After last week's little rant about the portrayal of science in the meeja, I thought it might be interesting to show you a couple of photographs.
This 
is the view from the lab door.
That's the boss's office at the end, with a white board outside that the rats use to leave rude messages to each other. The 'island' in the middle seats four of us, with communal space (hah!) in the middle for a couple of microfuges (um, small centrifuges, that take little 1.5 millilitre tubes - the eppendorfs I was wibbling about) and bunsen burners, and a heating block. Rats use the de-militarized zone there to pour agar plates, unless one of the four denizens has encroached. Then it's war.
Another four rats inhabit this room; two along each of the walls. So there's a fair amount of room each, some might say a lot of room for an academic lab. The shelves in the central island, as the shelves along the walls, are taken up with personal stock solutions and small plasticware. Under the benches you'll find personal drawers, stocks of larger plasticware and hopefully clean glassware. That's a glassware sink you can see, with a deionized water tap. The blue shelves immediately left constitute a chemical store, and there's a refrigerator and freezer next to the hand-washing sink on the right, behind the door (where you can't see them). Further to the right, along the wall, are our two thermal cyclers (or 'PCR machines').
This view
is from the thermal cyclers' end of the right-hand wall, looking at the central island and my bench. There are many benches like it, but this one is mine. When I took this photograph that white, polystyrene box on the very left of my bench contained dry ice, the bored scientist's best friend. Our group occupies two and a half rooms like this one, and any amount of office space spread around the building.
One of our two thermal cyclers:
. It's essentially a metal block that heats up and cools down (see 'Peltier') under control of a simple programmer. This is generally considered a better use of resources than three water baths and a grad student.
Open the lid of the Mastercycler and this is what you get.
My experiment had been running overnight. Not much to see, but those coloured tubes are bad and the 'natural' ones are good.
And not a coloured spotlight in sight.
Comments
Wow. What a shit heap! I was always fastidiously tidy in the lab and this has carried over into how I cook in my kitchen now that I don't have a lab to play in. It drives the wife nuts as I have to clean the place and then chop everything into identical little white bowls befoire I start. It's borderline OCD, I'm sure.
On your specific point, I agree that the scientist's environment is mis-portrayed. However, as a neat freak and one who is 'in to' the aesthetic, rather than thinking "We never have purple lights in the lab", I instead used to ask "where can I get some of those neato purple lights, and do they do them in red too?" I suppose it's that sort of focus on the task in hand that led to my four papers versus your own many-fold more.
Nige.
Posted by: Nige | July 23, 2006 03:34 AM