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The Importance of the Lab Notebook


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 your own respective nations military. Your military depends on weapons such as various guns, various bombs, various defense systems, various vehicles, various communications systems. Everything on the field of battle depends on scientists working in the background making damn sure those items work properly frequently enough for the soldiers to do what they're advertised to do; stay alive while killing other people. This requires the lab notebook, because if one scientist alone works on one single project, that scientist will make a few mistakes. And those mistakes will be perpetuated through all of the experiments that scientist performs on that project. Therefore, that scientist has to transfer further study on the project to other scientists. This requires explicit notes on what was done on what aspects under what conditions as well as the observations taken from these experiments and the conclusions taken from them. This is exactly what the lab notebook is. Detailed procedures, detailed observations. Hypothetical preliminary explanations.
For those of you who care about the capitalistic machine, there is a huge fiscal reason for the lab notebook. If there is a scientist working on a new breed of, say, computer, if that scientist is not using a lab notebook – or keeping a piss poor lab notebook, or throws away their lab notebook like Zhiwen Zhang of last weeks blog did – then the double checks and triple checks will be that scientist will basically be saying “you're just going to have to trust my memory.” That doesn't flow in science. If that scientist goes to the head of the department and uses that phrase, that would not fly. The scientists and head of the department will have essentially the same reaction; “Show me the lab notebook. Show me your work.” So said scientist will have to run the experiment again and keep good notebooks to conduct better research. Running these experiments again under bad lab notebook keeping procedures wastes man-hours. It wastes materials. Both of these wastes money. This all to make the products you buy usable out of the cheapest products possible.
If you are of the mind-set of scientific accuracy (as I am), taking the word of another scientist without the lab notebook is like a Christian taking the word of a Muslim, or an atheist taking the word of a Christian, or liberals and conservatives taking each others words for it. It just does not fly. In order for me to double check your work, I need to run your experiment to confirm it for myself. The same holds true the other way around. In order for you to double check my work, you need to run the experiment I have run. In either direction, this depends on the lab notebook. This is the explicit notes of precisely what you did and how much material you used and the times and observations. The explicit details in the lab notebooks help us as humans and as scientists keep each other scientifically honest, but more importantly, to severely reduce mistakes and errors.
These are just a few examples of why the lab notebook is so important in society. I am sure that if you contemplate it hard enough, you can think of more examples of why the lab notebook is important to you.


Take that as you will.
-K. Alan Eister, Δαβ
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