As I wrote in a recent post (been a while) we were charging toward a milestone in the development of the product I have been wedded too since I started this job. Now we have reached an passed that important point and we have a little (very little, unfortunately) breathing space while Manufacturing finishes their shake-down of the process. Once they are good to go they will start making product and we will move on to our next assignment.

However, during this time I have an opportunity to play around with some ideas I have been hatching these last many months. Finally some time to do ye olde fashioned research (enough of the development part for now). It has been during this “free-time” that I have been forced to remember something from my graduate student days: The law of first time success – loosely stated it is “hope that your experiment doesn’t work great the first time because it will be nearly impossible to repeat it without a lot of time and effort that is completely disproportional to the initial try”. (note: this contains the Friday-Monday Corollary: never try a new experiment on a Friday because if it works then you better keep working on it through the weekend or it won’t work on Monday).

Perhaps I am a bit superstitious (I have been reading SuperSense and highly recommend it) but I find that when I have initial success beyond what I hope, it is difficult to reconstruct that sucess. I don’t know if it has something to do with the freshness of the reagents, the freshness of thought and process or just dumb luck but I do know that it is frustrating as all get out. Oh, well back to the bench – please cross-your-fingers for me and wish me luck.

Cheers,