Issue 5 · Winter 2021

Sciences and Arts

From Laboratory to Museum

Displaying Scientific Discovery with a Lab Notebook

Elizabeth Molacek  Aaron Fond 

A key component of any research process is documentation and record-keeping, so that results and conclusions can be shared as well as verified. In the sciences, this record takes the form of the lab notebook—traditionally a physical notebook with handwritten notes that document the scientific process and resulting knowledge produced by the entire lab. Lab notebooks document a process and thus rarely provide a final conclusion, or especially the sought after ‘aha’ moment that occupies public imagination.

The reality is that the day-to-day of research is usually boring, iterative, and messy, and a lab notebook is a space to house this process. Despite their essential role in the research process, lab notebooks rarely make it to the headlines. During the COVID pandemic, with the demand for fast, new knowledge and cures, the scientific research process has been atypically thrust into the 24-hour news-cycle. This intense focus on research has amplified the huge divide between what we, the public, want—objective proof and conclusionsand the fuzzy, gray reality of research, which must be interpreted, re-investigated, debated, and confirmed until an overwhelming abundance of evidence leads to a consensus. This ambiguous reality is expressed in a recent article about a faux disease model for a hypothetical epidemic, cheekily dubbed Simulitis, giving readers the chance to “model some scenarios—and see what epidemiologists are up against as they race to understand a new contagion.”

To read the full article, please click here to download the PDF file.

This article appears in Athenaeum Review Issue 5 (Winter 2021), pp. 131-140. Download a PDF copy.