Six days into my first real taste of scientific academia, I found myself facing stark white light and three sterile fume hoods at 9:15 on a Saturday morning. I had been the willing recipient of my own batch of stem cells, which I was charged with cultivating, looking after and eventually experimenting upon to hopefully provide data of some use to my PhD supervisor. Excited to be flying solo already, I gave my cells the five-star treatment.

Stem cells are so demanding to grow that they often require feeding every day, meaning that I had no choice but to come in on my supposed weekend to give them their meal (which consisted of whatever I could find in the -80C freezer before frostbite caught up with me). So initially I was thoroughly disillusioned with the glamorous cutting-edge-of-science academic lifestyle that people imagine when you say: “I work in a stem cell lab”. To me, it seemed like I had unsuspectingly taken on thousands of pets.

Everything changed over the course of the next week. Working closely with my supervisor, a ten-hour experiment produced an actual result. The lab members were sceptical – no one believed it until we could show them every control experiment under the sun. People don’t just get results in this line of work, especially not the summer student who has no clue what he’s doing. But, lo and behold, a protocol based on ‘estimated’ dilutions and getting bored before the timer went off produced a near-perfect result – a testament to the experience of my supervisor.

Thus the majority of my planned placement was completed in the first 10 days. As I fed my cells yet again, I realised something had changed. It was no longer a chore to feed them, or move them into a bigger flask to give them room to grow. I wanted to put batches in the freezer, so that if disaster struck I wouldn’t lose them. The result of our experiment had both given me a taste of the success that an academic feels when they finally look down the microscope and see that they were right all along, and earned me the respect of my older, more experienced colleagues. And I have come to realise that I had attributed some of that success to the cells themselves; that they had earned the time and trouble it took me to look after them.

If only the story ended there. Real life hit like a hammer in the second half of my placement, when a year’s worth of cloning experiments disintegrated in front of my supervisor’s eyes, nearly forcing us to resort to the emergency gin tucked away in the drawer. Cloning experiments that were going beautifully suddenly collapsed and we were forced to begin again from scratch. I finally felt the disappointment that comes from unexplained failure, and found true respect for the resilience of your Average Joe PhD; after a week, month or year of two-steps-forward-one-step-back, they still come into the lab with the idea that just maybe, today will be the day for a breakthrough. Fortunately a week of further work resulted in the development of a protocol that my lab will use to quantify levels of particular proteins in stem cell experiments, which had previously been impossible to reliably achieve.

My first ever cells were responsible for my fundamental change of opinion on academic life. It isn’t as glamorous as it sounds: stem cells may not be growing people new kidneys in time for Christmas this year. But I realised that scientists don’t spend weekends in the lab and nights with a pad of paper by their bed because they have to. We do it because the cells become yours, and you care about them. Your results become your badge of honour that you show off with pride, and most importantly, you absolutely, definitely will find the answer to that one, burning question - and you’re damn well going to do it before anyone else.