Life of a Lab Rat

I have arranged to meet a colleague for coffee and cell biology tomorrow morning. She works in Zoology.
She says the "zoology (biology) building, A08, is in Science Road".

So I go along to the University's map page, and click on 'Z' for Zoology. Nothing found. OK then, 'B' for Biology. Something there, but not what I want. Search for the building code, and find that I actually want the Heydon-Laurence Building.

Well that was bloody obvious, wasn't it?

Some people just don't get it.

A reader wrote to me, on the horrors of MSDS and risk assessments etc., and suggested I look at something called 'Chemwatch'.

So I looked at the website, and BANG! Browser window resize! Choice of flash or non-flash! Eye-hurting design!

Wake up guys. That stuff is sooo last millennium. And because of it, I really can't be arsed.

You see, this is why I hate the internets.

Just got back from a performance at the Pawns' school (Elder Pawn was first clarinet in a fantastic rendition of Pirates of the Caribbean) and am now supposed to be washing up, but I happened to stumble across Emma PeelTigtog's rant on paradigm shifts:

I’m not the only person to be annoyed over the years by the egregious overuse of the term “paradigm shift”. I knew people were misusing the term, but not having actually read Kuhn’s seminal work wherein he coined the term, I never had the properly grounded basis to articulate why.

"Paradigm shift" gets nearly fourteen hundred hits in PubMed. That's a lot of paradigms being overthrown. I really can't be arsed going through and thinking about which ones are really paradigms, but much like my own bugbear, "quantum leap" (111 hits in PubMed) — why people get so excited about the smallest possible discrete advance is beyond me —, I suspect that even (especially?) in the proper sciences the term is much abused.

I'd say more, but the suds are getting cold.

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

Never one to mince his words, the Bard of Stratford obviously never had to deal with administrators, specifically administrators responsible for Occupational Health and Safety.

As I type, the Cage is gripped in a frenzy of OHS paperwork. Apparently there is to be an audit next week, and as there have been so many serious incidents in biological labs all over the world (um, not) we each have to generate and maintain a folder that contains vast acreage of processed rainforest, to comply with OHS regulations. Note that this does not make us actually any safer (because, frankly, concern for one's own skin is a pretty good incentive to not killing oneself at work); the entire exercise is to keep the lawyers happy.

The University has a policy of "eliminating conditions and incidents that could result in personal injury or ill health", which, as far as any of my fellow rats can work out, consists in actively preventing us doing any research.

Consider: The amount of paperwork to be analysed, filled in, printed off and filed is going to knock the lab for six for two working days at least. Then each time we do an experiment we're supposed to go to our personal folder and check that we're complying with whatever, further reducing the time available to do anything. But this, cunning as it is, is not nearly enough.

Each potentially hazardous chemical needs to have a corresponding Materials Safety Data Sheet in your personal folder. And the recommended site for downloading these MSDSs is broken:

.

Which means. . . because I can't download (and print) the MSDS, I'm not supposed to do the experiment. But I want to do the experiment (you know, I don't do this job for the money, I thought that should be obvious by now), so I'm forced to spend more time looking for the MSDSs on the individual suppliers' websites instead. Cunning.

But wait, there's more.

I've been reading the Cage's OHS website, — which you might think had actually been approved by someone who knows what it is we do — and, dumbly following instructions to the letter, we're supposed to mark each 'reaction' with a 'ChemAlert' label. Which means that for a standard tube containing one chemical, and the smallest available label, we get something that looks like this:

.

Now, imagine two, or three, potentially hazardous chemicals in there. It would be impossible to work with. Devilishly cunning, and further proof that the lawyers and administrators who dream up these schemes (a) have no idea about what we actually do and (b) don't care; because their purpose is not to save lives but to prevent the University getting sued.

What they fail to realize is that no amount of paperwork is going to make the lab safer, and is in fact counter-productive because people get so pissed off about the whole deal they treat the entire OHS section as a complete joke. Which might very well lead directly to personal injury or ill health (I watched this happen in Cambridge. It was not pretty then, and it is not pretty now).

Sod it all. I'm going to set up a PCR without having printed off a risk assessment, and bugger the lawyers.

Georg kindly sent me a link this morning, and although it is interesting, I've been wondering ever since about how to frame it.

I remember quite clearly the first time I realized that what you read in the newspapers (and by extension, what you see on news bulletins) is not necessarily what actually is. I had recently completed my thesis defence, and one Sunday morning my ex-supervisor rang me up to tell me that a member of my old lab had been murdered; shot at through his kitchen window. Come Monday, and the news had made the national dailies (and continued to do so).

And it wasn't that the incident itself had been misreported; it was the background, the little bitty details that made the victim a real person that were wrong.

That was just the start, of course. Soon I began to see details that were wrong all over the place. And yes, sometimes the stories were wrong too, or even non-existent (HT).

So when Georg says, hey, look at this:

Journalists and scientists at Monday's Scientific American sponsored panel discussion, "Does Science Get a Fair Shake in the Media?," hosted at USC Annenberg, unanimously agreed that while the public is consuming more science reporting now than ever before, mainstream journalism is doing a lousier job of covering the field

my inner cynic asks "Isn't all reporting like that? What's so special about Science journalism?"

I don't want to attack good journalism, or journalists. But there is a failure to realize, on the part of people like you and me, just how difficult it is to report factually, accurately and relevantly. I'm a hobbyist; it takes me as long as I want to write this, and I might still think 'to hell with it' and hit delete. But your professional journalist is trying to create a story, not write a scientific article, so that means she has to put in some 'human interest', to create a controversy or mystery if possible because within the looming deadline (that's redundant. All deadlines loom. It is in their very nature to loom. 'Loom': It rhymes with 'doom') she also has to get it past the editor who doesn't care about telling the truth but who does care about increasing circulation, or advertising revenue at least.

To approach science reporting with a traditional journalistic judgment of newsworthiness and objectivity is fundamentally incompatible with how science works

Our struggling journalist will, because she's good at her job, interview the locals, who range from the uselessly intellectual telling her that a modification in changing the dementia praecox concept to the more inclusive one of schizophrenia does nothing to weaken the fundamental dichotomy to the self-important constable who was proceeding to the Town Hall when the alleged miscreant did allegedly accost the alleged victim with what appeared to be a blunt instrument, allegedly, and finally sees the chance to get his name in the Scunthorpe Courier.

Which all means that it's a damned sight easier just to unthinkingly regurgitate the press release — which itself is expertly spun by someone with far more time to spare, if not just plain wrong.

Enough ranting. Even with good journalists and sympathetic editors, I think that science probably is worse off than, say, cricket coverage, because it is harder, LBW decisions and Duckworth-Lewis notwithstanding.

The media isn't doing its job to educate the public – most journalists have little to no background in science and statistics [...] Furthermore, due to traditional media's budget considerations, a science reporter is often responsible for several scientific disciplines, and that inevitably leads to a lack of intelligent, dependable coverage, or worse, over-coverage of wacky, pseudoscientific studies such as Jessica Alba's score in an index of female desirability.

Scientists must take some of the blame, too. When was the last time you read a scientific article that your mother, or even your sister, could understand?

On the other hand, many scientists cannot talk in layman's terms about what they do. Neither are they trained to do so. "No effort has been made to help us reach out or learn to talk to the media and to the public," Quick said

Which is one way of saying that you shouldn't be surprised when you discover that most science weblogs are about politics or badly written, or both. It's all a little bit pants, really.

The question remains,
"Can science blogs save science journalism?"
and I very much suspect that the answer is "No. But spending more on public education, especially in science, might".

There. Politics. Hope you're happy now.

The most excellent and talented Jorge Cham, of PHD Comics, is talking at li'l ol' Sydney Uni next week.

Unfortunately I will not be going to the talk, because my spies tell me

They were being exclusive about it. The whole thing was addressed to postgraduate students only.

They didn't even bother to reply [to] me. Also, they said that the 300 seats in the lecture room had been reserved already.

So bah. Bah, bah and triple bah. And humbug, too.

Progress is not always beneficial.

Back in my school days, in chemistry classes we used to pipette various liquids by mouth, and think nothing of it. Mouth-pipetting is great; if you're reasonably competent you just grab a pipette, suck, hold pressure with tip of tongue, blow when necessary. No extra equipment required. Of course, this must have been bad for us because school children in their thousands were dying from pipette-transmitted diseases and from ingesting benzine or whatever we happened to be playing with that week.

Yeah.

So, I went to university and found that the Health & Safety cretins officers had decreed that mouth-pipetting was far too dangerous (read, "people might sue us"), as witnessed by the carnage in our classrooms, and that we must use these beasties in our practical classes:
.

These were great: The glass pipettes, when put into the appropriate hole, would easily break, thus enabling cack-handed students to shove jagged glass spears through the palms of their hands (which, unlike the pipette-transmitted diseases and drinking of benzine, I actually observed, first-hand as it were. Twice). Glass pipettes, of course, are far more environmentally-friendly (and cheaper) than the disposable plastic ones that do not break quite so readily, and universities spend too much on Administration (including Health and Safety. . .) to be able to afford a good supply of these fellas:
.

I'm saying this because I spent fifteen minutes this morning wandering around the lab looking for one of those bloody things so that I could use a single rainforest-killing ozone-depleting global-warming non-student skewering plastic pipette. Eventually I found one of these
and was gratified that, after *mumble* years I still remembered how to use one, onehanded. Yay. Go me.

In the old days, I'd have just sucked up the 2xTY and spat it out. Progress, you see?

Oh, and while doing the Google thing to find some pictures with which to illustrate this rambling nonsense, I came across a girl band who call themselves the Pipettes. This tickles me.

(Image credit: foche)