Mired as I am in manuscript revision, the conversations of other people in the group office often float past unnoticed, deflecting off the bubble of concentration I try to maintain around my computer. But sometimes, the things people say are so unexpected that I can’t help listening in.
“Let me guess,” one of our post-docs said. “You want to borrow my rack again.”
“Yeah,” said the Ph.D. student from down the corridor, rather sheepishly, as he leaned against the door frame. “Mine hasn’t been working.”
“Sure, go ahead.”
“I did buy exactly the same thing,” the student hastened to add, “but yours seems to be lucky.”
“Well, there’s nothing special about it,” she replied. “But help yourself.”
Now, it’s science’s little secret that many of us, despite our rational veneer and extensive scholarship, are actually quite a superstitious lot. I’ve had a colleague who insisted on using a particular pipettemen because he was convinced it was imbued with a mysterious lucky charm; yet another insisted that her reactions worked better in blue Eppendorf tubes. There was even one lab mate who felt he had to wear lucky pants for that big experiment. But the student in question did not strike me as that sort of bloke.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’ve come here to borrow her test-tube rack because you think it’s lucky?”
They both just looked at me pityingly. And so it transpired that I was confusing rack
with Rac
My mother always told me not to eavesdrop.
I’m sure you are now racked with guilt about eavesdropping.
Just goes to show what happens when there’s a GAP in your knowledge.
PIPped to the post!
Better Ras it up, then.
I just popped over to check on the progress of the lucky experiment, but unfortunately we’ll have to wait ’til Monday for the big result.
Par for the course.
Do you miss being submerged in the daily lab work? I noticed that I quite like being cocooned and just focus on one thing for a while, my own manuscript.
I am going slowly crazy, to be honest. The revision is a brief review article and I am trying to condense a stack of previously published review articles about five inches high into one large diagram that manages both to simplify the concept without leaving anything crucial out — all while satisfying the referees’ conflicting ideas of what is ‘crucial’ and what is ‘redundant’. I think I’ve discovered in the process that I definitely do not enjoy compiling basic, textbook style display information.
My good friend was recounting a sad incident in which her home was flooded by a workman who accidentally drilled thru a water pipe. She began, ‘This guy came round to fix the sky…’ I thought about the hole in the ozone layer before saying, ‘Why don’t you just call it the ceiling – weirdo?’ For anyone as dopey as me she meant the satellite dish.
I have that same rack, but my day-glow pink one is the lucky one ;-)
@Rivka. Did the workman excuse himself first?*
*obscure Jimi Hendrix reference
Jim, I think it’s a bold man who can pull off a day-glow pink accessory and still hold his head high in the lab. Well done, you.
Is it that obscure Jenny? I got it.
Quiet in the peanut gallery.
In my previous lab I aggregated (that’s my word for it) all the green racks. Not because they were lucky, but because
it’s not that easy beingI like green.Oh no, is this going to be a comment thread full of Ras-family-themed puns again? I’m so tired of that….
…Rap
(It was irresistible.)
We have to mek the most of all these jnk comments.
I’d like to point out,
EnaEva, that I’d successfully distracted everyone from the puns until you came long.It’s because I read everything at once. When I wake up, you guys have been posting for hours, but I see everything within a few minutes, so I just got a high dose of punnage and regular comments all at the same time.
Unrelated, but related to the post: lucky pipettes are totally reasonable. I had one that was not calibrated quite right, but everything worked with that pipettes interpretation of “50 ul” and “25 ul” (even though I could tell from the yellow tip that it was giving me too much). I didn’t want to switch, because I didn’t know how much I was actually pipetting.
[pang] …aaaand I just missed pipetting for the first time since leaving the bench. =(
Erk!
Oh, SNAP25
I’m going to be banned from commenting on “Mind the Ras-GAP”
Pipetting is very satisfying. My only problem when I did a lot of it was that I seemed to clench my toes in concentration, which made them cramp up.
(File under ‘why I was never tempted to work more on the lab than in the field’)
Clench your toes?
That’s just weird.
What can I say?
No toe-clenching in my salon, please. It’s bad for the complexion.
Eva, you could have measured how much your lucky inaccurate pipette was measuring…but I guess that takes the fun out of it.
You’ve come here to borrow her test-tube rack because you think it’s lucky?
What a WASp-ish thing to say.
And also, labs are full of mythology. Just ask anyone who’s done the “sacrifice, burn incense and chant mystically” protocol while setting up a PCR.
We had a protocol in the lab that we got from a Chinese person, with one step saying you needed exactly 888 microliters of water. It came with the explanation that that’s a lucky number, so they’d been using that instead of 1 ml.
Eight is my most favorite number! Our Chinese post-doc always does 8 minipreps instead of 10 — did so just today, as it happens. The X-gal didn’t work, so he’s taking a punt.
My favourite number is 47. I try to do 12 minipreps. I like punting on the Cherwell.
Actually, he decided to spritz more x-gal and IPTG onto the plates and leave them another night, so he could calculate the odds of success retrospectively while the minipreps were growing, to see if he could actually prep fewer tomorrow. We spent about ten minutes trying to find something in the office or lab that could be used as a spritzer. We almost went with the computer screen cleaning fluid dispenser, but it smelled like formaldehyde and we were afraid it might kill the bacteria. We ended up just pipetting it on and rotating the puddle around. Most inelegant – but it might just work.
Why 47?
It’s a friendly number.
What does one sacrifice to make a good PCR? The undergraduate?
Hey, it can’t hurt, can it?
A good DNA prep with all alcohol gone, estimate accurately and dilute the DNA before PCR, use 20-50ng. Never fails! If it is a tough standardization of a genotyping PCR I have a 10X buffer composition that has never failed me, YET, through >2000 different new PCRs.
2X PCR buffer composition:
32mM Ammonium Sulfate, 130mM Tris, 0.02% Tween20 pH8.8 (Filter sterilize)
Add dNTP’s (2.5/ 5mM) and 5.5mM MgCl2 when you use in PCR.
Good Luck!
Nothing. My ancient wisdom, gleaned from an old Iranian woman is that (1) one should spit in the tubes, (2) PCR should not be done in the summer, (3) Perkin-Elmer is a swear word.
Technology might have moved on from those days.
I suddenly wondered something:
“There was even one lab mate who felt he had to wear lucky pants for that big experiment.”
British pants or American pants?
British pants, I’m afraid. Make me giggle every time.
Is it just me or did we have a recent blast of literalism in here? Meanwhile, Bob, I think your protocol has a glaring oversight: you forgot the tongue of bat.
Heehee!
I always instantly think of the outerwear when I read “pants”, and much later realize that it can mean underwear. I could never live in the UK – or I’d have to wear skirts or dresses all the time. And everyone around me should also wear skirts or dresses, all the time, regardless of gender. Just never give me any reason to accidentally say “nice pants” in the wrong country.
Boring.
Things get a lot more interesting when you don’t wear pants at all. British or American. In public.
Please keep your pantless observations to yourselves, Richard. This is a respectable joint.
Eva, it only took me a few years to get
assimilated by the Collectiveused to a whole suite of US/UK difference. I would never use anything other than ‘trousers’, now, and I have also gone native on lifts, boots, bonnets, sliproads, sweets, roundabouts, rubbers, toilets, bangers and hundreds of other sundry items.There’s photos, somewhere.
From the other side of the fence, it’s very disconcerting hearing someone talk about rubbers in an American accent.
Sorry, mate!
You’ll be saying ‘cor blimey, guv’ next. Non-ironically.
Jenny wrote:
Eva, it only took me a few years to get assimilated by the Collective used to a whole suite of US/UK difference. I would never use anything other than ‘trousers’, now, and I have also gone native on lifts, boots, bonnets, sliproads, sweets, roundabouts, rubbers, toilets, bangers and hundreds of other sundry items.
Indeed. Just now I read a comment of yours on this post where you referred to a “biro”.
I learned the British and French word for eraser on the very same day when I was eight. At the American school in Morocco the students either had to take French or Arabic classes: French if you didn’t already speak French, Arabic if you did. For my British classmate that fall was her first French lesson ever. We just did some vocabulary that class, learning the names of things around us. When we went back to our own classroom, and rejoined with the kids who went to Arabic class, one of them asked the new girl what she had learned in French. “We learned the word for rubber”, she said. “Huh? No we didn’t.” “Yes, we did. Une gomme.” “That’s an eraser.” “… a what?”
What do you call it in Merkin, then?
We must find the relation between object use and meaning of the object used, is possible understood situation regardless of different language.
@RPG – Americans call them “erasers”, as do Canajuns. “Rubber” is rubber. “Biro” is never used on this side of the pond, it’s a “ballpoint pen” or just a “pen”.
I’d translate the rest of Jenny’s examples, but I’m too lazy so I’ll just leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Reminds me of someone in France who was trying to impress with his French-speaking skills. After sampling some wine, he wanted to say something about how he appreciated the taste of wine with no preservatives in, but guessed wrongly that ‘preservatifs’ was the equivalent French word.
giggle
But really, everyone probably prefers not to have those in the wine either…
moving swiftly along (and I clearly remember the first time I heard ‘contraceptive’ defined, too):
‘Bic’?
Reminds me of someone in France who was trying to impress with his French-speaking skills.
Probably was just an illusion. The prejudices have their limitations and
dwarfing the world.
‘Spuchs’!
“Bic” isn’t commonly used to mean “pen”, at least in this part of this country. I don’t think it’s widely used in the U.S. of A. either.
Is it time to start talking about “rubber cement” again?
Eva, if you can’t handle the pants, don’t even ask about the fannies.
‘Fanny pack’ just cracks me up. As it were.
ahem
Wint – Spuch is an Catalan surname no “rubber cement”.
I am mortified that I actually forgot that Biro was not American. This is precisely why I have to write all my novels in British.
It’s difficult to keep track, after a while! I have the same problem, in reverse.
Easier to read that way.
on lifts, boots, bonnets, sliproads, sweets, roundabouts, rubbers, toilets, bangers and hundreds of other sundry items
Richards> I’d translate the rest of Jenny’s examples, but I’m too lazy so I’ll just leave that as an exercise for the reader
oh… I tried to make make all of them out in AE but wonder if I got them correct. Nowadays I feel confused and my high school [English] teacher would be so disappointed in me since I have broken his cardinal rule “never mix accents”
I mean, I know elevator but I used to say ‘lifts’.And don’t even get me started on the fall/autum concept. one is much harder to pronounce…. :)
fall/autum concept. one is much harder to pronounce
And to spell, obviously. ;)
RW> yeah yeah, mock the non-English speaker… do you laugh at the person spilling soup too? ;)
Personally, I think that I forgot the n makes the point more clear :)
Åsa – Thank you my english is no good, but I don’t go boasting over there.
I only laugh at biochemists spelling the supe.
Åsa – sorry, I couldn’t help myself. And yes, I laugh at spilled soup, but only if the timing is humorous, and it’s not all over me.
There is a reason I often wear coffee-coloured pants, by the way.
I also need to consider what can bring luck to me…
At one point a few years ago I was seriously considering going to lab day wearing head-to-toe Coomassie blue.