Confirmed: I'm a BAD scientist

After 50mins of close scrutiny at the gel.... I noticed 2 things about it.

1. There's leakage (yes AGAIN! wan to yank the whole set apart and thrash it on the floor already....)
2. The gel has yet to polymerise!!!! 50mins!!! something is thoroughly WRONG!

*DEEP SIGH*

Pluck up some courage, read the thousands of protocols again and realised that, I'm suppose to TOP UP the volume to about 10mL and not simply ADD 6.5mL of water to it (cos in the last few preparations, I did noticed that it was alot more diluted than it was supposed to be).

So we re-weigh the chemicals and add all the reagents in, this time, add only a tiny weeny bit of water first, to dissolve everything together. So happily, to help it dissolve better, I smart-aleck put it on a heat block to increase the 'speed' of dissolving with higher temperature. After about 10mins, both me and my lab mate found ourselves staring into a beaker of crystals!!!!! The whole beaker of gel wasnt suppose to solidify nor crystallise!! It was just suppose to be in liquid state till we add in another two catalyst to make it polymerised....

*super strange*

So we had to discard the whole beaker of crystals again and re-start the weighing, adding, dissolving process again. This time without any heat, no heating, no heating.

after 5mins of stirring, most of the chemicals hasnt dissolved.

I'm wondering if there's a gel God out there whom we should seek permission to cast the gel and to pray for smooth smooth set up of the gel.....

yes, for those who are wondering, we started out at 9am this morning, attempting to cast one small tiny mini gel... now its almost 3, we're still fighting with the chemicals and reagents to cast a perfect gel.... think i'll go and frame this gel up if it works!