Life of a Lab Rat

I read

Organ size is limited by the number of embryonic progenitor cells in the pancreas but not [. . .]

in my RSS aggregator and am desperately, desperately trying to avoid the obvious joke question. Because that would be crass and juvenile and I am a mature, sensible and respectable (if not actually very well respected) scientist.

Ahem. Just who do I think I'm fooling?

dee why, n
De letter preceding de zed.

The climate and terrain here are completely wrong for haggis (either wild or farmed). So what is the local equivalent?

I can't see myself Addressing a Kanga banger, to be honest. Doesn't quite work.

Bit of a furore.

Unfortunately it's not in real life, but in the so-called 'blogosphere'. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that while I am not opposed to neologisms in general, the class of them that starts with 'blog-' is monstrously barbarous and should be avoided whenever possible. Sometimes, sickeningly, this is not possible. I apologize to my more discerning readers, both of you.

I have been wondering, myself, about the purpose of this weblog and sciencey weblogs in general. I am not totally sure on why I wanted to do this, except that 'it seemed a good idea at the time'. I know I had some noble notion that I could attempt to make science and the scientific way of thinking accessible to Bruce and Sheila Public, and some completely selfish motives that were to do with channelling my creative instincts. But I never thought that it was just about me, by me and for me — an exercise in self-gratification.

tuggeranong, pl n
Aboriginal name for spiced snack, often referred to as 'Bombay' or 'Bhuja' mix [poss. from Bandjalang, lit. toenail clippings].

The most important reagent in our trade is water. Most of our reagents are made — and most of our experiments are carried out — in a huge concentration of water. Pure water is 55.5 moles per litre. That's a lot. And if the water that you use for your reagents and experiments is not as pure as it could be, then you could have a problem.

Incidentally, this is why lager in the UK is so crap. When you have a product that is 95% water — because Stella and Grolsch and Heineken and XXXX (because Australians can't spell 'beer', yes I know that one) and the rest of that watery yellow wee, in the UK are not actually imported but brewed under licence — and that water, as safe as it is, tastes dodgy, then you have crap beer. Imported Pilsner Urquell is fine, and locally-brewed ales such as Owd Rodger or Theakston's get around the problem by (a) being brewed where the water is good and (b) having flavour.

Scene just now in the lab: Your humble correspondent setting up an RT-PCR experiment. The conversation went something like this,

Black Queen: Are you going to use the new block ?

BK: No. I have a programme on the Eppendorf.

BQ: But it's intuitive!

BK: You mean you can give your samples to a grad student and let them get on with it?

BQ: <That Look>

There was a bit of a kerfuffle in the Cage last year when someone complained of vast quantities of uncollected mail in the 'S' through 'U' pigeonhole. Some of the other lettered boxes were similarly overflowing, and I have sympathy with anyone who has to search through the same 38 pieces of mail to find the promised form/brochure/whatever that isn't there.

Various solutions were proposed, but were met with a howl of protest and threats of legal action against anyone who dared interfere with The Post (Pratchettian moment there, sorry). It was interesting to note that the loudest emails (if emails can have a property 'volume' then these had it) — sent to the entire department, naturally — were from the worst offenders.

With the New Year, there is a subtly different problem. The pigeonholes are once again straining under the weight of payslips and sequencing invoices. And I do not recognize the names. Do new Cage inmates not get shown where mail is delivered? Do they not go for tea or lunch? Do they even care about dead tree communication? If anyone has an entertaining and legal solution to this annoyance, please feel free to let me know.

One good thing about coming back to Australia, at least this time, is that once again bananas are nearly as affordable as they are in New Zealand.

What with Christmas, annual leave and the whole pneumonia/pleurisy thing (about which I will write some more this week) it has been six weeks since I did any productive work in the lab. I did set foot in there a month ago, and showed the boss one of my x-rays, but then I went round to the Royal Prince Albert and next thing I knew I was flat on my back with a whizzy thing whizzing around me, some bugger sticking a tube in my chest and on enough antibiotics to sterilize the whole damn' hospital. If only it was that quick, actually — again, more on that later.

So tomorrow, it's back to work. And I have to remember what the hell it was I was doing all that time ago, and decide whether I should go to Lorne this year as planned or spend the extra week working. I certainly won't have time to do the experiments that were to form the basis of my poster.

A while ago a friend of mine and myself were debating whether a certain news item from Fox News had any truth in it. The story was quite incredible, and given that both of us have seen stories reported in the media and known the truth behind those stories, we were quite cynical about its veracity. We hoped that our cynicism was well-founded, because if the story was true it was truly terrible.

And my friend, who works in local government, wrote back to me, something that I'd like to share this New Year's Day, in the hope that maybe you will begin to trust the media less readily, that maybe one of you will question what you hear, be less accepting of what the government and the news agencies tell us, be more independently-minded.