Inspired by the poem “Ithaka” by C. P. Cavafy
When conducting scientific experiments, biology does not always cooperate with our carefully designed protocols. You may know what you hope the final figure to show, but not what the experiment will teach you along the way. In that sense, an experiment can feel a little like an odyssey.
The week before
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one
The experiment begins with tumor cell injections in mice, followed by a two-week wait for the tumors to grow. Two weeks in, the first problem arises: the tumors have not reached the size needed to begin treatment.
Monday
… and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
One week later, the experiment can move forward. But the immune cells that we have been growing for two weeks to treat the tumors are far fewer than expected. Further processing costs us even more cells, leaving too few to follow the original treatment plan. After some discussion, we adjust the experimental groups to work with what is available.
Then, we wait.
Thursday morning
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them
Sample Collection.
Six tissue types: blood, bone marrow, spleen, lymph nodes, liver and lungs. By the end of the day, we will have 150 individual samples, each one needing to be collected, processed, stained and analyzed separately. There is no way to do this alone. The team divides the work. Samples move from one set of hands to another, into tubes and onto ice, as everyone works to keep the cells alive.
Thursday afternoon
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for
As the day goes on, more adjustments are needed. Some tissues have far more cells than expected, so we dilute them and keep going. An antibody we need has still not arrived. The FedEx delivery is somewhere on campus, so someone heads to the loading dock to track down the box, only hours before we need to use it. We reach out to several labs to find one with the specific antibody we need. They lend it to us, and the experiment keeps moving.
Thursday night
But don’t hurry the journey at all
Eventually, all 150 tubes make their way to the flow cytometer, where we can finally analyze the cells in each sample. One student stays until midnight, running the tubes one at a time to make sure that, after everything it took to get here, we don’t lose the experiment at the final step.
Results
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
So, did it work? Did the treatment shrink the tumors?
In his poem Ithaka, Cavafy reflects on Odysseus' long journey home, reminding us that reaching Ithaka was never its only value. The journey gave him experiences he could not have gained by simply arriving.
Scientific figures are our Ithakas. They show where an experiment arrived, but rarely what it took to get there: the changed plans, the borrowed reagents, the many hands around ice buckets, or the person beside a cytometer at midnight. Along the way, we learn to solve problems we could not have anticipated, and to rely on one another when an experiment becomes too much for one person to handle.
Perhaps some of the most important results of an experiment are not found in the data, but in the scientists we become along the way.
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