The Hidden Cost of Makeshift Lab Documentation
It’s 3 PM on Thursday, and you have group meeting in an hour.
Your PI just asked you to present last month’s Western blot results—the one where you finally got clean bands. You know you documented it. You remember typing it up. But which file?
You open your “Lab_Data” Dropbox folder. Inside: 47 Word documents with names like “Western_blot_June.docx,” “WB_protocol_v2.docx,” “Results_antibody_test_FINAL.docx.” You start clicking. Was it early March or late February? You check the file dates. March 3rd… March 10th… wait, you modified that one last week, but the data is from February. Open another. Not this one. Try another.
Fifteen minutes later, you find it. The protocol is in one document, your observations are in another, and the gel image? That’s somewhere in your “Images” folder. You’re pretty sure.
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