THE MORAL OF THE STORY

Ok well I have had a request to explain why I am the worst / dumbest scientist in France... so here goes. I had been trying to conduct a (relatively) simple experiment that I needed to do in order to proceed with my project. I had done this protocol multiple times in Australia without any problems. But do you think I could get it to work in France? Of course not.

So after about 3 weeks of repeating the experiment, consulting half the lab (and admitting how crap I was at science in the process), Guy (my supervisor) asks me what type of water was I using? "The special, sterilised, double filtered milliQ water of course" I replied. "The water with H2O Q written on the label".

Apparently it turns out that the Q does not stand for milliQ water (which is double distilled water - nice and clean for experiments), but that the Q was actually the Greek symbol phi (??? don't worry I had never heard of it either), and that phi (only in France) means physiological water..... which basically means it has salt in it. Of course, salt is the exact thing that inhibits the experiment I was trying to do!

So now there are two morals of this story
1. The famous Pasteur Institute does not have double filtered distilled, nice and clean water on hand.
2. Know your Greek alphabet!

P.S. My experiment worked now I am using just plain old H2O