- Being a scientist is not easy. When you are designing your experiments, there are many factors that you have to take into account. - One's faced with a bewildering number of choices in doing and designing an experiment. So really thinking through those choices very early on is critical for one's success as a scientist. - So I think one of the things that's really, really important when designing an experiment is to come up with all of the, sort of, outcomes that you think you might see. So what do you expect to happen, you know, what pieces of data are you actually going to have, and what is it going to mean if it works, if it doesn't work. What do you expect to see? - A lot of the art form of experimental design comes from within and I think it helps to just sit and think about the other possibilities for designing and executing it before you actually conduct the experiment. - One doesn't get to a successful result through sheer number of hours in the lab, through sheer number of experiments. Really a much greater factor of success is based upon the choice of the experiment that you decide to do. - Learning how to design your experiment will save you a lot of time. Because you will think in advance about the variables that are going to influence your experiment, about what are the potential challenges that you are going to encounter in the experiment, and once you have done the experiment, what are the steps that you have to take to try to improve your experiment and obtain a good outcome. - But another important element is being very critical of all elements of the project. I mean in a healthy way. In other words, just because you've made some choice of certain experimental conditions, you know, doesn't mean you need to be wed to them. Science is a very iterative process. It's really that process of working through different pilot setups, demoing experiments, trying it out, having it fail for some unforeseen reason and then tweaking the experimental design a little bit to make it more precise or address some of the issues that you ran into. - And by doing the experiment iteratively you are in a position to appreciate that nuance and better design that experiment down the road. - And what you quickly learn through mistakes of experimentally design is that you think you've got it all figured out at the beginning but there's a lot that you'll miss even if you are an expert who's been working in that field for decades. So for students to gain an appreciation for that, I think is very valuable. Is that it is fine to try your best to design an experiment but to understand that there really is no perfect experiment and it's more a matter of what are you going to learn from this process. - It's really trying to do experiments that are getting at the heart of the question that you are trying to address. So this is the important niche that we are trying to cover, is to try to explain, really the art and the practice of being an excellent experimental biologist.