Tedium: it has its uses.
Biological research is a complex activity requiring many different approaches. We spend a lot of our time making tools – modified plasmids, say, or a transgenic cell line – and the rest of the time testing them in experimentation. The testing is supposed to be the fun part: the creative flexing of our hypotheses, emotionally enriched by the crushing disappointment when they don’t fly and the surges of happiness when they do. The testing, in other words, is the real science.
But spare a thought, if you will, for the tool-making – the necessary foundation for all those dreams. The unglamorous activities that will never, in themselves, lead to fame and glory. Indeed, the repetitive manual labor typically required to make tools is considered to be a lower-caste occupation, often ferreted out to undergraduate interns or outsourced altogether, and scarcely worth more than an acknowledgement in most papers.
I have to admit, though, that there are times in my life when I have not minded taking on such thankless chores personally. When existence in that messy parameter space outside of the laboratory known as ‘real life’ becomes overwhelming for whatever reason, the manipulations of science can be a safe haven. But the catch-22 is that it is precisely when things are particularly turbulent that it difficult to concentrate on higher intellectual pursuits. The mind slides away from rigorous analysis, from creative brainstorming, from the angelic highs of dreaming up the perfect hypothesis and how to test it. So in those cases, mindless tedium can becomes a solace of sorts.
I have a vivid memory of one night in the lab back in Seattle when I was a graduate student. It was about three in the morning, and – following an explosive romantic break-up –I’d found myself almost instinctively getting on my bike and heading for the one place where I knew I could find safety and distraction.
The lab at three a.m. is your kingdom. I recall putting an Offspring album onto the CD player as loud as it would play and working up about a hundred minipreps from pelleted bacteria that I’d been accumulating in the freezer. (I still can’t hear the song ‘Come Out And Play’ without flashing back to that night.) And I found that there was a fearsome joy in the ritual and thoughtless annihilation of so many tubes, cranked through conveyor style: lyse, precipitate, neutralize, extract. Pipette, mix, decant, spin. The DNA crashing out of solution in satisfying white puffs, collecting reassuringly at the bottom of the tube, going clear on drying, then gelatinous in dissolving. Everything controlled and entirely predictable. Quantitate, digest, elecrophorese, photograph. Thoughts somehow both focused and entirely absent from the world in that haze of discrete little steps.
That night, I was a robot – and I needed to be. Equally, in the past week, my cloning work has been the calm in the eye of a little storm, the point of focus that has kept me getting up every morning to incremental nanosuccesses as the new tools slowly progress down that belt. In a few days it will all be over but the sequencing, and my normal experiments will resume.
Perfect timing. At least I hope so.
‘incremental nanosuccesses’
I wonder what the smallest unit of success might be? The quantal unit if you like. The quark of success.
In which I am Robot
“The lab at three a.m. is your kingdom. I recall putting an Offspring album onto the CD player as loud as it would play and working up about a hundred minipreps from pelleted bacteria that I’d been accumulating in the freezer”.
“Robot Rock”, Daft Punk 2007 et al
In crystallography these days, tool-making is at least 90% of the process (and no-one can hear you scream…).
I used to enjoy the tedium of setting up crystallisation trials but now we have robots to do that. Real ones.
Jennifer, I hear you! I have spent 2 years here doing almost nothing but building tools (in the form of a big expression library). Only now is it starting to pay off in the form of novel insight into our biological problems. Hopefully the papers will come soon, try explaining “tool building” to granting bodies when trying to get funding and justifying what you’ve been doing with all that $$ (and I have been spending up big time)
I was thinking more about this, and actually what is a large-scale screen but a very big tool to find hits? If you put it like that, my situation is not that much different from Darren’s.
I have noticed, though, that if you make a particularly good tool, it can do wonders for your popularity. It gives me a warm feeling to overhear other people talking about my reagents – when your reagent acquires a lab nickname, you know it’s going to be used for a long time.
The miniprep kit I use has started including suggestive literature about their dedicated robot. They don’t list any prices. If you have to ask you can’t afford it!
Do methods count as ‘tools’?
Tell us more about the lab nicknames—not heard that one before.
Transgenic cell lines – they tend to get shortened. Mine are called HeLa-13 (after the colony well from which they were derived) and they are all the rage.
I think developing a method falls into the ‘tools’ category.
Oh! I was thinking people called your Tris ‘Tommy’ or something like that. I wasn’t thinking of naming cell lines. HekZNF B1 was one of my faves.
Our lab would probably have shortened that to B1. Sounds more approachable.
Names are important. I used to call my 70% EtOH “DNA Precipitation Buffer” because alcohols were supposed to be kept in the flam cupboard.
Anyway, tools. I coded lots and lots of perl in Sydney: currently unpublishable but great tools. sigh
I liked your “making versus testing tools” distinction in person as well.
But what about days when you get into cloning hell (or the many other equivalents) when things that should be easy and routine end up being a nightmare and you’re left thinking ‘but this isn’t even meant to be the experimental part’!!
Samantha – indeed. That’s exactly where I am right now. (Note to all who would tempt the cloning gods by making statements like the last sentence of my second-to-last paragraph in the post: just don’t.) Even worse when you are doing it for someone else and it doesn’t even contribute to your own project.
Thanks, Heather.
Anyone who fears human cloning needs to realize that we can’t reliably do bacteria yet.
Heh. Does this mean I have to give up my white cat?
Depends if you can clone it or not…
Update: worked out how the sequencing works in this place. There is a magic Tupperware container in the post room where you leave your tubes, and 24 hours later they email you the sequence.
I could get used to that.
Is very civilized.
24 hours?! Supamac, are you listening?
I get good turnaround on my sequencing (and I’m doing a lot, see above re library)… it’s the analysis that slows me down, someone say Perl?
Hah. I was just chatting with Eva about my lovely perl scripts, and whether I shouldn’t just bung them at Nature Precedings.
You should, they may be really useful for someone. We are having the same discussions here about a really nice little Java app that one of our students has developed for browsing/analysing images from high-content screening runs.
I get this really strange elation vs dread emotion whenever I send off plates for sequencing. It’s great to get the cloning done, but I know I’ll be faced with several thousand traces to analyse in a day or 2. It’s not just simple blasting either, need to check for in-frame fusions…. some days I feel like Rain Man
Back to tools. Yeah, and I should think about various papers, too {hides from Beta Gal}
I’m beginning to suspect it is I who is, in fact, the “tool”
Someday the analysis will be outsourced too.
And then what will there be to do for scientists?
We can work full-time on the hypothesizing. It could be amazingly productive.
I for one welcome our hypothesis-free robot masters.
Dear Dr Rohn – have you ever considered a career in editorial ?
But seriously – I guess measuring fossil bison bones at 2 am listening to Motorhead is the same thing as cloning things at 3am when romantic disasters are involved. I thought I’d put that allbehind me, but you had to bring it all back, didn’t you, hmmm?
Ooh. Story, Henry?
No. It’s too painful…
It’s very important not to have romantic disasters at the same time as one of your labmates. Because the choice of loud music is so personal.
Labmates? Pah! At the time I was working on my own in a lonely museum basement with several thousand bones for company. A bit like Ben Stiller in Night At The Museum, though without the jokes.
Also without Ben Stiller, I hope?
Yes. Thank goodness.
Anyway, shouldn’t it be ‘I are Robot’? Just sayin’.
Ooh! Saw the “I is scientist” t-shirt today in Cromer.
I saw one the other week that said ‘I Are Scientist’. I was too shy to ask him what it meant.
Now you mention it, it might have been ‘are’.
What can I say? We were talking about rocks evolving.
It’s true. But Cromer does funny things to one’s mind.
And one’s digit count. NFN.
‘incremental nanosuccesses’.Nanosuccesses and incremental sums up the ‘real science’.
Beautiful post. makes one reminisce…almost…
@Shuja speaks the truth.
Thanks, Ian: I’ll keep the bench warm for you.