In the Fall of 2018, as a part of a Writing in Biology class at UMass Amherst, I conducted a project where I created a scientific figure, wrote the methods for creating said figure and passed the methods along for somebody else to replicate. The purpose of this was to show how much detail plays a factor when writing a methods section. The methods should be clear and easy to follow, like a recipe of sorts. Science, in and of itself, is about imperfections and this project highlights that. Blindly assembling a scientific figure using someone else's methods is a daunting task and is sure to generate interesting results similar to those put forth later in this paper. After receiving the replicate figure, it was evident that the differences between the two figures were due to a combination of human error and natural differences. Inferences were then drawn from the differences and a list of potential factors was generated as a means of explanation.
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