The Science of Life

Last Week, I mentioned I would do a blog on the importance of keeping a good lab notebook this week. So this is me fulfilling that statement. Think of this as a weird part two to last weeks blog; kind of like “Let's Kill Hitler” to “A Good Man Goes to War”. The lab notebook has it's sticky little fingers in every single aspect of your modern, western life. The buildings which surround you and in which you live and frequent. The clothing which you wear. The food you eat. The computer you are reading this on. The internet networks that allow you to access this website. Thumb drives. The military. Medical science. The PA systems of poetry readings and stage performances such as plays. Batteries. Vehicles. Weapons. Drugs, legal as well as illegal. Television. Every aspect of your life, no matter how minor and minute or how big and grand it is, it depends on the lab notebook. Here, I will provide a few examples. The first is for those of you who are hip with...

Let me begin this blog as a whole with an awful truth about the scientist in general and the chemist in particular. This is a flaw that I disdain, but have to admit is present if I am going to stay honest to myself and to you, my readers. This flaw is that of not going full out on meticulous detail when publishing findings to a scientific journal. Now this may mean not going in full detail in a lab notebook causing the experiment to be irreproducible, or this may mean presenting visuals that represent “impossible science”, or this may mean getting to a certain conclusion through shady means, among other things. All of these things happen in all fields of science, and especially in chemistry. And when these flaws are apparent, the scientists involved in not going full out on detail on a report get called out by the scientific community, in the same way when a murder is committed, the murderer is called out by the community (s)he murdered in. And like murderers, those scientists w...