There once was a legendary student whowas super good at synthesis of special materials. Once upon a time, there was a postdoc who made her measurements excellent and beautiful. And then if that person disappears, the project totally grinds to a complete halt. The past is past. You cannot go back to the past just like you cannot go back to the future.
The so-called inheriting techniques issue is everywhere. I’ve seen tons of cases where this becomes a problem, and I’m kinda in that spot myself to some degree. (Self-assembly research is tough on reproducibility sometimes, you know!)
I got to chat with a professor who won a Nobel Prize, and according to what I heard, they were doing this nano-crystal bio project and it was going great, but then COVID hit and people couldn’t come to the lab, so the hands-on technique inheritance got totally cut off, and the bio project came to a complete stop right there. Even with all the equipment and brains available. So yeah, that’s sad and sadly inefficient. But it is important to know that it can happen to the Nobel prize winning lab. Which mean…. Passing down techniques is harder than winning a Nobel Prize!!!, and if all the lab’s knowledge gets properly stacked up over time, that’s like, insanely impressive, you know. Lab notebooks are important, sure, but if that was all it took, we wouldn’t be struggling like this.
The problem is, I think, that the person doing the technique doesn’t even know what’s important and what’s not. That’s why it’s hard to teach.
At this point, maybe one idea is that we gotta film experiments everywhere and have AI extract stuff or something? Can’t we do something about this? As an AI-loving human, I feel like this kinda thing has gotten way easier than before.
Roughly summarize into about 30 minutes, write down what experiment it is. Then have AI summarize it, tag it, and make it easy to search later. But this sounds pretty annoying as a project? Well, maybe I’ll give it a shot anyway. Yeah, I’ll do it! Let’s go for it! For starters, I thought I’d begin with something like my own Vlog. Probably the key is good audio, so I went and bought a kinda fancy mic. Might end up being wasted money again, though! If it does. This could be the solution to the Nobel-level tough problem of technique inheritance, right! Who knows, though!
