We biologists tend to speak of “wet” science as the gestures we carry out at the bench, involving buffers, enzymes, culture media and other such waterlogged reagents. This is less science than engineering, perhaps, but it is fun, and I miss it. Molecular biology involves the transfer of microliters, cell culture the transfer of milliliters, bacterial work sometimes the transfer of liters, but I miss a second-nature look for the meniscus. It’s cooking, and I don’t have time for that at home either for the time being.
Actually, cooking does not take so much effort – planning the meal does. And that is true in science as well. The planning part is the dry science, and the real added value of any thinking I do, as much as practical hands-on lab experience is also useful when helping my students think of an appropriate set of quantitative RT-PCR primers. Jenny’s agenda is another example of this sort of dry science.
But ordering reagents, offering urgent corrections on a colleague’s manuscript and on a proposal to the French delegation to the EU Framework Programme 7 Health initiative, and arranging dry ice shipments of cells is beyond dry. It’s desert. I can derive no sustenance from these.
Hence a blog post, instead.
Hopefully you will soon stumble upon an oasis!
I used to get into this argument with the obligatory one person in the lab who didn’t want the radio on. “I can’t think with music on”, she’d say. I’d reply that you shouldn’t be thinking in the lab, you should be thinking and planning in the office, and then just coming to the bench to carry out the planned experiments. No thinking involved when all you’re doing is adding predetermined amounts of different reagents to little tubes and then cooking them for predetermined lengths of time and predetermined temperatures. Would she like us all to stop talking, too? (Actually, she did).
(I should add that I had other serious issues with this person beyond the radio, hence my reluctance to play nice. I was not the only one who had issues with her. There’s one in every lab…)
Indeed, Cath!
Although musical tastes and tolerable volume do vary…
It wasn’t ever all that loud, and she was 3 or 4 bays away. What really bugged everyone was how she would march up to the radio and yank the plug out of the wall, glare at everyone, and march off again without saying a word…
’ the obligatory one person in the lab who didn’t want the radio on.’
Summary dismissal should be legal for such an offence.
Mr. Darwin, alas, in France summary dismissal is only possible for criminally legal offenses.
Cath, I can only imagine the reaction she would receive here, given that people play their music off their computers! The “one” in our lab just makes snide remarks and, possibly, may be biting a tongue at other times.