Life in lab isn’t all monotonous pipetting and occasional retrophoresing, at least not in my lab. Every once in a while there is an afternoon – or 15 minutes, as the case may be – of real adventure, of an undertaking requiring the participation of many lab-members in a symphony of cooperation, team work, and only moderate grumblings of time better spent pipetting.
We had a minor adventure in my lab last week, and my lab members were gracious enough to let me record the events for posterity. I did help, mind you, just from the sidelines.
Might need a bit of background for this particular lab adventure. Liquid nitrogen tanks, which are used for long-term storage of cells and viruses, are organized in hanging towers with slots for boxes, which house individual cryotubes (a very space-age name for a plastic tube, isn’t it?). A long shaft is inserted at the top of the tower and holds all the boxes in.
Should one forget to insert this shaft, boxes will fall out and sink to the bottom… of a tank containing about 50 liters of liquid nitrogen at a temperature of approx -200 deg C. And there you have it. A box full of infectious disease at the bottom of a large tank filled with an immeasurably cold liquid. Awesome.
So how does one extract this box full of precious reagents from the bottom of a liquid nitrogen tank?
First you have to dump all the liquid nitrogen into a an intermediate vessel
And fish out all the tubes that have popped out of the fallen (and opened) box, with a surprisingly handy aquarium net.
Then you have to reach in to the immeasurably cold tank and pull out the box itself. Then reinsert all the tubes while keeping them on dry ice – this is tons of fun when you have nothing but latex gloves for temperature protection
And then fill the tank back up again.
Lab is sometimes frustrating, occasionally entertaining, but very rarely is it dull.
Cool. Thanks for the pics. A much more realistic representation of what goes on in a real lab than what we see on TV.
I wonder if the other bloggers would be willing to post photos from their labs as well…I’m going to ask.
Oh my, Anna, I would have been mortified. Your model is not even wearing a lab coat!
(Can you tell I froze the tip of one finger quite well, once? Once burned, twice shy.)
Posting photos from lab… well, maybe. But there is a lot of good stuff on JoVE in moving pictures already.
Excellent Anna! I too would have been wearing some protection…I once burned my hands very badly with dry ice…
We only wear labcoats when we are working with radioactivity. Otherwise, we live on the edge. We pour out and lift 50L of LN2! It’s because we are hard core.
I have never burned myself too badly (fingers crossed), which makes me think my time is coming and I need to be more careful!
During my PhD in Glasgow I had to take my turn filling our liquid nitrogen tanks, and it always freaked me out (mostly due to the shrieking noise of the expanding gas coming out of the hose nozzle when you first turned the tap). A year into my PhD, there was a fatal accident in Edinburgh in which a technician suffocated during a liquid nitrogen leak. After that, we had to go in pairs, there were all kinds of alarms fitted, and my supervisor contributed an old boat hook that got propped up next to the door in case anyone had to be dragged out of the vapours. People complained and made fun of the whole thing, but I was secretly relieved and reassured by the new rules!