- Taking good notes for me means being purposeful and thoughtful about the whole experimental process, which, from a practical standpoint, means knowing what you're doing, why you're doing it, what you're expecting out of it, writing it down so that you can keep track of it, you don't forget about it, and being observant and just both keeping an open mind but also keeping track of what's going on in the experiment. - And really what the students do in my lab is that, for every entry, they put in a specific experiment and what we hope to learn from this experiment. So I think that is the first key point that needs to be addressed. What do we actually hope to learn from this experiment? And as you develop the experimental plan, if you don't see how the experiment will bring us back to what we hoped to learn, that's a problem. So I think, if making them go through the process of thinking about what to expect, that is really, really important. Now, at the end of the experiment, I also ask them to do a small sort of assessment or interpretation, in which, you know, where we avoid just putting up data and saying, "There's the data for this experiment." But I would like to know also how does this go back to what we hope to learn from the experiment? Are we now attacking the hypothesis? Is it causing us to refine our hypothesis in some way? How does this bring us back to the big picture of what we're studying in the first place? And so I actually want that in every place, in every entry, of everyone's notebook is, for every experiment they bother doing, I want them to bring it back and think about how it fits into the problem. - It's good not only for your personal benefit. It's also important because you want your experiment to be reproducible. So it's important that your notes are detailed enough in such a way that someone else can reproduce your experiment. For example, when you are doing incubations with a particular detergent, you may write in your protocol, "I am incubating these cells for ten minutes." But my question come here is: has to be "ten minutes", or can be "at least ten minutes?" And this is a a big difference, because those cells may be damaged if you incubate it longer than ten minutes. So you need to be precise and say whether that incubation has to be ten minutes or can be at least ten minutes. - The fundamental problem that comes out in doing science, as an experimentalist, is you do a protocol a couple of times and then it kind of gets burned into your brain and you can do it for weeks without ever writing..Oh yeah I always remember I always do these five steps these ways. It's amazing how few of us can actually go back to our notes and actually do the experiment exactly the way it was. So, here's a story that's kind of related to that, which is paying attention to details. So a graduate student comes the David Botstein's lab and yeast transformation is being developed as a new method. What happens is he gets it to work. It's a rotation student. It was hard to do. He's a golden kid, it's great. He comes back to join the laboratory and he has to go further and he has to do transformation. He can't get his transformations to work for months. And so, other people in the lab are getting it to work and he can't, and finally the thesis advisor gets really mad and says, "You guys got to sit down "next to each other and figure out what's going on here, because I can't figure out why Jim can't do the experiment." So it turn out that, in order to get this procedure to work, you need to use agar that is three percent. In the time between when he was a rotation to when he came back to the laboratory, a manual had come out from Cold Spring Harbor which was to tell all the yeast community how to do transformation and it had a typo in it that said two percent. So he didn't have his notes about how he used to do it, so he couldn't go back and be like, "Why was it working before, it's not working now?" He didn't have the details, I used three percent agar, because everybody was just using agar and he didn't bother to write down the details of that, right? And so he lost a huge amount of time because he didn't have really good notes. - I can think of one case where we did produce a result, published it, another investigator questioned it, and, fortunately, first of all, the postdoc, who was involved in this result, very clearly documented every element of this experiment. In that case, I actually went into the lab myself and reproduced that experiment using the notes that my postdoc had described and published in the paper, because I also wanted to make sure that I could repeat that experiment with my own hands. Fortunately, in that case, all of those elements did play out correctly, but that is an example of what should be possible to do in any kind of circumstance or any kind of situation with data in the laboratory. We have a responsibility as scientists that, not just getting credit for ourselves, but having the whole field advance, and that's again the biggest tribute to you as a scientist. If your work and your data influences other people in a way that they can build upon it, design their own experiments. - I think that notebooks are the diaries of the lab. They are like the institutional memory of the lab. I think one of the best tips came from an exercise that I did very early on, I think when I was in eighth grade in biology class. They had us sit in front of a candle and writing what we saw as the candle melted, and I looked at the candle and I think my mind was just wandering all over the place. I just couldn't focus on the candle. And then eventually, something clicked where I started seeing things that I wasn't seeing before I started taking notes on the candle, and I think it's that concept. It's about seeing beyond what you actually see if you don't pay attention. I would like to give the example of Alexander Fleming with the famous example of the discovery of penicillin. And they always tell this story like, oh, well, you know Alexander Fleming, he left for a week and then he came back and he found his plates contaminated, and how lucky was he that his plates got contaminated when he went away for a weekend? And then he discovered penicillin. And I asked the students, "Do you think Alexander Fleming was the first person whose plates got contaminated?" My plates get contaminated all the time, right? So there are probably a lot of people whose plates were contaminated. I think his mind was prepared for it. He was able to see what other people had not seen. And I think that's also key in keeping good lab notebooks. Being able to see what other people cannot see. Being focused, paying attention, taking good notes.