I found myself digging in the trash today grinning wildly. This occurred towards nine at night, and I was in the lab. The excitement of doing science had come over me more strongly than in quite a while.
In my projects I haven't been too terribly successful in Grenoble. In particular, in one, I've been battling the same problems for a year now. It's no fun trying to overcome the same issues over and over again. There were times for optimism, and there were even times for cheerfulness. But in the end, I always had to conclude that I didn't get much farther, and that the major break-through had still not happened. It dragged me down. Add the upcoming end of my contract here and the move to London with all its prospects to the mix, and it's easy to see that I've been struggling to maintain my motivation as much as I have been to solve scientific problems. In fact, struggling to maintain motivation doesn't help solving scientific problems, to say the least.
So it was with much joy that I noticed late tonight that instead of solving one problem (finally, as I thought) I identified another, totally unexpected, baffling, surprising. Also challenging – and motivating. I had to go through the trash to dig out tubes I had thrown out hours earlier because the answer to this new problem might just lie in the contents of these tubes. This is science for you.
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