I have heard switching labs described as switching families. You know what? It really is. You may hate your family at times, yell at them and tell them to go stick their head in the LN2 tank, but at the end of the day they are still your family, comfortable and familiar.

I have switched families. It’s done, it’s over, there is no going back. I have been ceremonially stripped of my ID and lab keys. My old lab has been emptied out and gutted, only dust balls and derelict tubes remain in the corners. The level of my attachment to that space is entirely absurd, I know, but I can’t help it. I spent an obscene number of hours over five long years in that lab – I have slept there, eaten there, watched movies, written blog posts, and had many many beers. Those rooms were home to me and now they are gone.

So what does it take to relocate a large lab? I need to double check this with my PI, but I think what you need is $50K, a very large truck and many many able-bodied men and women. It took four people four full days to pack the lab and offices into innumerable boxes. Another crew of large men then loaded the boxes into the longest truck I have ever seen in my life – one truck housed all the freezers, refrigerators, incubators, boxes, and equipment. A generator on the truck will keep a number of the fridges and freezers at temperature so that the most sensitive reagents (viruses, bacteria…) will remain safely frozen or chilled. The truck is making the drive from Boston to Tucson, AZ in three days without stopping. Let me re-iterate – there will be no stopping between Boston and the Southwest except to refuel. The drivers (two of them, I believe) have everything they need in the huge cab of the huge truck – TV, shower, bed, carpets, kitchen, and copious amounts of caffeine and other stimulants, I imagine.

Happy Driving.

P.S. There is nothing more bizarre than watching a laminar flow hood dismantled, collapsed, and loaded onto a cart. I always considered TC hoods a part of the lab structure, integrated into the walls, a lab limb, if you will. They are not. They are actually rather portable.