You’ve probably all seen it by now: Scientists for Better PCR, an advertisement for BioRad’s 1000-series thermal cycler. Fabricated as a music video and available on YouTube, the song is a deft send-up of the 1985 classic “We Are The World” in which, for those of you too young to remember with excruciating clarity, luminaries such as Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Billy Joel and dozens of other stars got together to croon for Africa with such lines as “There’s a choice we’re making/we’re saving our own lives” and “We are the ones to make a brighter day, so let’s start giving”.
Gospel truth: Lab kit advert targets GenX
In contrast, the ‘scientists’ in the BioRad advert, sporting headphones and the occasional cowboy hat and sunglasses, take turns singing lines such as “There was a time when to amplify DNA/You had to grow tons and tons of tiny cells” and “It’s amazing what heating and cooling and heating can do”. Many of the actors in the video resemble the original ‘US for Africa’ performers, such as Bob Dylan, Kennie Rodgers and Diana Ross, but in an intriguing twist, a few of them have also been given a subtle scientist look as well, so subtle that I cannot quite put my finger on what they have done to their hair and clothing to suggest this.
Undoubtedly the funniest part of this song occurs in the chorus. We’re told that one of the virtues of PCR, besides detecting mutation, solving crimes and facilitating recombination, is “when you need to find out who the daddy is”, at which point the gospel backup vocals respond with “Who’s your daddy?”. Near the end, as the chorus is reaching epic stadium proportions of poptastic euphoria, a thermal cycler is thrust into the choir and passed hand to hand overhead until one of the singers passionately embraces and kisses the humble apparatus. At the end, the earnest American voiceover declares: “For all the scientists out there doing PCR, BioRed salutes you.” A scientist friend of mine confessed she actually got a tear in her eye at that point – although she then owned up to having consumed an entire bottle of Pinot Grigio just beforehand.
The link has been e-mailed to me over ten times from a broad geographical area, which means that it has gone about as viral as anything scientific is likely to get. (I mean, we can’t really compete with sneezing baby pandas or shockingly inarticulate American beauty queens.) And the tune is perniciously infectious: in the past few days I’ve caught myself humming it several times.
I have a deep admiration for this clever bit of marketing. Not only is it refreshing to see a biotech supply company leaving the safe territory of cheesy slogans and puns that we all know and cringe over. But they are intimately communing with the perfect demographic on this occasion. I mean, think about it: who is actually in the market for a brand-new thermal cycler? Certainly not an old-timer, whose lab would already be well kitted out. And not a post-doc or graduate student: these folks don’t hold the purse strings. No, it’s precisely my age group they’re targeting – scientists who are old enough to have just started their own lab, give or take a few years, and are in need of core equipment.
And just at the right age, too, to have been in super-formative mode when “We Are The World” first came out. Scientists tell us that memories laid down in late adolescence remain the freshest and most precious. For recognizing this weakness and exploiting it, I can only say, on behalf of scientists everywhere:
“BioRad, we salute you.”
Is this the beginning of a larger trend? I very much hope so :)
- Martin
Well, it’s certainly fun. And it’s always good to have entertaining portrayals of scientists out there, reminding everyone else that we’re not an alien species.
I wonder what the story is behind the song. Who are the singers (professionals, BioRad employees)? Is this intended as viral marketing campaign? Even though the video is already appearing in many blog posts, I couldn’t find the story behind it.
- Martin
Viral baby, viral! This is as viral as ads can get. I caught this BioRad PCR video on dozens of blogs. Just look at the youtube viewer numbers.
Funny or not, it seems to have spread like wildfire :)
Martin, I’d be interested to know a bit of the background. Maybe a making-of video?
Oddly, last week I noticed that a lot of the many comments on the main American YouTube entry for this video are duplicated/cloned, or are just names with no comment appended. Some guy in BioRad marketing, furiously fabricating a fuss?
I too had been wondering about the singers. Some of those soloists could be professional session musicians, but I reckon some are just BioRad folks pulled out of the corridor for a bit of fun. In the meantime, it’s probably better for business to keep it as mysterious as possible.
Most advertisements I see are of equipments for biochemical study.
Yes, advertising a PCR machine is nothing new. It’s the methods they’ve chosen that are of interest to me.
Sorry, but it’s riddled with cheesy puns and quite dreadful. If this is meant to portray scientists as being ‘regular’ people (wuth dreadful taste in music), then I’d sooner remain an ‘alien’.
Sorry not to be clear, Leo. I didn’t mean that the scientists in the advert were accurately representing real scientists. What I meant was that the overall effect is to show that scientists have a sense of humor and can poke fun at themselves as well (and indeed, a lot of scientists I’ve talked to think it’s hilarious). Usually when scientists are shown in adverts, they have white coats, don’t smile, and demonstrate a high tendency towards weird clip-board holding behavior seldom seen in the wild.
Indeed, I am almost certain that this is a parody. And in my opinion, it’s a very well done viral ad. It has made the online science community laugh and has achieved to spread quickly.
I got at least 4 emails with the link to the video!
This could be an attempt to try make science cool, or am I stretching it…?
I’ve been saying for years that geek chic is on the rise in popular culture, but that might be more wishful thinking on my part!
I bet they’ve got a sequel lined up:
I’m in the middle of a chain reaction
(Chain reaction)
You’re there to amplify my DNA extraction
(DNA extraction)
etc.
I always thought Kary B Mullis sounded like a rock star.
{Groan}...don’t give up the day job!
Apparently KBM acts like a rock star, if the urban myths are true…
Jennifer,
Perfectly clear (as always). Beware the streaked and pin-striped company reps who report back to their marketing people on this scientist sense of humour thing.
God god, I hadn’t thought of that! Might well have let the polymerase out of the tube on that one.
“A man walks into a lab with a pig under his arm and says…”
(complete as desired.)
More! I want more! A version of Band-Aid would warm my cold, cynical heart. And until that comes, here are the lyrics to the song I sang upon finishing my MPhil… (to the tune of My Way)
Results,
I had a few,
But then again,
Too few to mention.
I did
Not have a clue
I ballsed it up,
Without exception
I set
The lab on fire
I lacked controls
Ran out of kinase
No more
No more of this
Thank God its Friiiiiday….
That’s fabulous, Ed.
I have vague recollections of a 12 Days of Lab Christmas put together by fellow grad students, the first thing on the wish-list being a “five year Ph.D.” (which is on the short side for the US.) I can’t remember all the lines but the funniest was, “Granted-supported head-shrink”.
Jenny – the fact that you’ve blogged on this, and that we’ve all replied, shows just how infectious the Viral Meme is. The BioRad folks will be reading this (oh, yes, they will) and they’ll be laughing into their Pinot Grigios (Grigioi? Grigiatti?)
It’s good to see that scientists are generally regarded as having a sense of humor, though. The other day I published a great SF story in Nature’s Futures column called When Britney Spears Comes To My Lab by scientist Vince LiCata. (Just a thought – it might be more LabLit than SF) Despite the fact that it is clearly a parody and in a slot that has been running what is quite obviously fiction, we’ve still had complaints from people saying we’re poking fun at the grand scientific mission, or women scientists, or whatever. Doh!
Interesting story, Henry. Third-person future tense – quite an unusual narration. I’m sorry to hear that some of your readers are a bit short in the sense-of-humor department; in my experience, ‘recreational outrage’ (when people aren’t truly offended, personally, but think there could be a cause for offense in principle, generally, so they might as well react) is on the rise, and it’s definitely humorless in the extreme.
‘Recreational Outrage’. I like it. And I plead guilty, especially when the London to Norwich train is any more than 7 mins late so I miss my connection to Cromer and have to wait in Norwich stations FOR A WHOLE HOUR AAAARRRRRGGGHHHHHH!!!!!
Hey, isn’t that one more precious hour with your Eee in which you can write?
Theoretically. Except that after a 2-hour London-Norwich run in which I explore the outer reaches of sex, violence, aliens, violent sex, violent aliens, and violent sex with aliens (honestly, anything to cheer up a long train ride crammed in to hideous marketing executives from Ipswich) the battery’s flat, and that makes the delay even more frustrating. I could carry a spare battery I suppose.
Those interested in more songs about science should check out the Great Beyond blog.
That’s great, Martin! Thanks for the tip.
Love it. Can we have more scientists behaving badly? How about “(Can’t) let it be”?
Huatulco Condos
Jennifer,
I came across some background info for the video. Apparently it is the idea of Tyler Kay from Biocompare. They also produced a video for Agilent. More info can be found here.
Thanks, Martin. Are they also behind BioRad’s latest annoying pop-up ad, ‘ready to rumble’? This is a really bad decision on their part. Any pop-up that activates seemingly at random and starts making a really loud noise (in my very quiet group office) just makes me hit Apple-Q in panic to shut it up. Probably not the effect the marketeers intended.
This only made this week’s Feedback column in New Scientist, credited to a “Crystal French” (surely a pseudonym).
If only I knew it was that easy to get fame. I’ll be faxing New Scientist every one of Jenny’s blog posts from now on.
Oh, and another one’s at it
Take off your geekglasses, girl and stand on a beach!
Re Henry’s “Futures” story: many people read Nature for whom their native language is not English, and for whom it is understandably not obvious when something is a parody or not (or fiction or not. Nature is not known for publishing fiction, the Futures column excepted, and we don’t make it totally obvious to readers that Futures is fiction, expecting them to work it out. If you were reading something along these lines in Swahili, how hard would it be to work out if it was fiction or nonfiction?)
Hope you don’t mind me mentioning the above caveat. In the meantime, I came over to let you know that this saga has now reached Nature News, in the shape of this story by Brendan Maher on the BioRad and Eppendorf campaigns.
Next, will we be voting for one of them for the White House? ;-)