Podcast – Lucky Charms: Unravelling Lab Superstitions

Voice Over:

The Dementia Researcher podcast, talking careers, research, conference highlights and so much more.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Hello, everyone and welcome to The Dementia Researcher podcast. I am Dr. Yvonne Couch and I’m delighted you could join us for an episode that is going to reassure you that we are just as crazy as you are. Now, in theory, science is all about evidence and rationality, but even in the most state-of-the-art labs, you’ll find researchers who hold onto weird rituals, lucky charms and superstitions. So today we’re going to explore the lighter side of scientific research by exploring the wonderful world of lab superstitions. From lucky pipettes to lucky pants, we’re about to uncover the official do’s and don’ts that researchers swear by. But first, we need to find out who my fellow lunatics are. So let’s do some introductions. Kam, you’re a regular, but can you remind the listeners of who you are and what you do?

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

Hi, everyone. So I’m Kam and I’m a senior lecturer in biomedical science at Teeside University. My research is broadly on the neuropathology of neurodegenerative diseases, so I’m interested in what happens in people’s brains when they have dementia.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Excellent, thank you. So Soraya, you’re also a returning guest. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Dr Soraya Meftah:

Hello. Yes, so I’m Soraya. I’m based at the University of Edinburgh and I’m a postdoctoral research fellow with Dr. Claire Durant. And at the moment I’m interested in looking at human organotypic slice cultures and assessing functional changes in that and how we can model dementia in those slices.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Excellent. So we’ve already got a couple of different techniques that we can be crazy with. Lauren, you’re up next.

Dr Lauren Walker:

Hi. So I’m Lauren, I’m an Alzheimer’s Research UK fellow, but I’m based at Newcastle University. Similar to Kam, I work in the neuropathology of neurodegenerative diseases, particularly mixed pathology, Alzheimer’s related pathology in patients that have dementia with Lewy bodies.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Great. And finally, Tabitha.

Tabitha Broadbelt:

Hi. So last time I was on this podcast I was doing my PhD with Dr. Szu-Han Wang at the University of Edinburgh, was using mouse behaviour and pharmacology to study learning and learning modulation in a model of amyloid pathology. But since May, I’m now a postdoc at the MRC’s Brain Network Dynamics Unit at the University of Oxford with Professor David Dupret, still looking at learning and memory in mice, but this time using large scale single unit recordings.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Excellent. Thank you. So we’ve got a great range of techniques and things we do in the lab and things we do outside of the lab. And I’ve just realised I’ve not introduced myself. So I’m Dr. Yvonne Couch, I work at University of Oxford and my main focus is stroke, extracellular vesicles and the brain vasculature. So now we know who everybody is, what we’re going to do is we are going to leap straight into what superstitions we have and what superstitions are in general. Right. Let’s get into it. So we’re going to start with some personal questions. Lauren, we’ll start with you. So we’re going to focus outside the lab to start with. And I know that you’ve told me, which I’m so pleased about, that you’re a magpie saluter. Can you tell us what you do and what you think that does for you?

Dr Lauren Walker:

So yes. Before, when we were chatting about this, I didn’t think I was a particularly superstitious person. But then actually thinking about it, someone randomly told me about 20 years ago that you needed to salute a lone magpie when you see it. And for the last 20 years, and I have no rhyme or reason as to why this is actually, what it’s helpful for or nothing bad, touch wood, has never happened, touch wood. But I have the same magpie on my commute to work that I see every single day and I have to salute this magpie every time that I see it. And it’s at the exact same point. So if anyone walks past me at the same point in my commute on the way to work and on the way home, I salute this magpie and I still have no idea why I do this.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

No, it’s great. I do exactly the same thing. And I was told I think when I was about 17, that you have to salute them because it’s bad. You have to say, “Good morning, Mr. Magpie. How’s your wife and children?” And every single time I see a single magpie, that’s what I’m doing. But I have to avoid, if like you say, if you see somebody coming the other way, that’s it. You’re ruined because they think you’re a crazy person. But I think a lot of people do this kind of stuff. Soraya, just before we leapt on, you said you do stuff with salt?

Dr Soraya Meftah:

Yeah, I’ve always thrown salt over my shoulder if I spill some salt and I also salute magpies and I also don’t walk over three drains in a row. I don’t know why I do it, but I just do. Yeah.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

I was told that two drains is lucky, but three drains is bad luck. So I walk over two but not over three. But then it confuses me if you’ve got two sets of three in a row, it’s six. And I’m like, is that two lots of bad luck or three lots of good luck. I’m just, it baffles me. Does anyone else have any crazy outside of the lab superstitions that they’d like to share? Tabitha, jump in.

Tabitha Broadbelt:

I also feel quite uncomfortable when people don’t look me in the eye when you’re cheersing drinks because that brings bad luck.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Is that to do with, is that cultural? Have you lived somewhere else? Because I lived in Germany for a while and I know that they’re very much, you have to look someone in the eye when they do it.

Tabitha Broadbelt:

Yeah, so I grew up in France, which is where it comes from.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Excellent. Kam, have you got any outside of the lab superstitions?

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

Well, I guess similar to Lauren, I didn’t think that I really had any until I started thinking about it. And I remember when I was younger, I don’t do it now, but when I was younger, I don’t know if anybody else has heard of this, but on the first day of the month, the first thing you’ve got to say is white rabbit and I think it’s like three times or something.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yep.

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

And then you’ll have good luck for the rest of that month. I used to always do that. I’d wake up and it’d be the first thing I would do on a morning and I’d be like, “Oh, it’s the first day of the month. I’ve got to say that, otherwise I’m ruined for the rest of this month.” I don’t do it now, but it’s something I did when I was younger.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

I used to. I’ve still got, my personal one is outside of the lab is that I have lucky items of clothing, which I’m not lucky in any way. But I am devastated because my other half did a sort of our wardrobe and he threw away the skirt that I did all my interviews in. And so now, if I ever get invited to do any other interviews, I’m like, “Oh, I don’t have the right skirt. So now everything is just going to go disastrously wrong,” which is clearly the wrong mindset to go in with, but there’s nothing you can do. So we’ve established that we’re all ever so slightly grazing outside of the lab, but let’s leap into what we do inside the lab.

So a lot of generic superstitions that are very popular with old people and some of the ones that we’ve just discussed are either common sense or really ancient things. So Lauren mentioned knocking on wood and knocking on wood is apparently to banish devils that were supposed to live in trees or to appease the benign wood gods, depending on which bits of literature you read. Not putting your shoes on the table was one of my nan’s favourites, but that’s kind of common sense. So it’s supposed to be bad luck, but actually your shoes are filthy and you don’t really want them where you eat. So a lot of superstitions are sort of based in that, but that’s sort of obvious and generic superstitions. But lab superstitions and some lab superstitions are truly bizarre. So what we’re going to do now is go through our personal lab superstitions first, then we’ll grab some of the weirdest examples that we’ve gathered from our friends and colleagues. So Tabitha, let’s start with you. What are your personal lab superstitions?

Tabitha Broadbelt:

So I’ve noticed that I’ve got two. The first one is when I’m running mouse behavioural experiments, I have to keep the same deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, shower gel and shower same morning and do the same morning routine before I run my behaviour experiment. The other one is that my free floating sections, when I try and mount them on slides, just respond so much better when I shout at them in French.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

I love that. That’s excellent. It gets a little bit of rage out there as well. But I do think that the mouse behaviour one actually makes a lot of sense. I was told when I first started doing behavioural stuff that you shouldn’t wear strong perfumes and you shouldn’t wear things that smell. So actually, what you’re doing is sort of almost controlling your own experiments as you go along. So that’s sensible science. It’s not crazy. Well Kam, you did behavioural work and animal work and immuno and stuff, are there any superstitions that you had that are along the same sort of lines?

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

I feel slightly better now because thinking especially with animal behaviour, it’s like, “Oh, it’s not just me.” It is like actually these things maybe have some scientific basis to them. Because certainly with animal behaviour, it can be prone to be an influence by lots of different variables and you think well, being a good scientist is trying to in some way control those variables. So you almost feel that if you have any superpositions, if you have any rituals, they’re kind of justified because if you know that anything works, then no matter how bizarre it is, you stick with it. But there was one thing when I was thinking back to when I did a lot of my animal work that thinking back I’m like I don’t actually know why we did that. It’s almost like you pick these up off people that have trained you and then you pass it on to the people that you train.

But this thing was, so when I worked with Lister hooded rats, they weren’t genetically modified or anything, we didn’t need to punched them for ID because they were just wild type Lister hooded rats. So we actually IDed them by using a marker pen on their tail, just numbering them. When I then moved on to work with mice, we would ear punch them because they were different, they were genetically modified and we had wild types, so they had to be ear punched then. But with these rats, we just would use a marker pen. But we used to always write the numbers in Roman numerals. I don’t know, is that a thing?

Dr Yvonne Couch:

I think so. So I think, when I do tail marking, I’ve got, interestingly, I thought you were going in a different direction with this and I’ll leap on that in a minute, but I’ve got a very specific way I mark tails and it’s always just ones, but the five goes at the bottom and all the fours go at the top and stuff like that. But the way I thought you were going was I have a very specific pen I do tail marking with and I cannot use anything other than that pen. I’m sure other pens work well, but I’m now so attached to this pen, that it has to be this pen, which again, I think is a slight degree of superstition. So Soraya, you said you’re not particularly superstitious, at least you don’t think you are, but I know that Lauren mentioned to me offline that she has particular ways of taking pipette tips out of boxes and things. And we’ll quiz her on that in a minute. Is there anything like that that you do?

Dr Soraya Meftah:

No, I’ve realised I’m weird since I sent that email. Sorry. So just before coming here I was discussing, I was a bit like I don’t really have many superstitions, but actually I’m very particular with music. So when I was doing surgeries, I used to always have to listen to Kisstory, which is a very specific radio station in the UK. It’s kind of nineties, naughties pop. I couldn’t listen to anything else otherwise my surgeries would go terribly.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Excellent.

Dr Soraya Meftah:

And it’s the same for, I do electrophysiology, which is kind of a dark art in itself. And actually, for that, I listen to very specific niches of music. If I’m having a bad patching day, I normally listen to Shakira. She normally puts me in a good mood and then normally my patching goes a bit better. So yeah, I didn’t realise I was that weird. And then I was like, “Yeah, of course you listen to happy music when you’re doing stuff,” and everyone was looking at me. So now realised I have a few superstitions.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

I think it often takes somebody else to observe your behaviour before you realise that you’re doing something odd and someone’s like, “Why are you doing that?” And it usually takes a third person coming into your lab going, “Yeah, why do you do it like that?” And you’ve not realised that it’s very peculiar until somebody else points it out to you. But I leapt into the tip discussion. Lauren, tell me what you do with tips and tell me what else you do in the lab that you think is a bit superstitious.

Dr Lauren Walker:

Yeah, so the tips, I don’t know if anybody else does this, but I always naturally, when I take my tips from a box, I’ll go from front to back and from right to left. And then I don’t know if anyone else has seen this online kind of personality quiz. So apparently, the way I do it is militant and there’s other kind of ways like the old-fashioned snake game on the old-fashioned Nokia phone, apparently that’s a pattern you can take it out. And there’s another one that’s haphazard. But I can’t take my pipette tips, now I’ve seen this and I don’t know why I do it, now I’ve seen it, I can’t take my pipette tips out any other way because if the pattern is haphazard, what’s that going to do to my experiments? So that’s one.

And I don’t know if that comes from growing up when we were younger, reading these personality tests in magazines when we were younger. Well, I certainly did when I was younger. But now I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it and I can’t change the way. And I rack my pipettes in the same way as well. Yeah, I can’t explain why. Another one that I do is that I talk to my microscope. So particularly, first thing on the morning, if I know I’m going to have a long day on a microscope, I need to give it a bit of a pep talk just to kind of calm it down to say, “It’s going to be fine. We’re going to go all day. I can’t have you breaking down midway while I’m kind of doing some analysis. So it’s going to be fine.” And just kind of reassure it before I get started.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Is this regular microscope or confocal?

Dr Lauren Walker:

Regular microscope.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Excellent. So it’s not even that high maintenance, you’re just making sure it’s in the right mindset.

Dr Lauren Walker:

Pretty much. I mean it’s an automated microscope, so I normally set it off to take images over a 40, 45 minute period. And if I come back after 45 minutes and it’s still, yeah, or it’s time, something’s gone wrong in the middle, then it’s kind of 45 minutes off so I have to start all over again.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yeah. I think those kind of things are you get into the habit of it. And then I didn’t think I did any of the weird ones that are on the standard list like talk to yourselves and stuff. I did used to, when I first started in [inaudible 00:14:57], I was doing a year in industry in Germany and there was postdoc in a different lab and I told him that I like to sing in cell culture because cell culture was often very empty and had the radio on, singing along, great way to learn German.

And he said, “You do realise that now you’ve done that, you have to always do it because your cells have gotten used to you singing.” And I looked panicked. I was like 19 years old, I have no idea what science is at this point. And so I convinced myself that I had to. So every time I was in cell culture, irrespective of the audience, there were often other people in there and they had to just put up with me singing to my cells. And then when I moved labs, I was like, “Well, if I don’t do it now, then I won’t have to carry on doing it.” So I occasionally sing in the lab, but not when I’m doing cell culture.

But I agree with you on the tip thing. And I’m worse. So if we have a couple of students who make my eyes twitch by doing the random thing and just taking it out from wherever and I get so crazy about it that I have to stand there before I start and re-rack them. I’m just filling in all the holes like a loon. So I think it’s good that we’ve all got some degree of minor lab craziness, but I think there are some more loopy examples out there and we’ll just talk about them next I think.

So now we’re going to move on to some examples we’ve heard other people tell us or things we think are generic to a lot of labs. And I started this by eyeballing a list that Adam sent me. I have no clue where he got this list from. And some of them were really, really weird. So there was one about a sacrificial control, where you have to sacrifice one control to the lab gods, whoever they are. And I was thinking about the list and I didn’t think I was particularly personally superstitious in the lab.

Obviously, we’ve already established that clearly I am a little crazy. But one of the things that was on the list was the lab coat of success. I realised I am still wearing my undergraduate lab coat. I have a picture of Roger Rabbit stencilled on the pocket, which I do not have time to go into the reasons why. But I love this lab coat and I refuse to, we’ve got generic blue lab coats in the department and I refuse to wear them because I’m like, “No, this is my lab coat, this is what I wear.” It’s like the pen thing. I now can’t give it up.

So what I want to know now is what are the oddest or most generic things that you’ve heard other people tell you about what they’ve done? Now I’m going to ask Soraya first because she’s already revealed something. So you are an ephys person. I am surprised you are not more crazy because most of the crazy stories I’ve heard about lab superstitions come from ephys people.

Dr Soraya Meftah:

Yes. And actually I do have some ephys superstitions that I asked around for. So yeah, for myself, well I obviously have some weird ones with music, but I know, so I kind of asked a question out on Twitter and I got this one back, which basically for wholesale patch clamp recordings, one of the main things for good success is you have your electrode, which has a hole in the middle of it, and you need to make a very tight seal onto the cell membrane. So we call this a seal, it’s quite a common term that you use in this kind of thing. And someone has the animal seal as their wallpaper to encourage good seals in their experiments. I’m not sure the two links, but that’s what they do. And then another one was that if you’re doing slices, they wouldn’t take the first slice for their recordings and that would be a sacrificial slice. They also wouldn’t use the first drops of liquid, that would also be sacrificial drops to the gods, whichever gods, I don’t know.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

No, I love it. So the ephys one that I was told was a friend of mine said she had her rig, which is the big sort of metal cage for anyone who doesn’t do ephys, that you do it in. And they had to move labs and she had to move her rig upstairs. And in the new lab, nothing was working very well at all. And she realised that when they moved, she used to have, she’s not religious in any way, but she used to have a little Buddha statue that sat on top of her rig, and she realised when they moved, she put the little Buddha statue in her office. And after a while when stuff wasn’t working, she was like, “Ah, the Buddha statue,” moved it back onto the rig and of course everything started working again. So it is obviously the Buddha statue that is the reason for that.

Dr Soraya Meftah:

I mean I think there may be logic to it because maybe the Buddha is taking in the noise. We are very fussy about electrical noise and systems. Maybe that was doing some extra, I think for ephys, if everything’s working, you don’t change things.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Exactly.

Dr Soraya Meftah:

So even if we have to ground the electrical noise, if there’s a cable that doesn’t seem to be doing anything, you can’t touch it because it’s still, everything’s working so you don’t touch it. And that’s I guess the ephys kind of superstition side.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yep. Voodoo is happening in the background that you do not understand. Do not rock the boat, scientifically speaking. Kam, do you have any that anybody else has told you that you think are particularly loopy?

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

Well, not ones that people have told me, but having worked in three different pathology labs, I’ve been able to experience them firsthand. So in pathology labs, I would say probably the main technique that we use is something called immunohistochemistry. It’s a method where we use antibodies to bind antigens and tissue samples to allow [inaudible 00:20:34] to visualise certain cells or the proteins that are expressed by those cells. And there’s a pretty standard protocol that we’d use for that technique, but there is a degree of flexibility in terms of the steps and the timings and things like that.

And what I found is moving between labs is that even if we’re using the same antibodies or using the same types of tissue, all these protocols will have slight variations. Well, I say slight variations, some will even have bigger variations to them in terms of incubation times. And I think that even though I know that I’ve done this in this lab and it’s worked and I’ve got a protocol that works for it and it works really well, if I move to another lab and they’ve got a slightly different protocol, I’m going to use that protocol because it’s just a very strange thing where I’m adopting the superstitions of the people in that lab that have developed that protocol. And I don’t want to be the person to go and change anything just in case it doesn’t work and then I waste tissue.

So I certainly adopt any superstitions or sort of rituals that might happen within that lab because I don’t want to be the person to come in and change and then it not work. I would say one thing that I did pick up in the first pathology lab that I worked in in Sheffield, and I was told from the very beginning that you do not do any lab work on a Friday because it won’t work, and that’s kind of the one that’s just stuck with me all the way.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

I love that.

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

You don’t do any lab work on a Friday, it won’t work. It’s a waste of the day.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

I’ve had stuff definitely work on a Friday, so I’m not on board with that one, but I am on board with just taking it easy on a Friday. And I asked a colleague who now lives in Germany, whether she had any particular lab superstitions, and her version of that was if she had more than two mistakes in a day, like major screw-ups, she’d just go home. She’s like, “The world is trying to tell me something and I should just stop.” And she said sometimes if she’s having a particularly lazy day, she’d just drop a beaker and go, “Life is over. There is no point.”

But I interestingly am on the almost opposite end of the spectrum to you in terms of adopting lab protocols. So we have something I stuck up in the lab when I first got here. So I arrived and there were two PhD students who’d been here for a couple of years and I obviously had no idea how they did anything. So I spent a good few weeks just tottering around after them going, “Oh, show me how you do this. Show me how you do this,” bearing in mind I had some experience of my own. And a lot of what they did was peculiar. And so I quizzed them. I said, “Why are you doing it like this?” And the answer was always because that’s how Mikulis did it.

So after the fourth iteration of, “Because that’s how Mikulis did it,” I was like, “No, you cannot give me that answer now. I want a scientific answer.” So there’s a de-motivational poster stuck up in the lab that’s got a picture of the Spanish bull run on it and it says tradition in really big letters. And underneath it says, “Just because you’ve always done it that way does not mean it’s not incredibly stupid.” So yeah, I was on the opposite end of the spectrum. I like to shake things up in the lab. Lauren, do you have anything that anyone has told you that you think is particularly peculiar?

Dr Lauren Walker:

Well, I asked the question to some people in my lab kind of what they did and quite shockingly, and I don’t know quite how to take this, one of my lab members turned around and said, “Well, I just sabotage everybody else’s experiments because there’s a finite amount of luck in a day and I’m going to make sure it’s directed to me.”

Dr Yvonne Couch:

I really hope that’s not true.

Dr Lauren Walker:

Yes. I’m sure, 99.9% sure he was joking. But yeah, kind of sacrificial control, sacrificial person. And it’s mainly [inaudible 00:24:29].

Dr Yvonne Couch:

You’re hoping he’s not sacrificing your experiments?

Dr Lauren Walker:

Yeah, well as I said, touch wood, I’ve not had a bad run in a while, so I think I’m doing okay.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Maybe he’s picking on someone else.

Dr Lauren Walker:

Maybe. Yeah. But other kind of things, people prefer different specific side of gel tanks and people prefer if they’ve got a particularly good single from a secondary antibody, they’ll always go back and use that vial. Obviously that might be to do with batch control and things like that, but it’s come from the same overall vial of antibodies, it’s just been allocated out. But I mean, I’ll probably do those things as well. I don’t think I heard anything too out there. I think I sound like the most weird person in my lab at the moment.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Talking to your microscopes quietly in the corner like a loon.

Dr Lauren Walker:

Yeah.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Tabitha, what about you?

Tabitha Broadbelt:

I haven’t been in my new lab for very long, so I haven’t had time to pick up many new superstitions. But one of the other postdocs has shared with me that apparently the right corner of one of the shakers gives the best immunohistochemistry results and I will be putting that into practise.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Excellent. I love that kind of stuff. I like it when it’s ingrained as well. So my version of this is qPCR tubes in the very first lab I worked, well not the very first lab I worked in, in my master’s in PhD lab, I turned up and they said they used to have mixed bags of the 0.2 mil tubes you do qPCR in, they used to have mixed colours. And somebody at some point said, “Don’t use the blue tubes.” And I was like, “Why?” And she went, “PCR doesn’t work if you use the blue tubes.”

And we’ve got this mixed bag and it’s like pink and green and yellow and blue and I’m sat there like a crazy person sorting the blue tubes out and I never used the blue tubes. And they ended up being my standard curve tubes, you just never ran them through the PCR machine. And I think I did this for about two years before I eventually said, “Why do we not use the blue tubes? This doesn’t seem to make any sense.” And somebody told me that they thought, no evidence, they thought that the walls of the blue tubes were ever slightly thicker and so PCR just didn’t work. I’m sure it’s just rubbish, but I still did it. And then I got to my new lab and I was like, “Do you know what? I’m just going to buy clear PCR tubes to save my sanity.” So I think you almost have to have that fresh start effect where you’re like, “I’m going to a new lab so I can stop being a crazy person.”

Good. So that’s our generic lab superstitions and some of the oddest things we’ve heard people say. So next up we’re going to think about the origins of superstitions and where these kind of things might come from. We’ve had a few hints of where we think these things might start, but I’m wondering on whether anyone has any specific ideas on where lab superstitions might start? Kam, do you want to jump in on this one?

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

I think that often, as I mentioned earlier, these things tend to, they’re basically lab folklore, aren’t they? And they’re passed on from the person that trained you to you and then you pass it on to the person that you then train. And if you know that a certain protocol works, you stick with that. And especially when you are quite inexperienced, and this doesn’t just mean if you’re early career, a PhD student, postdoc, it could be that you’re just moving to a new place. I think that when you’re inexperienced, you do hold onto these things and you do think that they’re critical. So this could be if you’re learning a new technique or a new method, for example. You hold onto these things thinking that they’re critical because you might not have necessarily the theoretical background to be able to challenge it. And I think that if you then do move to another lab and you are going to take that technique or that method with you, then you might suddenly realise that that critical step that you thought was critical is now no longer so critical.

They might have a method or a protocol similar that they’re using and you realise actually they don’t have that step in there and it’s working perfectly fine, but just in case sometimes you might think, oh, I might just have to keep doing it because I don’t want to risk taking it out. That’s technically me. I’m the one that will go to another lab and adopt the superstitions there or if I’m taking something that they don’t currently have and I’m taking my stuff, I’ll take those superstitions with me. And I mean sometimes I try to do what you do, Yvonne, and I try to question why I am doing that and is that necessary, but I think especially when you’re working with human tissue, you’re worried about changing anything in case it doesn’t work and then you’ve wasted that tissue and then you have to then make some more changes to try and get it working again. And I think you’ve got to get that balance of the risk and being brave enough to challenge.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

It’s true. And I think challenging things, like you say, is very expensive and time-consuming. And if you’re working with human tissues, definitely very precious and mice are very precious and you don’t want to waste what could be a decent immuno run or a terrible immuno run by accidentally not shaking your rack five times when it’s in the dab or staring dead ahead at the clock, which is what I do. I have to stand at a specific angle with my immuno rack and it always has to be a 15-second wash to start with irrespective of how quickly it developed last time. Yeah, there’s all kinds of that going on in the background. Does anybody else have any thoughts on how they think superstitions start? Soraya?

Dr Soraya Meftah:

Well, I was just going to follow on a bit from that because, again, we were talking about this just before recording the podcast and one of the guys in the lab was saying that actually antibodies bind within 15 minutes, or something like that. So why are we doing hours and hours of incubation? Same with the secondaries, they’re so optimised, so they’re very fast, they probably are bound within whatever, but we are doing 20 minutes, an hour, three days, whatever. And for immunohistochemistry as well in particular, we block with normal goat serum or donkey serum or whatever.

I think that’s kind of a carryover from before in a sense because they used to kind of need to do more wider blocks. Whereas in the lab, I’ve used donkey when I’m meant to use horse or something and everything’s been fine. And I mean, that’s more kind of scientifically, I think there’s things that can kind of have a bit of leeway. Obviously, things you have to do in a certain order that will make things work. But yeah, I just wanted to follow on because when you were speaking about it, I was like, “Oh yeah, that reminds me of this conversation that I just had.”

Dr Yvonne Couch:

No, it’s true, it’s true. And I think you don’t, yeah, there are protocols I definitely don’t mess with. And we had a couple of antibodies, one of which was very firmly, you could put it on for a couple of hours at room temperature and that your immuno would be great, but everything else was very much overnight at four degrees. And I absolutely have never questioned why there’s a difference between those two. Yeah, scientifically, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe I’m just not curious enough, maybe I’m a terrible scientist. So as is my wont for these kind of things, I did a bit of research on the backgrounds of superstition and I listened to a great podcast with Professor Richard Wiseman who describes superstitions, I thought this was such a great phrase, as one trial learning, which was great.

And Lauren and I have both already said that we were only told once about the magpie thing and we’ve been doing it for years and years and years. And it is one trial learning. We’ve never had any demonstration, I’ve never seen a magpie and not done that, but I’ve also, prior to that, never experienced any particular bad luck when I’ve seen a single magpie. So this doesn’t make any sense. And I had lucky socks for every single exam and I think about 20% of my exams went really badly and I was still wearing those socks. So actually, these kind of superstitions don’t actually make a lot of sense. So Ian Harrison, I think he’s aa Imperial in London, he said that when he does western blots, he has to grab exactly the right amount of tubes from the bag for the number of protein samples that he’s running otherwise his western blot won’t work properly. I did say that was a little bit too much like a lottery for me, that would distress me too much. Western blots distress me anyway, but that would really distress me.

But one of the things I did find out is that the people who research this sort of thing have said that basically superstitions and rituals, especially that you go through in the lab, they’re not necessarily OCD, so you’re not that level because OCD tends to be you get a lot of mental anguish when you do these things. So listening to specific music or racking your pipette tips up, that’s not OCD, but what they do say is that it can reduce anxiety. So by doing a specific thing, so for me, I do a lot of surgery, surgery is quite fiddly and lots of things can go wrong. So if I do specific things before I do the surgery and during the surgery, they will make me less anxious as I’m doing it. And I think that kind of stuff is really helpful. And they’ve also said that by putting in specific ritualistic steps, what can also happen is you can reduce your level of anxiety about whatever it is that you’re about to do. So with that in mind, does anyone think that their rituals and superstitions help them or do you think they hinder you in any way? Tabitha, Do you want to jump in on this one?

Tabitha Broadbelt:

You already mentioned obviously with the mice that they are really sensitive to odours and there’s already so many different things that can impact your outcome of your behaviour studies that introducing new smells, especially as there’ve been experiments that show that they do recognise experimenters and react differently to people handling them, that I think this probably helps remove one variable. Do I maybe take it too far and now think that a specific brand of shower gel makes my mouse recordings work better? Maybe, but it helps prepare me for my day of recording. So I guess that comes into what you’re saying about a ritual that helps prepare you.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yep, I think so. I’ve stuck notes up on doors before. So I was doing a set of behavioural experiments and someone else in the wing, and I don’t know who it was, just had serious amounts of man aftershave on, it wasn’t Links Africa, it wasn’t that bad. They smelt great, but I was like no, no, no, just a big passive-aggressive sign on the door saying, “Doing mouse experiments, could you please tone down whatever it is that you are wearing or go work somewhere else, go work somewhere else else for the next week or so, so my mice can breathe in peace.” Does anybody else think their superstitions are helpful or do you think they’re making you a bit crazy? Kam?

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

I think reflecting on a lot of what we’ve talked about in the examples that we’ve given, I feel like a lot of what we’ve talked about could actually be seen as good lab practise. For example, eliminating variables. And maybe this is just me trying to justify all of our little idiosyncrasies, but I think maybe with the ones that have no basis, we have to maybe reflect a little bit more on those ones. But I think like you said, Yvonne, they’re kind of designed to give us confidence in our work and maybe that then results in the outcomes that we’re hoping for in our experiments. But I do think that potentially they could hinder us if in some way makes us restrictive to change or reluctant to change, reluctant to new ideas and to changing things. So for example, being reluctant to change part of a protocol which could potentially give you better results, potentially get rid of some of that background [inaudible 00:36:40] that’s plaguing you. And so I think there are benefits and cons to having these little superstitions and rituals.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yes, I completely agree. And I think if we all start with a basis of I’ve come into this lab, these are all the loopy things that they do, I will do the loopy things that they do for a while and then I will change one thing, I think that’s what is important to do as scientists change one thing at a time. And if I take the one loopy thing out, it still works, great. It’s all about scientific method and reproducibility.

Well, what I think we’ve established here is that we’re all a bit loopy. And if that’s made you feel a little bit better about the number of times you checked the Minus80 door after you’ve closed it and the fact that you have to sing to yourselves, then so much the better. So today, you’ve been listening to the Dementia Researcher podcast. Please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. For now, I’ve been Dr. Yvonne Couch and it’s goodbye for me. And goodbye from my wonderful guests, Lauren, Kam, Soraya and Tabitha.

Dr Lauren Walker:

Bye.

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

Bye.

Dr Soraya Meftah:

Bye.

Tabitha Broadbelt:

Bye.

Voice Over:

The Dementia Researcher podcast was brought to you by University College London with generous funding from the UK National Institute for Health Research, Alzheimer’s Research UK, Alzheimer’s Society, Alzheimer’s Association and Race Against Dementia. Please subscribe, leave us a review and register on our website for full access to all our great resources, dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk.

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