much. After a moment he looked up at me again.

"Is there anything more than that?” Gilly sounded genuinely puzzled.

“Well, do we have to do another drug?” All of the prior experiments I’d been on with him had been tests of drugs."

Gilly stared at me in annoyed patience. “Well, this is the psychopharmicology lab. That’s what we do here. I take it you’re hoping for something weirder than the testing of a chemical though, right?”

“Well, basically....”

Gilly chuckled. “Trust me," he said, "I’ll find something absolutely buh-zarre!”

Gilly did live up to his promise. In Sandoz Laboratory’s large, grey, hard-bound volume listing the names, properties and molecular structure of their drugs, he found a supposed “smart pill,’ a drug called piracetam, theorized to remove certain long, inter-neural protein strands which hamper brain activity. Tests on neurally-damaged rats, chimps and humans had given mixed results, and some had praised it as the miracle cure for such problems as Alzheimer’s Disease while others had scoffed at any evidence of its effectiveness as simply so much error. Of course, in light of all this disagreement, both Gilly and I expected to have lots of fun running the tests. Nothing excites a scientist more than an actual chance to figure something out.

Gilly ordered a a large jar of the drug from the manufacturer, and receiving it a week later, he gave me two cognitively decrepit rats used in a previous study on the effects of cocaine to use as test subjects. Before taking any further action, however, he and I followed a semi-tradition in his field of science and sampled the material. It had no effect on us, however, other than a temporary excitement over the possibility of discovery.

The next day we began the experiments. Each day Gilly or I would dissolve a tablet of piracetam into a set amount of distilled water, and then he, being an actual university employee, would then inject either a measured amount of the resulting milky fluid or an equal amount of pure H2O into our rodents’ undersides. We would then put our subjects in a “vigilance box,” where they would earn a small pellet of food by pressing a bar each time a light went on. The device basically measured their ability to pay attention, a good indicator of overall cognitive function, by determining how many times they reacted to the light, and we thus compared their scores when on piracetam to those achieved without the drug.

We ran the experiments for about two months, and, frustratingly, as the results came in we found that the rats were indeed improving at their task, but that the rise in their scores was just a little too slight for us to rule out dumb luck as the cause. Gilly, the disciplined, workaday scientist, was willing simply to accept out findings as inconclusive, but, wanting to leave my academic years on a high note, I would not accept anything but a conclusion, positive or negative. Ultimately, I decided to deal with this ambiguity as many scientists before me have done, and I began to search scientific journals for an acceptable way to alter my experiment or data to produce a result. To be clear, my efforts would not falsify my experiment; any procedure in the journals has, after all, stood up to at least some scrutiny from professional scientists and is therefore valid. Furthermore, I had seen researchers, even in the hard sciences like physics, grinning somewhat cynically over a decision to re-run an experiment in a new way designed specifically to gain a desired outcome, and so I had only the smallest tremors of conciounse over the decision to take this general course . After all, like other scientists, I was trying to make a point, and like other scientists I was really just taking the logical steps to do so. Having decided on that action, however, I now had to find a specific means.

Gilly suggested running the experiment with a larger test-group. His reasoning was solid: According to The Law of Small Numbers, an experiment run on a test group of less than thirty must show a larger overall change than one on a larger group because the cause of an effect could simply be the oddness of the very few subjects involved. Unfortunately though, I didn’t have enough time before graduation to muddle through the paper-work for material and clearances needed to run our tests again. I then suggested comparing the results after injections specifically to those from before we gave any injections. Gilly rejected this idea, though, correctly pointing out that no scientist can ever simply cherry-pick his facts. At this point, I suggested just running the experiment for two more weeks without injections. We wouldn’t have to clear such a thing with the university, and I just might be able to record the rat's overall improvement since the start of the injections, a rise in overall scores that may have actually decreased the difference injection and non-injection test sufficiently to give us a false negative result.

For lack of any alternative, we adopted this idea, and interestingly, we did finally find a meaningful difference. The rats actually performed better in this last series of test than they had at any other time, and in light of this result, I even theorized that some ingredient in the capsules might be offsetting the effect of the drug itself for at least some time after administration. At this point, I would've liked to test my hypothesis by comparing the results of experiments using a powdered or seral form of piracetam to those using dissolved capsules of the stuff, but this near to graduation I would have to leave that question either unanswered or in the hands of other researchers.

As a conclusion to this drama of science, I sent the paper for the experiment to a professional psychologists’ convention for possible presentation, along with another "hipper" one on the attitudes of blacks and whites toward people of more than one race. The people in charge of that convention accepted both of them, to the somewhat insulting surprise of my Theories of Learning Prof,' but they scheduled them for simultaneous display in two inconveniently distant booths at diagonally opposite ends of a large ball room, leaving me to prove my abilities as a long-distance runner. In the end, my experiment did not "prove" anything, of course, but by the end of my days in the lab, I'd read enough of the scientific journals to know that most research ends simply in a best guess rather than an actual conclusion. In light of this though, I can still take pride in having offered science a useful and practical suggestion rather than an abstraction posing as fact. In all, my experience made me appreciate the great fallibility of any human endeavor to find the truth, but it also gave me a great respect for men like Gilly, who struggle so hard to avoid error. Gilly seemed to have reached for this goal by concentrating his efforts on testing the real-world effects of things rather than the validity of theorums, and after knowing him, I can only hope that as many scientists as possible follow his way.