research and expectations

A conversation with my co-worker F about research life made me think about expectations. We were preparing our next batch of samples, and we chatted about his decision to attend graduate school (after a short career of rock and roll) and mine not to.

Structure of Hemoglobin Picture

Since I'd heard that first year of graduate school is often the hardest, I asked F how his year was going. "Great", he said, noting that something that keeps him going is high morale. "Do you know who Max Perutz is?" Max Perutz was an organic chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962 for his work on hemoglobin. If you've taken Biochemistry, you know how tricky (and amazing) this globular protein is. It has four subunits with Fe in the center heme group, and changes its structure when oxygen binds to facilitates the binding of the next oxygen.


Max Perutz spent years trying to determine the structure of this elusive protein. Because hemoglobin has a different structure when oxygen is bound to it, he would crystallize the protein in an anaerobic chamber (for X-ray crystallography) and oxygen would get in, alter its structure. "But", continued F, "instead of thinking he'd fail again, every day he came in thinking today would be the day he'd crystallize hemoglobin' ". And that he did.


This reminded me of another story from my Seattle friend when he was trying to crystallize a protein. Didn't work, kept going at it with tweaked conditions: pH, different substrates, everything and anything for months. I prodded on, "and?", waiting a grand finale of his finally crystallizing that bad boy. "And they canceled the project, and I stopped working in the lab". Hmm.

Pick your attitude. Do you: "Hope for the best" OR "Prepare for the worst."? 
(because can you really do both full-heartedly?)

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed. -Alexander Pope, 1688–1744

OR

This 2009 study by Golub, Gilbert and Wilson suggests that having low expectations may make you more unhappy than having high expectations, mostly because you make yourself unhappy during the waiting period before you know the actual outcome. If you harbor positive expectations, you can "savor" your daydreams and achievements before you find out the real result, compared to feeling "dread" if you expected the opposite.

To summarize, people have low expectations because:
1) If the outcome is bad, they don't want to be disappointed.
2) If the outcome is good, they want to be pleasantly surprised.


But this study found that the subjects felt the same joy or disappointment regardless of their expectations, implying their expectations only affected their happiness during the waiting period.