What I Believed About the Scientific Process Was All Wrong

This journal club presentation taught me two important lessons in approaching the scientific process.

 

1.       In scientific experiments, and especially in biology, one can never overgeneralize their findings. One must be aware of the scope that their research and results address and no clear implications can be confirmed without direct experimentation.

2.       As a result, do not try to look for connections/draw conclusions if you cannot. Science is not always conclusive, but rather, preliminary in some cases. 

I’d say the process of digesting my paper and attempting to present the paper’s conclusive findings taught me this the hard way. 

Let’s backtrack to the beginning. When we were first assigned the journal club presentation, I initially didn’t feel too much panic. I had previous experience participating in a journal club for one of my other classes, although the guidelines were much less strict, and had experience presenting some of my own scientific experiments in the past. I’ve got this… I believed.

Looking at my paper, I expected it to be quite simple to interpret. The researchers were looking at how ionizing radiation affected stem cells vs somatic cells and analyzing the varying gene expression levels in certain DNA repair genes as a response. “Cool! All you gotta do is look at which genes are elevated in which cells and then read the discussion to understand how the results can explain the specific pathway that gene is involved in within the DNA damage response for that certain cell type,” I thought. 

But to be honest, I really struggled in interpreting the paper and distinguishing the study's main results and consequently, found myself quite confused.  I don’t know if the researchers just did a poor job in supporting their results with previously published findings that addressed the roles of these genes in their respective pathways, or if I simply did not possess a strong enough background to understand the implications. It seemed to me that whenever they discussed the published findings, they would state a bunch of disjoint pathways and correlations, but never drew any direct implication of these findings in supporting their own data. 

In addition, sometimes, they’d present some research that may support one protein’s role in a murine model, but then countered it with another study that stated the protein was involved in a very different pathway in a human model. Of course, this confused me, because it made it very difficult for me to try to pinpoint the protein’s exact pathway. However, it also taught me that in biology, murine models tend to vary greatly from human models and results observed in murine models cannot always be replicated in human models and therefore we cannot overgeneralize such results. 

In the end, the researchers never specifically tried to explain any gene’s specific overexpression in a cell type as a result of its specific pathway. After struggling to align the pathways discussed and trying to draw my own understanding of the implications, I eventually came to conclude that none of these supporting details were conclusive, rather only theoretical. In the end, the results only were effective in confirming which genes were upregulated in which cell types, but could not provide any more definitive conclusions. I myself learned to not always look for a clear definitive path, but to be content with the murky unknown and understanding that some research probably prompts more questions than answers.

Still kinda confused,
Sophie