There is a passage from Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” that describes the enthusiasm of young interns working for the Municipal Bureau of Research:

The students were filled with an espirit so strong that it seemed sometimes as if it must surely waft out the windows of 261 Broadway and melt some of the soot from the blackened granite of the Tweed Courthouse below. They believed in the importance of what they were doing; a half-century later, rheumy eyes would light up and smiles would curl corners of wrinkled lips as they talked about it, and they talked in terms old soldiers reserve for old battles. “How would I sum up what we were doing?” one would say. “We were fighting to make democracy work, that’s what we were doing!”

– The Power Broker, p. 63.

This passage makes me want to replicate the same spirit in the lab. “How would I sum up what we were doing? We were fighting to save old buildings and the planet itself!”