Today in the lab, after having been given an extra five days to culture and grow, there has still been no phage to cultivate: our second try did not go as we hoped. Also, that streak test that had the interesting anti-bacterial property to it turned out to be relatively insignificant to the class’s goal, so I threw it out along with the rest of the samples: it was a cool, unique finding though! So, now, we are going for it a third time. I’m starting to wonder what about our procedure is going wrong. I have the terrifying suspicion that it is something simple that we are overlooking. Maybe we shouldn’t obey that “hypothesis” about how CaCl_2 increases phage infect-ability as if it were a law. Whatever the issue may be, others are sharing the issue: no Texas schools have cultivated any phage.

I am learning to redefine what failure is and what the real goal of this project is. I need to remember that I am doing this to research and learn, not just to find phages. Whatever it is, I am loving this learning process. However, we will need to start progressing sometime soon or we will have to revert to using the host bacterium of years past: I hope that doesn’t have to be the case