The Thrill of Discovery

I made a discovery last week. Tuesday, to be exact. After months of cloning, I finally had a genetic construct to disrupt the protein I am studying, and I transfected it into bacteria, and several days and manipulations later, the result was there and plain to see: my protein does indeed bind this regulator, and when disrupted in those 7 amino acids I changed, badabing, the binding is now gone! I almost cried when I developed the film and saw the result. A film so pretty and perfect it's publication ready. I can't give you specifics, don't want to get scooped somehow.
Well, so, I then proceeded to mess up every routine thing for the rest of the day, since I kept thinking about the next experiments I need to run, and how to structure the rest of my 109 days to make them happen, let alone a draft...
Such was my excitement! It was in fact such a thrill that I instantly understood how people get addicted to it enough to want to plow into a full-on scientific career. Whoa! (Sidebar sadness: never had this experience in grad school).
At any rate, it's a great feeling that, at the end of some very ardous cloning in which I got stuck in several ruts, it all worked out. Holy cow. Such is the wonder of being in a really great lab, in which your work is set up for success, in which good ideas are developed all the time and stashed away until some grad student/postdoc wants to come and try, I can't say enough about how this is what academic life should be like. This year will have reconciled me to the fact that there are great places to be found in academia. They're just now as common as one might think.