Following on from the ingenuity of our French post-doc, the ante has recently been upped by the lab’s Italian contingent.
Continental shelf A cheap solution for all your live microscopy needs
Feast your eyes on this little beauty. Necessità was surely the mother of invenzione when one of our PhD students fashioned the device lovingly from a tissue-culture multi-well plate lid and what is know in the trade as ‘Blu-tac’. You can nest your 35mm dishes into each of the six ports, which ensures that they stay put as the microscope’s automatic movable stage zooms around taking pictures of your living cells.
Bellisimo.
Howay!
Disclaimer:
Mind The Gap does not mean to imply that cultural superiority can be extrapolated from said ingenuity.
Although I think I am going to start keeping score. The lab stats so far:
France: 1
Italy: 1
Japan: 0
China: 0
UK: 0
Argentina: 0
and (ahem)
USA: 0
Right. Just you wait.
Aha! I think I see where this is going, Jenny. For your next project, you’re going to arrange Lablit’s answer to reality TV, with a lab-based show that’s something like a cross between Scrapheap Challenge and It’s A Knockout in which teams of scientists from different nations have to sequence the genome of [insert name of celebrity here] using nothing more than a rusty lawnmower engine, a jam jar, a piece of string, an eggbox and miles and miles of sticky-backed plastic.
What worries me is that this will be an exercise in reinforcing national stereotypes. I mean, you’ve already discussed French
je ne sais quoiingenuity, and now it’s the Italians’ turn. Massimo has lined up behind his team, as you see. But where will it end, I wonder?It brings to mind a recollection of national stereotypes by former Labour Chancellor Denis Healey in his lovely autobiography The Time Of My Life (now, I’m not a fan of political autobiography, but Lord Healey can actually write) which he learned while Minister of Defence. National character, he was told, can be discerned by the titles of books that people of different nations would write about elephants, such as
England: Elephants I Have Shot
France: L’Elephant Et L’Amour
Finland: How The Elephants Helped Us Defeat Russia
Norway: Norway And The Norwegians
However, my favourite example of this kind of list came from the Fellow of English at the Cambridge college where I was a graduate (who was feisty, female and American). She claimed that national character was best understood by the things women say after sex:
England: (starchily) “Do you feel better now?”
America: “What did you say your name was?”
Sweden: “Ah! My sadness has almost gone!”
Anyone else around here remember The Great Egg Race?
Not I, Bob – do elaborate. Richard, you are making me nervous.
Henry: I would say that, although one shouldn’t generalize (Oh, go on. -Ed.), different nationalities do have different personal styles in the lab. Of course the variation within groups might be greater than between, but one suspects that there are still trends to be sensed.
Some of them rather amusing.
Mwah hah hah.
Um, yes. I’ll just step away from Lablit right now.
What have I done?
Bob – not only do I remember it, a friend of mine had a giant eggcup for being on a winning team in it
While Henry has a point, if we are to have a LabLit TV version, I think it should also involve sport in some way so we can push those tedious Euro 2008 games off the schedule.
Scored another century, probably.
LabLit would be thrilled to sponsor a (in spirit, you understand, not with actual dosh) lab reality TV program, pitting Dane against Swede, Brit against Trobriand Islander – the potential is mind-boggling.
And think what we could do with the lab coats.
The Great Egg Race title sequence. I think you’ll get the idea – make Heath Robinson devices to do some brilliantly pointless task.
I think Brian drew France in the lab pool.
Oh, this is wonderful.
But I want to be on Richard’s team.
Of course you do, Jenny – we have the obscenely powerful magnets.
I somehow think that magnets might be cheating a bit, though. Too high-tech.
HIgh tech?
Naw. (21 Tesla!)
I like this one:
I’d hate to see the microwave that thing came out of.
I think the proudest achievement of my PhD was the cuvette I constructed for in situ measurement of immobilised enzyme on a conductive glass electrode – the electrode was held against one inside face of the cuvette parallel to the spectrophotometer beam while the solution containing the chromogenic substrate was stirred by gas bubbling from a tiny PTFE tube behind a baffle plate on the opposite face so that the bubbles didn’t obstruct the beam – all constructed from disposable cuvettes, Araldite, copper wire and toluene (which makes great polystyrene cement). There may well have been Blu-tak involved at some point too. I could dig out a diagram to post but sadly this was before digital cameras (or indeed scanners) were ubiquitous so I don’t have a picture. If my novel immobilisation process hadn’t been so lamentably, unpublishably useless this might have been standard equipment in labs across the world by now (er, or not.)
Tom – please post a diagram! I would be proud to have it framed and displayed prominently in this humble salon.