Sometimes even the most innocuous events can have serious consequences. In a recent post, Henry related a lab nightmare of Hieronymus Boschian proportions which, on waking, made him thank Dawkins that he was no longer a practicing scientist. This, in turn, reminded me of why I decided to abandon a successful and lucrative career in science publishing to return to the lab. I’ve already discussed some of the core reasons for this volte-face, but up until now, I haven’t actually revealed the decisive inconsequential moments that catalyzed the whole affair.
I have a dream: BenchKote is compulsory for those ‘CSI moments’
The first two stimuli were dreams, a vivid pair in as many weeks. In the first, I was standing just outside the lab where I did my first post-doc, over ten years ago in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Inside the brightly lit, familiar room, my former colleagues scurried around, unaware of my presence as gels were loaded, centrifuges were set spinning, fridges and freezers were opened and slammed shut. I stepped forward eagerly to join them, only to find that an invisible membrane, flexible but strong, was physically blocking my path through the door. Try as I might, I could not breach this barrier and gain access. I awoke in a cold sweat.
In the second, I had returned to science and was working in an unspecified lab in the middle of the night. As dawn arrived, a fresh spring breeze blew through the open windows and I felt a surge of joy, acutely aware, in the dream, of how fortunate it was that I had been given a second chance. This time, consciousness greeted me with a shower of disappointment that none of it was actually real.
A few nights later, I was watching a random episode of CSI: Miami. The episode cut to one of those stock sequences they feature every week: cue trendy music and atmospheric lighting as the camera cuts to various scenes of a CSI agent in the lab, performing some crucial experimental manipulation that will crack the case. These sequences are always rather dreamlike: the person is thoughtful, focused, almost euphoric as bits of fiber or cloth or shrapnel from the cadaver are tweezed into Eppendorf tubes and their residues run through the mass spec or HPLC or PCR machine. We see the furrowed brow, the careful movements of hand and forcep and tube; nothing is hurried, nothing is sloppy. There is almost a beauty in the act.
At that moment, I experienced a sharp pang. Which is actually rather ludicrous, because I never used to research like that. Nobody does, right? But clearly, dear reader, my subconscious was desperately trying to tell me something – and the rest is history.
More than a year on, reunited with my lost profession, I am as reckless and messy in the lab as I ever was. Except occasionally. Occasionally, I get a CSI Moment. A hushed, fuzzy focus falls over the lab and I suddenly view my experimental manipulations as a beloved ritual. I am, in short, back in those dreams, not ever taking for granted the fact that I managed to wrest them into reality.
It happened today, actually, a CSI Moment. In honor of it, I ceremoniously snipped off a length of BenchKote to transform my work space into a pure white sacred zone, and then my robot and I performed a high throughput immunofluorescence assay in perfect serenity. No matter that I didn’t have the sexy lights and music, and that the space beyond the BenchKote was a thinly-veiled disaster area.
For that brief snippet in time, I was at one with my science.
It’s a Zen thing. From a certain angle, I think that’s how we’d all like to be.
Then real life crowds in, and the student knocks Coomassie all over the BenchKote.
Heh. Yes, when the experiment was over today, the BenchKote was a sad, yellowy, crystallized shadow of its former glory and I crumpled it into the bin.
The spell was broken.
But the experiment was perfect.
Thank you for that lovely post, Jenny.
You were the inspiration. I tried to incorporate scantily clad women into it as an homage, but couldn’t quite work it out.
Your post brings back memories of my graduate student days. I shared it with two others. One, like me, was a palaeontologist, whose desk was (like mine) littered with bones and slabs of rock. The third was an obsessively neat computer-phylogeny chap who had a terminal and a stack of printouts — and that was that.
However, I spent relatively little time at the lab, spending most of my graduate days traveling up and down the country to museums and private collections, measuring ice-age bison bones.
One of these private collections was in a creaky old house in which the bison bones were foundin a freezing cold attic. To get to it you had to navigate up a lot of winding stairs and narrow passages past all sorts of stuffed birds and other stuff. That was a lot of the inspiration for the first chapter of By The Sea, for those who read my novel on LabLit
Scantily clad women are rather rare in palaeontology, especially in the Bone Room in the Natural History Museum basement, where I went to measure sample bison and cattle skeletons. Women were very much in evidence. In fact, the entire staff was female, but they were very far from scantily cald as the place was freezing. I worked in duffel coat and scarf – and fingerless gloves do not make the best lab-wear for close manipulations of vernier calipers. The place was so female that the lab lacked a gents’ loo. If I wanted to go I had to make my intentions known, wherupon one of the sybils would lead me through many passage ways and locked doors and wait outside until I’d peed, and then accompany me all the way back again.
Zen moments aside, I think there is something very wrong with an o’erly tidy lab bench, in the same way that an obsessively tidy playroom is wrong. Pipettors, like toys, were meant to be strewn everywhere.
Henry, I can so picture you in that chilly bone room.
Ssh, Jenny. Pipettors are toys, and we’re all having fun; but best not to let everyone know it.
{giggle}
It’s true. It’s too fun to be a real job, which is why they can pay us so poorly.
snort.
Bugger that.
“…working in an unspecified lab in the middle of the night”
…as one does.
I like this post. My lab related dreams are all of the variety in which things go terribly wrong, but I’m not entirely ruling out that I might miss the bench in the long run. I just can’t imagine it now. (I even thought I was completely done at the bench, but have to go back for a few weeks again. It comes with chance of authorship, and 4 weeks of work for a paper is a good deal, and really the only reason I’m picking up the pipettes this time.)
I couldn’t either, when I left. At that point I was running a group as well, and lab work was something I thought I’d shed happily, permanently, like an unwanted skin.
The desire crept back when I was looking the other way.
You can blame Messrs. Herriot and Attenborough for my first interest in biology. Books and TV are dangerous things and should not be allowed anywhere near impressionable young minds.
Cath, do you think NN should similarly come with a Government health warning?
I was half in love with Herriot when I was a lass – the book version of him, not the BBC adaptation.
All this talk of Citizenship tests and whatnot — I think you’ve just proved your eligibility to be a Brit right there.
Although the TV version was quite good for demonstrating just how far up a cow’s arse a man’s arm could go.
It’s important information for well-rounded and intellectually stimulating conversation.
I once attended an AGIFORS conference (what, never heard of it? Airline Group of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies, of course) in Memphis.
One of the attendees was a stunningly attractive woman from Columbia, who was usually invisible because she was surrounded by the Italian delegates. However, somehow, I ended up sitting next to her on a minibus ride to the local shopping mall.
She asked me where I came from and I said originally from the North of England. ‘Oh,’ she said with obvious delight. ‘Where James Herriot worked. I love James Herriot.’ Apparently he was very popular in Bogota. So if Richard is right, most of Columbia may be eligable for British status.
But only, Brian, if they read the books (and prefer them).
Ah, what is it about Brits, anyway? The whole country is an obscenely strong magnet.
“Cath, do you think NN should similarly come with a Government health warning?”
I think the odds of some youngling reading these pages and being seduced into a lifetime of lab work are somewhat slim.
Is that, do you think, because the younglings aren’t reading NN? We need to get Dr Rohn into more schools so that they can see what a marvellous thing the doing of science is.
Shame about the career structure and the pay, but anyway.
That’s a loverly post Jenny :)It’s funny, now I’m closer everyday to leaving the lab I’m (kind of) enjoying my lab work again, but the thought of having to stay at the bench makes me want to cry/jump of the TN-AR bridge…
Well Ian, give yourself a few years and you might find yourself pining away. I’ve never known anyone more nostalgic about the bench than ex-scientists.
Be strong, Ian. Firm and resolved.
but the thought of having to stay at the bench makes me want to cry/jump of the TN-AR bridge…
canonically, shouldn’t it be the Tallahassee bridge?
I’m not as BJM I hope! One of my fave Country songs though…
‘Fave’ and ‘Country’ in the same sentence, Ian?
You’ve been near the body of the King for too long.
Thank yuh very muh! A one for the muneh, a two fo the sho…a cannae find ma blue suade sho…
…no wait…something’s wrong….
There’s a lot of C&W music on the radio here in Colorado, where I am currently on holiday – the only thing on offer, actually. It’s amazing that there can be song lyrics incorporation both sex and pick-up trucks.
revises opinion of C&W
I fell in love with Country (& Western is a European addition dinchaknow), after a road trip across the US. 5500 miles and nothing but Country on the radio… one either learned to love it or went slightly mad. Or possibly both now I think about it…
In walking (jet-pack etc.) terms,
5500 miles = 8851.392 kilometers
500 miles therefore = 804.672 kilometers
Still with me?
If one was to write a wee song about walking 804.672 kilometers – d’ya think I’m sexy? Probably not.
On the other ‘extremity of arm beyond wrist’ I Proclaim, is this well known gem brought to the
beaches of Cromerworld by brothers Craig and Charlie Reid.Please use the World Wide Metric sensibly, intelligently, sagaciously and mannerly I say.
——
Declared Conflict of
InterestTartan: ScottishExtendedos Remixos
Comic Relief 2007 – Peter Kay, Matt Lucas & The Proclaimers
Jenny> you forgot to throw in the additional [cow] farm in it as well :) (realised what the lyrics was to one of the songs I sang along with on my way to work the other morning… shudders it was so much better when I didn’t pay attention)
Cath>_I think the odds of some youngling reading these pages and being seduced into a lifetime of lab work are somewhat slim._
You mean that we don’t sound positive and enthusiastic about our subject? (I think we do. Although we might be a little wierd in our humour.)
Or is it the obvious fact that none of us (as far as I know) are paid those humungous amounts of money that younglings seem to want these days? Or that we wonder how science as a field will survive with funding being scarse and the future, not to sound too sad, looks a little bleak?
Thanks Asa for driving this discussion back to base.
Sorry for the deflection.
I throw in my owl.
Money, actually, isn’t everything.
Makes being able to eat a little easier, though.
;)
Pshaw. You can easily live on a scientist’s salary.
You can, but I’m not sure that’s answering the right question.
Money, actually, isn’t everything.
nope, it isn’t. Looking at most scientist I know I would agree that they agree too.
Although, after listening to “the younger people”, i.e. relatives and their friends in high school etc, I have to say I think it might be an important factor for them when deciding what to do…
Personally I am more annoyed about how scientists are employed, not how much [little] money they get. it’s almost the same, but not really.
I would agree with you there, Asa. Except – previously, I was under the illusion that if I had a real job, I’d have more stability. It turned out this wasn’t really the case. I’ve been in a ‘permanent position’ in a company that ended up going bankrupt. And I’ve seen colleagues in ‘permanent positions’ getting ousted by upper management. I think permanence in employment is an illusion — and maybe in science, at least you know the score.
Looking at most scientist I know I would agree that they agree too.
But do you know if they would agree that you know that they would agree?
I know you know that I think you know I know you think that.
Y’know?
Jenny> previously, I was under the illusion that if I had a real job, I’d have more stability.
There is that of course, and I agree that it might be the case. We are all fooled to think there is such a thing as “job security” in this day and age? ;)
(but don’t you think there is a different type of security of not knowing when the company goes belly up and applying for the grants of the world in order to keep your research? I mean, in the first case you can always argue that it might be a storm that wacks your house to pieces and really, there is nothing you can do about it?!)
The difference might be then that a ‘regular job’ usually gives you retirements benefits, medicare etc whereas the world of Academia might not be so fortunate.
Like in Sweden when the whole stipend thing gets you “outside of the good security system” i.e. maternity leave, unemployment benefits etc and you end up with less money than a ‘regular job’ and less benefits as well, and it is still not a safe job.
Brooks> duh. Didn’t see that it was that tangled up, the sentence I mean.
Grant> y’all are mean now… ;)