Resourcefulness
Sometimes, doing good science means making your own tools. Usually that’s when you’re planning to do something that nobody has thought of before. But in Sidney Kuo’s case, it was just that he couldn’t find an appropriate vacuum filtering setup.
“I had to empty and clean the only vacuum filtration flask we had, which contained probably the nastiest, worst smelling compounds in this entire lab, file a hole through a rubber stopper large enough for the funnel, which took at least an hour, and cut my own filter paper to fit the funnel.”