I am still waiting for all this PhD stuff to sink in. I bought myself a dorky present to celebrate my newfound doctor-hood and am madly and passionately in love with it. I had many dinners with friends to celebrate over many bottles of wine. I have almost caught up on a massive sleep deficit and am hoping to get a massage soon to get rid of the ginormous knots in my back that have been there for nigh on seven years.

Dorky present to my dorky self.

I am now going through my dissertation and making the corrections that my examination committee suggested, taking stock of everything that has gone on the last couple of months, and retroactively processing everything that I filed away for later. You know what that is code for? I am now reconsidering every answer I gave during my defense and, in a neurotic frenzy, thinking of how I should have answered differently, what I should have interpreted differently, or presented differently. I am really excited for all this anxiety to leave me already.

I think part of my anxiety and general neuroticism is due to the insecurity I felt in giving some of my answers, not only because of my own self-doubt, but because of frequently conflicting information I pulled out of my literature searches. For example, I was trying to find out if NF-κB can be activated by heat shock. You know what the answer is? Depends on who you ask. Depends on the system used. Depends on the interpretation of the results.

Science is always held up to be as an absolute by society (as evidenced by the evening news), as something that is beyond question and solid as a rock. People who actually do science, however, have a much different view of it. It is fluid, ever-changing, and up for constant debate. I guess half the point of a PhD is learning the skills to wade through the ocean of literature and pick the worthwhile apart from the flawed. Even that is only part of the battle. Many effects/phenotypes are cell type-specific and experimental condition-specific. It is quite possible, and even likely, that two groups testing the same question in two different ways come up with two different answers, both valid within the context of the experimental system.

So what is to be done then? What conclusions can be made? If you are me, in the middle of writing a dissertation and trying to avoid a stress-induced coronary, you pick the paper that says what you need it to say and move on. I hope that something that is relatively, if not absolutely true is good enough.