In which we fail to adhere

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Jennifer Rohn

I’m trundling along here in my new lab, still trying to get everything up and running. On the tissue culture front, things have been fraught for some time, what with delays installing the carbon dioxide and nitrogen tanks, with learning how to live in harmony with the experimental prokaryotes sharing the same air space – all while finishing off a few key applications for funding. Finally, however, I thought I had the system working smoothly, and was ready to perform my first real experiment: infecting bladder epithelial cells with patient bacteria isolated from fresh urine.

ChamberSlide

This is an absolutely straightforward procedure. I’m simplifying it a little bit, but in essence, you seed your cells onto a coated glass surface (such as the chamber slide pictured above), perform the infection and, some time later, wash the cells and then fix and stain them to inspect what the bacteria have done to the cells and vice versa. It will be my bread-and-butter assay, the basis for testing the genetics and cell biology of infection and also trialling some of the interventions we hope to discover and perfect. So in that sense it is also a bottleneck: the basic experiment without which little else can progress.

So I was pretty miffed when it became apparent that Step One of this simple procedure – the step so basic that you wouldn’t normally even spare it a thought – was just not working. In short, I could not get the bloody cells to stick to the slide. Now this isn’t some ultra-finicking primary cell we’re talking about here: it’s ‘T24′, a full-out transformed tumor cell line that’s been growing for yonks, that’s so happy in culture that you have to split it multiple times per week to keep it under control. These are cells that are obviously quite keen to adhere when the notion suits them. They are the Sultans of Stickiness. They have gorgeous, frilly pseudopods that fan out as they probe their environment and inch their way across the plastic surface, forming and dissolving sticky adhesions with ease as they go. I could gaze at them for hours under the microscope, admiring their luscious lamellipodia.

But on glass, the game was completely off. Many cells can’t grow directly on glass, so when that failed, I tried coating with poly-D-lysine, fibronectin, collagen, serum, and attachment factor. All failed: the cells remained round, clinging together desperately in increasingly large clumps that wafted around the slide like seaweed on the ocean floor before dying a tragic death.

The real mystery, however, began when I contacted the lab in Cardiff that had kindly posted me the cells in the first place. Yes, T24 grew just fine on glass, I was told. No, no coating was required. Yes, they were perfectly happy, in fact, on the precise make of slides that I was using.

So, Dear Readers – I throw the question open. What now? Can anyone help solve the mystery? Or will my line of research suffer…a sticky end?

(Sorry.)

Posted in The profession of science | 19 Comments

In which we’d like to acknowledge what’s-his-name

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Jennifer Rohn

It is human nature to feel that you’re at the center of the universe, with all of life and experience revolving around your fixed point of view like a lazy orbit of galaxies. On a larger scale, this biased perspective can influence groups of people, and indeed entire countries. Most of you are probably familiar with the light-hearted maps of Daniel K. Wallingford from the 1920s, showing particular cities and their skewed view of the rest of the world, which have been used as inspiration for dozens of similar efforts since that time (The Saul Steinberg cover for the March 29, 1976 issue of The New Yorker being possibly the most well-known example).

Scientific culture, in particular, can be incredibly parochial, especially if you are fortunate enough to do research in a country regarded as ‘world-class’. I have noticed a particular attitude amongst some American scientists, for example, whose words and behaviors can sometimes betray elitism. “Real” science is done in America, you see, whereas other countries are just mucking about and possibly filling in some useful blanks.

A great example of this was the reaction I experienced as PhD student in Seattle, when I was fortunate enough to secure my first post-doctoral position with one of my heroes at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute. Expecting universal excitement and approval from my professors, I was instead treated in many cases to puzzled looks and bewilderment. I will never forget the words of the most censorious: “It’s all very well and good to do a post-doc abroad, but you do realize it won’t count, and you’ll have to start over with another post-doc in America.”

I don’t know what was more shocking: that this guy would say this to my face, or that he would actually believe it in the first place. (For context, the person in London I was going to be working with was about a hundred times more well-known and famous than this guy. A quick Google search, incidentally, reveals that this censorious professor dropped out of science many years ago, whereas my first post-doctoral supervisor is now a Fellow of the Royal Society. Despite this, the memory of his opinion of the scientific calibre “abroad” still has to power to raise my blood pressure in a swift flash of remembered anger.)

There are of course many other examples of this. You’ll sometimes see American open-access crusaders making – unconscious, I assume – statements implying that all peer-reviewed papers are paid for by American tax payers. We’ve also heard stories about important findings in faraway countries that are not celebrated until a prominent Western lab rediscovers and publishes the same thing in a bigger journal. Even Sarah Palin’s incredulity about “Fruit fly research in Paris, France” is channeling some deeper anxiety about self and other.

But it’s not limited to Americans – I want to stress that this sort of bias occurs in every place, on every scale. When I worked in the Netherlands, my entire universe seemed to shrink to a tiny nation six feet below sea level, and suddenly the lab heads at the Netherlands Cancer institute were perceived to be the top dogs, looming much larger than overseas celebrity scientists, whereas my own situation at the University of Leiden was considerably more lowly. Within Leiden, our biotech environment was looked down upon still further by the surrounding academic labs. Here in London, I sometimes get the feeling that some of my colleagues view the rest of the United Kingdom – aside from Oxford and Cambridge – as being somewhat less lofty. The joke is, of course, that the true beacon is still America, even here: there used to be a joke circulating amongst British PhD students that you really needed a BTA (“Been To America”) on your CV to be taken seriously in your future academic job stakes.

Perhaps the parochialism that most infuriates me is the habit of geographically biased name-checking during scientific seminars. I’m sure you’ve all heard this: Joe Bloggs up on the podium, attributing every background finding to specifically named (typically American or local) lab-heads, until he gets to one particular nugget of information that is attributed to “a Japanese group”. The underlying implication is that this person is no one you need to know about or remember, because he or she performed the research in a faraway place where labs are indistinguishable from one another. But again, it’s all relative. At a recent conference I attended, a British speaker name-checked American and British authors, but referred to “a French group”. A few talks later, a French speaker name-checked French and German lab heads, but dismissed another finding as being from “The Chinese”. And so it goes – each person in his or her own universe, carefully drawing lines between self and other, between tribe and not-tribe, between those belonging in the inner named circle, and those doomed forever to anonymity.

Posted in Careers, Nostalgia, Scientific thinking, The profession of science | 41 Comments

In which necessity’s a MoFo

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Jennifer Rohn

Reality check and status update: I’m still a lab head, and I’m still poor.

But after knocking around in this new position for nearly three months, I have to admit that it’s rather good fun being poor. When you lack items that you’ve always taken for granted, you have to come up with all sorts of creative workarounds to do your experiments. I’m not exactly fashioning a Large Hadron Collider out of twigs, tin foil and gaffer tape, but until our next big grant gets funded, there are a few things I really need that we just can’t afford to buy outright.

As it’s Friday, I thought I’d share with you a few of our more ingenious inventions:

1. The poor man’s CO2 incubator:

As I described last time, we have to culture both sterile human cells, and human cells infected with bacteria. But we’ve got only one CO2 incubator, and the sterile human cells get priority. How then to culture the manky stuff? We can get around the CO2 problem by using media that’s buffered to be at the right pH under normal atmospheric conditions, and we have a regular dry incubator for growing bacteria on agar. What about the requirement for achieving over 90% humidity, though? In hunting around the piles of discarded junk we’ve been slowly getting rid of, I stumbled across a strange plastic container called a “Tommee Tippee”. I had no idea what it was at the time (now I know it’s a baby bottle sterilizer, bought in for someone else’s bizarre experiment a few years back), but without its inset, it looked perfect: a sealable container large enough to contain both a tissue culture plate and a bowl of sterilized water – all nestled on moist paper towels.

Tommee Tippee gets a new lease on lab life

It worked a treat! All our cells were still alive and happy the next morning. Sorted.

Price: Hardware: FREE. Consumables (paper towels, water): Approx 5p/week.

2. The poor man’s lid:

When I arrived at the lab, I was bequeathed a pile of nearly-new stuff bought off a previous researcher’s grant – the woman had moved on to a non-research job. One of these was a water bath – without a lid. Had it been lost? When I went on the manufacturer’s website to see if I could order a replacement, I realized immediately why the previous researcher had not ordered one: it was sold separately, and it was nearly the same price as the bath itself. After another rummage in the Pile O’ JunkTM, I came up with an appropriately sized piece of plywood; after a nice coat of aluminum foil, it was good to go.

We don't need no stinkin' lid

Result: a bit more prone to fungal infections than a real lid, and liable to tear, so we have to change the foil once a week. Still, preferable to sacrificing £150 quid!

Price: Hardware: FREE. Consumables (foil, to be replaced at weekly intervals): Approx 5p/week.

3. The poor man’s N2 tank (a cautionary tale):

OK, so liquid nitrogen is pretty damned cold: −321 °F, to be precise. You can’t just store your samples in tupperware or a Thermos flask. We had no recourse but to buy a proper 30 liter tank, but we went the second-hand route. This wasn’t easy: the UK is a very small country, and there is hardly anything out there. However, we eventually struck gold, purchasing our tank from a charming Yorkshireman called Steve, who was even nice enough to throw in a three-month guarantee, and a random set of storage canes for free.

All fine and dandy, except it soon became apparent that Steve hadn’t bothered to look inside the used tank before he shipped it off:

FunkyMonkey

But no problem: after throwing away the ancient samples of Funky Monkey, we were ready to place a fill order with our friendly neighborhood BOC rep.

Price: Hardware: £400 + VAT (retail price, about £3,500). Consumables (nitrogen): Approx £6/week plus delivery. Free vials of dead monkey hepatocytes: Priceless.

4. The poor man’s shaking bacterial incubator:

Although originally a microbiology lab, the room and kit I inherited had no provision for growing broth cultures of bacteria. Traditionally, you need an incubator with a mechanism for shaking flasks and tubes with extreme vigor so that your bad-assed bugs are properly oxygenated and give high yields. This one was a real bitch to work out, but with a bit of trial and error, my colleague and I cobbled together the following little beaut of a solution.
1. Take tiny 37-degree benchtop incubator and put it on its side on top of a magnetic stir plate.
2. Open the small metal hatch (of completely unknown function) that is now on the ‘floor’ of the incubator, in contact with the stir plate.
3. Sterilize a 25 mL Erlemeyer flask with a magnetic flea inside it.
4. Add water for test run; pierce foil with thermometer to monitor internal temperature.
5. Place flask inside hole left by open hatch (almost a perfect fit, coincidentally) and switch on magnetic stirrer.
6. Turn on incubator and tweak the unmarked temperature dial until a stable 37°C is achieved.

Hypothesis: a vigorous flea-stir will create sufficient oxygenation for the bad-assed bug cultures.

Result: Unknown as of yet – still waiting for my consignment of tryptone and yeast to arrive. But we did manage to keep the test water temperature between 36 and 38°C over a weekend. Unknown as yet whether the incubator will work reliably long-term upended precariously on its side.

Price: Hardware: FREE. Consumables (water, flasks, fleas): FREE.

Next time: Manual PCR in three waterbaths?

I think not.

Posted in Scientific method, Silliness | 16 Comments

In which we’re too close for comfort

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Jennifer Rohn

It was always going to be a difficult relationship.

We knew from the very start that they weren’t very well-suited. After all, they came from such different backgrounds. They were used to such radically different environments. They scarcely even spoke the same language, and they certainly held radically disparate views about the best way to lead their lives. Despite everything, we held hope in our hearts that somehow, they’d manage to set aside their differences and co-exist in harmony.

Alas, we were wrong.

Yes, phase one of an important sociological experiment in now completed in my lab, rather like a reality TV show featuring the world’s most incompatible roommates. And I’m sad to report that it’s Eubacteria, 1…

GramNegativeRods

…and Eukaryotes, nil.

CellCulture

So what do you do when you suddenly find yourself in charge of a lab that needs to culture both sterile human cells, but also bacterially infected human cells? And you only have one tissue culture room?

The room in question had been the domain of microbiologists when I arrived. Nobody was doing regular cell culture. There were two sterile hoods, both of which were used to culture infected patient cells – and for some reason, despite the presence of seven entire empty bays in the main lab, all nine undergraduate students were also using the same small room to streak out all their bacteria onto agar plates. The place was practically humming with prokaryotic vibes.

So I banished the students, the Petri dishes and the bacterial incubator, ordered the room and its hoods stripped down and organized a deep clean of every conceivable surface with detergent and bleach. After a week-long quarantine in which no one was allowed in, I imported a clean CO2 incubator, CO2 tanks, a water bath and a new fridge. The right-hand hood was to be for sterile tissue culture only, and the left was for experiments with bacteria in them – only when sterility was absolutely necessary. No reagents were to be shared between the two users. In addition, no bacterially infected cultures were allowed in the new gas incubator; instead I bought in some CO2-independent media and rigged up a moist chamber inside the dry 37-degree incubators for the microbiologists to use (using an old baby-bottle sterilizing chamber we found up on a shelf – don’t ask). Then and only then did I order my bladder epithelial cells, thaw them out and put them into culture.

There were a few unavoidable shared elements allied to the two separate workstations. We have only one centrifuge, so while I bleached a dedicated set of adapters for cell work, there was no avoiding the fact that the two camps’ samples would have to share the same air space while spinning. There is only one inverted microscope, too, so sterile and infected plates sit for a time on the same stage. And of course, the air inside the TC room might be wafting a few hundred CFUs more than the normal atmosphere at any given time. Nevertheless, I thought it we were all careful and considerate, it just might work.

I cultured my cells happily for a week with no problem – and then the first microbiologist came in to do an experiment in the left-hand hood. A particularly manky set of samples, I noted uneasily – so full of rods that the medium was cloudy. The day after, on a hot afternoon when the temperature probably hit 30 degrees inside the sunny room, I taught one of my colleagues how to split cells and charged him with maintaining the line from then on. Just before the Easter break, one flask was contaminated, and today, the other one succumbed as well. I don’t know if it was caused by the incompatible roommate problem, the heat, or simple newbie bad luck – after all, many beginners get contaminations in their first month at it. Too many variables to say for sure.

We’ll wipe everything down and try again. What else can we do?

Posted in Scientific method, The profession of science | 8 Comments

In which I object

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Jennifer Rohn

I’ve just written to my MP, Simon Hughes (Liberal Democrat, Bermondsey and Old Southwark), airing my feelings about the Government’s hasty and ill-advised bill to track email, web and Skype communications of any citizen without just cause. A copy of my letter is included below. If you live in the UK and have strong feelings too, you can write your own MP via They Work For You.

Dear Mr Hughes,

I am writing to you to express my fervent opposition to proposed Government plans to allow the Government Communications Headquarters to monitor the email and web communication of ordinary citizens, without a warrant. This a shocking breach of privacy – and even if it advances our security interests by a few degrees, it surely cannot be worth the cost to our dignity as a civilized society.

I can only echo what Davis Davis wrote in the Sun on this issue, as quoted by the BBC news website: “We already have a law which lets the secret services eavesdrop on suspected criminals and terrorists. The new law does not focus on terrorists or criminals. It would instead allow civil servants to monitor every innocent, ordinary person in Britain, and all without a warrant. If they want to see all this information they should be willing to put their case before a judge or magistrate. This will force them to focus on the real terrorists rather than turning Britain into a nation of suspects.”

I do hope I can count on your support.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Jennifer Rohn
Principle Research Associate, Department of Medicine, University College London

Posted in Politics | Tagged | 4 Comments

In which the light bulb’s on the other foot

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Jennifer Rohn

Following on from a discussion about light bulb changing jokes, I was bustling around my lab this morning, getting ready to cryogenically preserve some backups of my new bladder epithelial cell line. I was all set: I’d ordered the Mr Frosty container, prepared my freezing medium, and the five plates of cells were looking beautiful under the microscope. Earlier, I’d been assured that I’d find isopropanol in the flammables cupboard.

TabSealed: the Fort Knox of canisters!

The isopropanol was there, all right: a giant, Fort Knox of a metal canister that had never been opened. And it didn’t look like it wanted to be opened any time soon. I’ve never seen anything like it before, so I googled the two registered trademarks printed on the opening: Tri-Sure and Tab-Seal. This led me to a 2-page pdf instruction manual (and a few YouTube videos) on how to open the canister – with a dedicated tool called a “Tri-Sure universal plug wrench”.

Having just spent a month clearing out this lab, I couldn’t recall having unearthed anything that looked quite like said wrench. Neither could one of my old-timer colleagues, who I’d brought upstairs to poke and prod at the impregnable tin.

At this anxious juncture, we finally noticed the two unassuming workmen who’d been lurking in the corridor between the main lab space and some of its annexes, climbing up and down ladders and whistling quietly to themselves. They were, as it happened, changing lightbulbs – a few of the fluorescent strip lights, and the dodgy emergency exit sign. Noticing the impressive array of tools in his box, we asked one of them for help. He didn’t have a Tri-Sure universal plug wrench, and he politely brushed off my attempts to show him the instruction manual on my mobile phone – but nevertheless he radiated confidence. Sure enough, in about thirty seconds, after employing a screw-driver as a wedge and a spanner as a grip, the canister was open.

So though we still don’t know how many scientists it takes to change a light bulb, I now feel sufficiently clued in as to how many light bulb changers it takes to break into a Tab-Seal closure and save the day. Which really just goes to show that sometimes, a PhD is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Posted in Scientific method, Silliness, The profession of science | 10 Comments

In which truths are revealed

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Jennifer Rohn

There are many things I love passionately about science, but one aspect has got to be right up there in the top ten: the transformation of a deep unknown into perfect clarity.

I find it amazing that using simple lab techniques, we can start from something as obscure and inscrutable as this:

Infected urine sample

and with a few manipulations, arrive at its precise essence:

Bacterial urine culture

The upper image is, as you’ve probably guessed, a fresh urine specimen from a person with an acute urinary tract infection. The lower image shows what you get when you spin down the urine and take a closer look. The centrifugation collects the heavy sediment, which is enriched for bladder cells that have been shed from the afflicted organ as a sort of bodily defense mechanism – and these tend to be loaded with a cargo of bacteria clinging to their outsides or packed within. Once plated on chromogenic agar, various species of bacteria can take root, grow to macroscopic colonies and be identified by their colors – all based on the agar being spiked with various chemical substrates that interact in different ways with different bacterial metabolism systems.

The plate above shows that the culprits in this patient are largely E. coli (brownish colonies), with a smattering of Enterococcus (blue). Depending on what’s in the urine, these plates can reveal a rainbow of possible microbes. And by performing dilutions and doing a little back-calculation, you can work out the exact concentration of each species.

None of this is Large Hardron Collider-style stuff; the color tricks may be fancy and newfangled, but the rest of the general procedure is ancient by modern science standards. Still, I think that that sometimes the classic tricks are the most satisfying. Sure, from here we’ll use PCR and sequencing to identify strains from their ribosomal RNA content, and eventually fluorescence in situ hibridization to work out precisely which bugs are getting inside cells, but for me, this initial discovery step will be a lot more magical.

Posted in Scientific method, Scientific thinking, The profession of science | 10 Comments

In which I ponder the new Two Cultures

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Jennifer Rohn

Given the recent trendiness of science/art/lit projects, and the grant money and audience interest they can pull in, CP Snow’s notion of ‘the Two Cultures’ is starting to feel a little bit antiquated. But I do sometimes wonder if a new division hasn’t quietly slipped in to take its place: science vs. journalism. If you squint into the distance, you just might be able to make out the front line now: scientists ranged on one side, bristling with dry ice canisters and sharp pipettors, and the journalists, whose job it is to report on their latest breakthroughs, lined up on the other with veeery sharp pencils, each camp teetering on the edge of the divide and no shortage of suspicious glances and bitchy comments in between.

If the relationship has grown acrimonious, either acutely or chronically, it’s a real shame. After all, the two camps should rightly be commensal: science feeds exciting information to sell papers (or whatever the online/advert equivalent is these days), while journalists help scientists get the word out about their latest findings, thereby fostering public interest in the work (which could inspire everyone else to be happier with their taxes funneling in that general direction). But commentaries in the Guardian over the past year show that there is a lot of disagreement, whether it be for or against scientists being allowed to fact-check their media quotes, or scientists failing to understand the purpose of science journalism. The most recent salvo I’ve seen, already summarized, and defended, by Stephen Curry and Imran Khan, features Nature journalist Ananyo Bhattacharya suggesting that scientists had sold their souls to industry. The comment threads beneath all these and related blogs show that there are a lot of vigorous and diverse opinions out there.

What better time, then, to get together and clear the air in person? There’s nothing I like more than a good live debate, and fortunately Alok Jha of the Guardian – whose science section is shaping up to be the premiere online ring for civilized sparring – is guest-curating the perfect opportunity at London’s Royal Institute on 13 March: Scientists and journalists need different things from science: Discuss. We’ll get to hear from Bhattacharya, one of the chief stirrers (for whom I have a soft spot, ever since we worked out that he’d actually been at one of the grad student parties I lampooned in my first novel Experimental Heart), and Cardiff scientist Chris Chambers, who begs to differ with Bhattacharya’s opinion on fact-checking. Also due to speak are everyone’s favorite science blogger Ed Yong, and Fiona Fox, the head of the Science Media Center, all moderated by Imperial College science communicator Alice Bell.

I have a special interest in this topic because I straddle the divide; although I’m a practicing scientist, I also earn freelance on the side writing science news. It makes for a rather unusual sensation – I can feel and recognize, sometimes, the wariness of my sources down the phone line, but when I’ve got my journalist’s hat on I am going for the kill. On the other hand, when I give quotes to the press, I am sometimes nervous about being taken out of context. Occasionally journalists spontaneously ask me to check my quotes, which I always appreciate – but then, if a source demands to see his quote before publication, after I’ve interviewed him on-the-record, it can get awkward. In short, I can see both sides of the argument, and on a given day I’m not entirely sure who is right or wrong.

A little bird has told me that the organizers are very much hoping to attract a goodly number of media-hostile – or at least, indifferent – scientists, because that would be a lot more interesting than preaching to the converted. And it’s not just going to be a rehashing of old grievances: there will be a genuine attempt to try to improve the understanding between the camps, and possibly effect some sort of change for Good. So if you hate those over-inflated headlines, meddling subs and a cure for cancer in five years’ time, why not come along and have your say – and see what the other side really thinks, and why?

Posted in Science journalism, The profession of science, Writing | 2 Comments

In which they don’t make ‘em like they used to

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Jennifer Rohn

Even though I initially trained as a virologist, it’s a little known factoid that I did my PhD in an old-fashioned Microbiology department – back in the days when “microbiology” really meant “bacteria”. We virologists populated a small unfashionable pocket in an otherwise seriously old-school establishment. From the array of teams working on microbes as diverse as Agrobacterium and Salmonella to the annual Christmas pudding steamed in a 50-liter container in the main autoclave, it was an all-singing, all-dancing floor of no-nonsense bug work.

Flasks

To earn my upkeep for the first year, I had to teach large labs of medical students the rudiments of sterile three-zone streaking, Gram stains, blood agar and the IMViC coliform test. (For some inexplicable reason that none of the professors could explain, the E. coli residing in my gut were reproducibly indole-negative, so I couldn’t use my own commensals as a classroom control. Considering how these are traditionally isolated, I considered it a bit of a blessing.) Although my heart belonged to the Retroviridae, I took great pleasure in the rituals and manipulations of classical microbiology and passing these on to my students. Even today, I still use the three-zone streak method and a flamed platinum loop to isolate colonies for cloning, even though most of my colleagues just scribble bugs with a dirty yellow tip and do just fine that way. It may not matter for molecular biology, but it’s more about taking pride in the proper way of doing things.

So, two decades on, it’s good to be back in a Microbiology lab with a capital M. Although I’ll be working on the cell biological aspects of urinary tract infections, there is a significant component of pathogen investigation that we need to do in parallel. Things have definitely moved on since the IMViC test: we now have fancy test strips to assay for indole production and the other metabolic readouts used to distinguish similar bugs from one another – and the most amazing chromogenic agar, onto which you can streak an unknown mix of bugs and separate out strains in a rainbow of different possible colored colonies.

But amongst the high-tech kits, relics of our deep microbiological past lurk high on dusty shelves. I’m sure they’ve never been thrown away simply because they’re too beautiful. And I’m certainly not going to break that tradition. So we’ll keep working in the shadow of a more genteel past, harking back to an era when things were made of glass and tooled to precision specifications by craftspeople who took pride in the aesthetics of their products.

MoreFlasks

BitsAndBobs

But I’ll close on a mystery: what the heck is this?

Snuffer

It looks like a weird pint glass, but its curvature suggests that the opening is meant to be facing downward. It rather harkens back to the days of Joseph Priestley, who put glass jars over mice to see if they required something in the ether to survive. But I suppose it might also just be an over-engineered Bunsen burner snuffer.

All ideas welcome!

Posted in Nostalgia, The profession of science | 30 Comments

In which I sort it out

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Jennifer Rohn

All of my professional life, I’ve worked in affluent labs – in academic groups bolstered by multiple sources of grant money, or in a biotech setting flush with investor capital. More recently, I’ve enjoyed a generous personal consumables budget courtesy of my Wellcome Trust Fellowship.

The new lab, alive with potential

The fridges and freezers in these work spaces have been crammed full of reagents accumulated over many years. Old chemicals are often perfectly serviceable, which increases the value of such well-stocked treasure troves. In my previous lab, for example, I inherited a scruffy, foil-wrapped 15 mL Falcon tube of ethidium bromide solution from the previous inhabitants in Alan Hall’s group, circa 2004; I dipped into this tube for my entire 4.5 year stint – it worked beautifully – and left it behind for the next lucky user to enjoy. Another bequeath chez Hall were three full boxes of alphabetically arranged restriction enzymes from Aat1I to ZraI, most with expiry dates in the early- to mid-1990s. Despite this, the majority still managed to cut DNA with some degree of efficiency. In karmaic payback mode, I made sure to leave behind most of the unfinished chemicals that I’d purchased.

The upshot of working in a wealthy lab is that you can often think of an experiment and then start it a few minutes later. If you don’t have a particular reagent, there is usually an entire building of colleagues from which you can borrow – or an entire campus if you can be arsed to brave the cold. In my first novel Experimental Heart, I describe the detailed etiquette of this “scrounge culture”, illustrating the importance of your neighbors – and the contents of their freezers – in keeping the engines of science running.

For the past week and a half, I’ve been settling into my new home here in one of the satellite campuses of the main university. The lab I’m charged with starting up mostly from scratch is enormous – 7 entire bays and five side-rooms – but it is also almost empty (aside from great piles of junk that we’re in the process of clearing out, including some amazing historical glassware that is probably worth a few bob – but that’s another story). As a remote site, the campus is a cobbled-together mixture of orphan disciplines that struck out on their own sometime in the distant past, probably as overspill. As a result, there is plenty of room, but the trade-off is that individual groups are divorced from the rest of their departments. Our building, for example, is an eclectic mix of people who don’t have much in common – and that includes the material we work with. In fact, my lab will be the only biomedical research facility on the entire site.

All this means that there will be no popping across the corridor for a quick scrounge; instead, appointments must be made, journeys on the London Underground undertaken. Yet with give-and-take being so crucial for the scrounge culture, I foresee a problem: I may borrow from colleagues on the main site, but no one is going to travel up here to borrow something from me in turn. Hence, any scrounges will become increasingly one-sided, and therefore psychologically unsustainable. I fear we will have to get used to going it alone – and preparing well in advance for any contingency.

So here I am, getting to grips with things. The lab has tissue culture hoods but no CO2 mains or liquid nitrogen. Historically a clinical microbiology lab, we’re strong on Gram’s iodine, agar plates, haemocytometers and specimen jars, but entirely lacking in basic items like enzymes, the means to assess DNA and protein, and advanced imaging apparati. So we’re busy ringing up companies, getting quotes, sketching floorplans, liaising with the site manager.

It’s exciting to face this blank canvas, roll up my sleeves and start making something vibrant and exciting out of it. In fact, it’s made me realize that throughout my career in both research and publishing, the appointments which have proved most stimulating and successful have been those in which the culture or infrastructure needed sorting out, shaking up, reinvention.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Doctor is In.

She’s only wishing she’d brought along that scruffy Falcon tube.

Posted in Careers, Nostalgia, The profession of science | 24 Comments