Life of a Lab Rat

superlative, a. and n.

A. adj.
2. Raised above or surpassing all others; extremely high, great, or excellent; supereminent, supreme.

dismal, n.¹ and n.² and a.

B. adj. [orig. attributive use of A.]

4. Causing dismay; terrible, dreadful, dire. Now in weakened sense (associated with 5): Causing gloom or dejection, depressing, wretched, miserable.

. . .

5. a. Of a character or aspect that causes gloom and depression; depressingly dark, sombre, gloomy, dreary, or cheerless.

When advertising a trade display, with the company in question providing afternoon tea, it is essential not to confuse these two words. The lack of the promised one might result in the other being descriptive of your sales.

I have been meaning to have a whinge about the scientific kit culture for more than a little while now.

Last year some time, I used a Qiagen miniprep kit (what can I say? I was in a hurry) and found that some noddy had added the blue dye to one of the reagents. Now, some of you will know what I'm talking about, and require no further explanation. The rest of you; seriously, you're better off not knowing.

The point is. . . well, no. Let's step back a bit.

Just over eight years ago I left a DNA extraction technologies company for reasons that do not concern us here. Eighteen months before that I had completed my first project at that company, which was to revamp a range of DNA extraction kits — minipreps, gel extraction, that sort of thing. I compared my efforts with those of the market leader, Qiagen (Promega and the rest, sorry, but even if your stuff is better it's not the benchmark). And even if I do say so myself, I did a pretty good job. My miniprep kit was faster, gave better yield, as good if not better quality, and was cheaper to produce.

It was, naturally (like the rest of the company down the line), torpedoed by a worse than useless sales and marketing department, and intellectually challenged management.

But I realized, last year as I used the Qiagen kit, that in more than eight years the market leader had failed to innovate at all. Minipreps are pretty critical to molecular biology research, and they still charge a 500% markup for something that, frankly, is crap.

Qiagen's idea of innovation is to add a blue dye, so that people can tell that something is mixed thoroughly. Which is bizarre to say the least; doing minipreps is one of the first things you will learn in a mol biol lab, and if you can't get that right first go you're going to have much more fundamental problems. Qiagen did nick one of my ideas, which was to add a collection tube to the kit. Now, I persuaded management that such a tube in the kit would be a good thing, and moreover, it should have a lid with an extended hinge so that it would actually fasten over the spin column while in the microfuge. Such a tube exists (and existed back then), so we just bought a job lot and packaged them with our stuff.

So Qiagen can't even get that right: Their collection tube is un-lidded, so you still have to fart around with different tubes at the end of the prep. To be fair, they did drop the five minutes on ice thing from the protocol, so I guess someone must be awake there.

Now, you might think I'm being hard on Qiagen, and you'd be right, but over the weekend I received the following (edited) email from my mate Tiddles:

Qiagen Maxi-Kit. first run = 1.3µg DNA/µl = ace. 4 times since ~0.3µg DNA/µl = a fornicating waste of my time. Fornicate. Fornicate. Fornicate. Fornicating fornicating kits. I fornicating hate fornicating kits. I have changed kit, changed solution, re-transformed my plasmid and still bollocks. Do you know what they think it is? I actually agree. . . It's growing too fornicating well and thus clogging their miracle fornicating filter system. What the fornication? Growing too well? What am I supposed to do? Put fornicating bleach in my media?

It's expensive, time-consuming, uses an imperial shedload of plastics, doesn't actually yield all that much DNA and, as m'friend Tiddles points out, can not cope with rich media. So to prep a lot of DNA for, say, multiple transfections, you need to do multiple preps. And if you try to use a decent amount of culture (like 101 ml instead of 100 ml) or rich media (2xTY) instead of that anæmic LB muck, the (bloody expensive) column throws up its beads in despair and fails miserably. Just like the Qiagen miniprep, in fact.

Y'see, back in '98, my miniprep kit could cope with buckets of rich media and still spew out loads of top-quality DNA, so I am very down on Qiagen for not coming up with something better.

But so that you know that I can do so much more than just whinge, my very next post will contain a link to the protocol that I currently use for maxiprep DNA. It makes loads, uses phenol, and gives you the feeling that you're doing some real chemistry. Great stuff.

There's a certain company that makes certain site-licensed software. A couple of days ago I was encouraged to set up my university with a full *two month* unlimited site license trial. Interesting how 'two months' becomes 'unlimited' in these halcyon days, but I'm more concerned that these nice people have sent the invitation to the wrong sucker target customer.

I don't actually know where the 'University of Sidney' is, although they might be talking about somewhere in Cambridge, I guess.

I just wanted to inform you that your samples arrived without sample volume left in the tube for a full sequencing reaction as stated on your order form. I refer to samples labelled XXXXA and XXXXB.

If you could resend these samples ensuring they are fully sealed and wrapped
up, we could sequence them for you as soon as possible by putting them on
the top of our list.

You dropped my bloody samples, dintcha?

Dear $SEQUENCING_SERVICE customers,

We are pleased to inform you that the sequencing price for the reaction,
clean up and analysis will drop from AUD$15 to AUD$13.5. This will be
effective on 1 September 2007. Meanwhile, we can assure you that we will
maintain our current service quality.

Damn. That was our last, best hope.

I have here, on a Post-It note from long ago, a message that reads who thought Times New Roman was a good idea for slides?.

I scribbled it in disgust on trying to read a student's slides during the 'pre-Honours' talks early this year. The thing about TNR is that it works, barely, on paper. On your computer monitor it's pretty dire; but when projected onto a screen it is simply horrible. It is far too spindly to be read easily, and some of the letters look as if they are in serious danger of disappearing altogether.

There are lots of nice fonts on my computer, and on yours, that are more appropriate for displaying information to an audience. My friendly word of advice is to always check your slides in the context you will be displaying them for real, and if the text looks crap then change the font. Experiment.

But remember what you are trying to do, for just under that memo, written in a more severe hand during the subsequent presentation, I find But not Comic Sans!.

I am convinced that Comic Sans is the work of Lucifer. It has its place, and that place might well be Microsoft Bob speech bubbles, but today it is over-used, hackneyed and so very, very unprofessional (if you actually are making a comic, check out http://bancomicsans.com/fonts.html.)

It certainly does not belong on slide presentations, posters, scientific journals, or on supplier quotes.

Some free clues to any sales reps who might be reading. Especially if they work for a company whose name begins with 'M' and rhymes with 'berk'.

1. It is expected that you will turn up on spec, and try to catch someone to talk at. Chances are that the specific person you want is in the middle of an experiment, has had a crap day so far and resents the intrusion. However, that's probably all right and they will leap at the chance to have you try and sell them stuff.

2. If you turn up on spec and the person you want to annoy isn't available, please leave a message saying "I'll come in tomorrow at 11". After all, their time is worthless and they will make every effort to be available. Do not worry about any inconvenience to them or their schedule.

3. Similarly, ringing the lab (cold) and leaving a message with someone other than your intended victim saying "I'll be there tomorrow at 11" is arrogant and disrespectful and exactly the sort of behaviour we have come to expect. You will earn a big commission this way.

4. After you have made such an appointment — of course the lab manager happens to (a) have received the message and (b) be free — turn up five hours late and expect them to drop everything and rush to see you. Don't worry that she had to leave at 2 to pick up her children; she has no life and will leave the kids to fend for themselves while she gives you her whole attention.

5. Having cast aside these irrational foibles (after all, we're only scientists; it's not like we work for a living), please try to sell anything and everything to anyone in the lab who happens to be sitting at a bench holding a pipette. It's not likely that they're doing anything, after all. Additionally, expect them to know all about your product range and especially be familiar with a sample you sent to someone who left six months ago.

6. This is more for your R&D division, but you should know about it. Make sure your company reads papers (published in open access journals) that describe new methods, and take all the reagents and sell them at vastly inflated prices in inconvenient packages. We will thank you for it.

7. Point out that we don't know a thing, and everything we have done for the last fifteen years is crap because we didn't use your products. Home-made enzymes and reagents can never achieve the job, and their cheapness is false economy. We love bits of plastic and will change to using whichever thermostable enzyme you happen to be selling that week because we like you, and suffer from terrible error rates.

I've been receiving emails from a company with the sub-title "Market Intelligence".

You have no idea how much I hate these guys (marketeers that is. The rep himself is perfectly personable).

Chou En has been feeling a bit got at in the office since I pointed out the faults of wikipedia. I think the conversation went something along the lines of

"So what about answers.com? Can we trust them?"

"Naw, they just lift everything from Wikipedia."

So to be nice to him, I have started a rumour that he can solve solution protein structures just by listening to the hum of the magnet. With a high enough sampling frequency, the capacity to hear radio waves in the centimetre range and the ability to do fast fourier transforms in three dimensions on the fly, it shouldn't be too hard.

Back to emails from companies. Even with his fantastical ability, Chou En is unable to decipher a simple email. He asked a certain company for the price of an NMR tube cleaning brush, and gave a catalogue number. Maybe you can do better. Here is the reply he received: