I see nothing. Absolutely nothing.

I look down at this petri dish in front of me and what do I see? A whole lot of nothing.

   
The petri dish was a component of an experiment completed by my fellow AP Biology Classmates and I on Wednesday, Jan. 11.

It had nothing in it at first, then E-coli, and we were attempting to make the said bacteria glow. Glow! It’s genetic engineering at its finest.

I could only dream of the possibilities this would open up for research, but what did I see at the end? That same nothing.
   
Supposedly, the pGlo plasmid (stuff that makes it glow) that we added was supposed to stop the antibiotic ampicillin (stuff that will kill the E-coli) from doing its job and killing our precious sample. The sugar arabanose would have activated the pGlo in the bacteria and made only one sample glow.

Did I see that glow? No I did not.
   
The results were supposed to be simple: A control with a lawn of bacteria (that is a lot - uninhibited growth), a sample with the ampicillin that was supposed to not have bacteria at all, and two plates with the glowing plasmid; though, only one had the activator arabinose.

So, after all the biological technical jargon, one was supposed to glow. That did not happen.
   
I took a look around the room at the other eleven groups expecting to see jubilation at a successful result, but I didn’t see even that.

All classmates except three received the same result I had gotten - Nothing.

Science is about achieving nothing so that the drive to find something is stronger when the next experiment begins.

Science needs nothing to exist so that one day we can find the something to refute that nothing.

So that nothing I got earlier becomes a good thing. I can say “My result was nothing, and I am proud of it!”