** Part III of Behind the Bench: A series about researchers and their rituals, by Anestis Tsakiridis **
The framework of a scientific story, which comprises a researcher’s vehicle to communicate personally-derived snippets of knowledge to colleagues, funders and the public, relies heavily on the choreographed assembly of data or “Results”. These are the building blocks of PhD theses, research articles, talks and grant proposals and thus hold an almost divine status in the minds and hearts of scientists. A “Result” can be anything: a number, a graph, an image, a statistical variation in a sea of data. It is the distillation of the empirical component of a researcher’s job, the visible product of manual work that, in the case of stem cell science, normally takes place inside laboratories and tissue culture hoods. Results are born out of questions and curiosity, both critical factors contributing to the design of a series of experiments aiming to shed light on the different facets of a hypothesis.