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The email came from a graduate student in Utrecht that Ravi had never heard of, and it was polite, and it was the worst email of his career. "We have been attempting to reproduce the effect reported in Figure 3 of your 2023 paper. We have followed the protocol as described and have not been able to observe it across four independent replicates. We wondered whether there might be a step not captured in the methods section." He read it three times. Then he got up and closed the office door, which he never did, and sat back down and read it a fourth. Figure 3 was the paper. Everything else was scaffolding. Figure 3 was the one that got the talk at the conference, the one on the poster, the one his PI had put on the department website. It showed a clean, beautiful effect: treat the cells this way, and this protein moves from here to there, every time, six replicates, tiny error bars. He'd spent a year on those six replicates. He remembered the afternoon he'd first seen it, the way he'd gone very still at the microscope and then walked to the PI's office without knocking. Now someone in Utrecht couldn't see it. He went to the lab notebook. Not the electronic one, the physical one, the black hardback with the numbered pages that his first supervisor had made him keep and that he still kept out of something like superstition. Page 212. The first replicate. It was all there. Cell line, passage number, the treatment, the timing. His handwriting from three years ago, faster than it was now. And then, in the margin, in pencil, a note he'd forgotten writing: "serum lot changed this week, new bottle, check". He sat with that for a long time. He'd never checked. Or he had, in the sense of noting it, and then the effect had been so clean and so exciting and everyone had been so pleased, and the check had become one of those things you'll get to. Six replicates, all from the same new bottle of serum. The paper said "10% foetal bovine serum". It did not say which bottle. Why would it.

He pulled the old freezer logs. The bottle was gone, used up in 2023. The lot number was in the log. He looked it up. The supplier had discontinued it. At four o'clock he went to see his PI. She listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which was unusual for her. When he'd finished she said, "What do you want to do?" "I want to tell them. Utrecht. And I want to try to get some of that lot, or something close, and re-run it, and if it only works with that serum then that's the finding, that's the real finding, and it's a smaller one." "It's a much smaller one." "Yes." "And if it doesn't work with anything?" "Then we write to the journal." She looked at him for a while. He'd been in her lab for four years and he had never quite been able to read her. "Okay," she said. "Do that. Copy me on the email to Utrecht. And Ravi." She tapped the desk. "You wrote the note. In pencil. Three years ago. Most people wouldn't have." "Most people would have checked." "Most people would have thrown the notebook out." He wrote to Utrecht that evening. He told them about the serum. He told them he didn't know. He offered to share everything, the raw images, the logs, whatever they wanted. The student wrote back within the hour and said thank you, that they'd try three different lots, that they'd let him know. He put the notebook back on the shelf, page 212 marked with a slip of paper. He didn't sleep especially well. In the morning he went in early and started pulling serum lots from the catalogue, one by one, into a spreadsheet, the way he should have done three years ago, and it was boring, and it was the job.