Life of a Lab Rat

And the reviewer says,

This is a well written and comprehensive article.  I have only a  few minor suggestions/corrections.

So that's nice.

I found this scrap of paper on the floor of the cell culture room just after Easter:

A shopping list, in ink, on scrap paper from someone's thesis draft. Strangely touching.

The picture is not the best quality, but I liked the scene:

My new iMac came with a mail-in rebate for an iPod mini. Not being one for personal music systems I thought I might use it for playing music through the car stereo, but I've found that it is really useful for those long, lonely and above all noisy hours in the cell culture lab.

I have subsequently discovered that whereas Stairway to Heaven from the IV album is not quite long enough to passage a single flask (aspirate, rinse, aspirate, trypsinize, quench, spin, resuspend, seed), the live version on the BBC Session Tapes is.

So now you know.

C, my esteemed office-mate (on paper he also shares a lab with me, but he's always either in the office or hiding under the NMR machine), is applying for a fellowship, and after tarting up his CV now requires a reference from the Head. This is somewhat problematic for C because the Head has told him to write his own reference, and return it for signing. C asked for my opinion on this strategy and I'm afraid I was not wholly complimentary.

I appreciate that Heads are very busy people and can not physically know all the people in a Department well enough to write a reference. So what is wrong with asking the referenced's boss? This is an unfair burden on C and somewhat defeats the object of the exercise. In an effort to restore harmony to our office I offered to write the reference. Here is what I came up with:

The Black Queen thinks I'm mean for not letting my young apprentice filch her phosphate buffer, but forcing him to make up his own.

I told her that it's a valuable skill. What do y'all think? Am I a harsh task master or one who is rightly concerned that he learns the ways of the craft?

Someone in one of the labs across the corridor had a real "If you're a muppet and you know it do something really dumb" moment yesterday.

There is a large lab on the other side, shared by two groups. Offices flank the lab at opposite ends, and my office is at the proximal end, buffered from the lab space of Group 'G' by a student cube farm. Then there is Group 'K' lab space, and Group 'K' offices. Even though C and myself are in Group 'M', we have office space in 'G', so we get to see all sorts of interesting stuff. And they have a really cool duplex colour laser printer, which is nice.

Anyway, most of Group 'G' is away at a conference, and a first year grad student was all that was to man the barricades yesterday afternoon. So it was not that surprising that he should ask me if I knew anything about the power being off in his lab.

I wondered what the beeping was. All the UPSes and freezers were alarmed, although the ceiling lights and some of the other freezers were still on. I suggested he get hold of the workshop, and they would send someone up to reset the circuit breaker. But the circuit breaker was fine, and for the next two hours our workshop guys, assisted by 4 or 5 blokes from the University Estates office scoured the lab ('G', if you remember) looking for the problem.

I know, I really haven't been keeping this place ticking over recently. It stems from the depression that's been bugging me since I got pneumonia last year (Hmm. I still haven't written about my time in hospital. Must do that).

So I need to get on top of that, and do some writing. This weblog, my personal one, and maybe, finally, do something about those half-arsed chapters I've got sitting on my Palm.

Let us imagine a laboratory building with seven floors, numbered '2' through '8' (yes, I know; I'm sorry it has to be this way). In this building there are many students, the newest of whom have been working there, in the labs, for a month now. Let us also envisage that mailing lists exist for the benefit of the building's denizens.

If we were to imagine — hypothetically of course — that if a 'coordinator' for one of the floors of the building wanted to contact the new students that worked on the floor, that they might avail themselves of the mailing list facility. Let us suppose that this 'coordinator' wanted to brief the new students on their floor, about general 'housekeeping' — use of shared facilities and whatnot. One might suppose that a single email to the entire staff complement might be excused, or even expected. One might wonder why they allowed a month to pass before arranging the briefing, but that's beside the point.