"THAT" moment

I have read this somewhere but don't really remember where. That the greatest motivation for a scientist and the reward they work for is the experience of that one night when he (or she) alone knows a particular secret hidden in the nature's treasure trove before they reveal it to the rest of the world next morning. It is to experience that feeling of discovery that we slog day and night. I have heard people talk of it in research pep talks. I've wanted to experience it and have been waiting for it ever since I started doing research. Through years of being a grad student and a postdoc; and I started my PhD in 2004. I call it the eureka moment. That moment when you see something in your experiments that you hadn't expected when you started. A pleasant surprise. I think that moment for me has come now. 

I am sure you've noticed that I said "think". You see, the way academic research works these days, you can't just jump out of your bathtub and start celebrating butt-naked. And it's never a moment. There is a long gestation period before you can be sure that you have got something good with you. A period when you have to repeat the experiment a number of times, so the observation is reproducible. You also have to think if you have got all the controls right and haven't missed anything. You have to do a number of supporting experiments that can explain the unexpected. Your work then has to be reviewed and approved by your "peers", who you hope don't have a conflict of interest in approving your observation. After all this, you have to be approved by a copy editor somewhere who wants to make sure that you have got your fonts right, the spacing right, the size of images right, their color right, the spellings and grammar right, etc., etc., etc. Only then will your work be published for consumption by the tax paying public that has funded the entire process. By then you would have lost all the enthusiasm to open the cork and it will be time to be back at the bench so you can continue with your efforts to save the humanity (from itself?). And wait for the next eureka moment.