Lab notebook

A teacher of mine once elegantly described what a lab notebook "should do." It should allow one to pick it up an repeat the experiments done by the notebook's writer and obtain similar, if not the exact same, result.  I must say some people have either never heard this explanation or choose to completely ignore it.

Case and point, about half of my last week has been spent trying to get a good yield of plasmid from a agarose gel using a QIAGEN gel extraction kit. I have been following the kit protocol but have only been getting yields of around 12% whereas they quote 70-90% recovery. So after trying the extraction a couple times I asked my PI if there was anything not in the kit's manual that would increase my yield, she gave me another lab member's notebook (no longer working in the lab) to try and find what they had done to get good yields. Upon skimming through and finding a similar gel extraction I observe that their yields are ~50%, so I decide to look for the protocol they used. After reading the entire notebook I realize that the only "protocol" they have is "gel extraction was done, here are the nanodrop readings". I am utterly amazed how little detail this person put in their lab notebook. So I now have to try a number of different tricks I found on the internet to try and boost my yield while wasting reagents, wasting my time, when clearly this person optimized the protocol! Their ignorance in not writing it down has meant all the time THEY spent optimizing it is effectively wasted! What is more annoying is that this isn't the only example, there are numerous places where more detailed is need yet to accurate replicate their experiments!

This is PSA!! Please keep detailed lab notebooks! It not only benefits you, but the entire scientific community!!