Disclaimer: The title of this entry is not representative of how pleasant baking and biomedical research are. Rather, it is a poor pun referencing “Breaking Bad” made by the author solely for the sake of the author’s amusement.

Many times before has science been likened to cooking, and protocols to recipes. I personally find biological research procedures to be much more like baking. Firstly, you can’t exactly sautée cells without potentially killing them. If you even attempt to “fry” your nucleic acid samples, consider all your proteins and DNA strands denatured. And if you find your cell cultures to be a perfect golden brown, there are way too many cells clumped together in that tiny space, and they need to be separated between new plates. Also, never steam any of your reagents, as they become utterly useless if not kept on ice.

So why would baking be a better analogy for biotechnological practices? Simple. You put stuff into a bowl (collection tube), mix your ingredients (reagents) all together by whisk (centrifuge machine) and wait for it to bake in the oven (incubator) for a long while. Afterward, your valiant efforts reward you with delicious cake — or rather, satisfactory (sometimes not) results for your research project.

Like baking, laboratory work is a hit or miss. One day you may have made the most heavenly soufflé with the perfect fluffiness to it. In lab, that day would be when your quantitative results show successful amplification of your complementary DNA samples. Another day, you may find that you didn’t add enough yeast to your cupcakes, and they droop down so sadly like the frown on your face upon seeing them. In lab, that day is when you don’t add enough yeast to your bacterial growth media, and you produce very few bacterial cells that possess your engineered gene of interest.

There is a secret to both baking and scientific research, however, that make a recipe become the magnum opus of the baker and the protocol the publication-worthy study of the scientist: improvisation. What does one do when the results aren’t coming out quite right? Add a little more of so-and-so to balance out whatever is the cause of a not-so-pleasant result. Try another method. Spoons were made for tasting, so why not try a smidge of that cookie dough to determine what is still missing?

But for the record, as similar as biomedical research is to baking, I would advise against eating anything in the lab given some poisonous, carcinogenic reagents, bacteria, and viruses you’ll likely be working with.