Numerous urban studies have characterized ‘The Broken Window Syndrome’: the notion that abandoned buildings with smashed glass tend to attract more of the same abuse. The phenomenon, it turns out, can be extrapolated to pretty much anything. In his excellent book ‘Blink’, Malcolm Gladwell summarized nicely how defects in one’s environment – graffiti in the streets, for example – can cause people to make a snap judgement about the value of the environment, which in turn attracts crime and further vandalism. Whereas the simple act of cleaning up can lead to a decrease in such negative activity.
Cause for reflection How important is a clean slate?
I’ve often mused about how messiness in the lab can influence one’s experimental processes. It’s definitely true that when my workspace is a disaster area, I find myself cutting corners, rushing a little bit, doing things less carefully than I might otherwise. Similarly, when everything is tidy, I enter into a zen state and become one with my samples.
But this is a pretty rare occurrence. Usually, left to our own devices, the lab gradually degenerates to a chaotic state: styrafoam boxes pile up, all possibly surfaces attract clutter, cardboard freezer boxes accumulate hundreds of rejected, forgotten miniprep tubes numbered one through twelve; the waterbaths secrete algal mats and the incubators, white films of unindentified fungus.
So about twice a year, we have a big lab clean-up. Most people show up at the appointed time (although it seems there is always at least one who rocks up just as the show is over, exclaiming with mock dismay, You’re finished already?). It’s usually a very cheerful affair. This time around we were feeling particularly ruthless; the disposal highlights include:
- several dozen blue boxes full of spent, encrusted miniprep reagents
- a bottle of DEPC-treated water, circa 1987
- about two hundred empty pipette tip boxes (sent for recycling)
- one broken electrophoresis apparatus, complete with fossilized agarose gel inside
- an ancient centrifuge with an adapter for six tubes, whose bench footprint was about one square meter
- four dozen rusty scalpel blades
- three bottles of LB agarose sporting about two inches of iridescent purple and green fur (“Life finds a way.” – Michael Crichton, R.I.P.)
The most exciting moment was when we decided we needed to dispose of all but one of each of the dozens of aged bottles of concentrated hydrogen chloride and sufuric acid huddled around the pH meter.
“Acid to water or water to acid?” I yelled out to all and sundry. (_Acido, acqua; acqua, acido?_ , the Italian contingent muttered amongst themselves to general bafflement). A consensus was eventually reached on the institute rules for such matters, and the toxic bottles were dispatched forthwith. Most satisfactory, as my friend John Cairns) likes to say.
That evening, the elves came to clean and polish the floor. The next morning, the lab gleamed, and everyone walked around in awe. I know from experience that the spell will last for a few days: surfaces will stay tidy, sloshed solutions will be promptly wiped away, tip boxes will be filed on the benchtops at precise right angles. I am positively revelling in my experiments: even my handwriting is neater in my notebook.
But it’s only a matter of time before someone smashes a window.
Elves? You have Elves? Round here we only have chickens.
J. R. R. Tolkien once paused from a big office clear-out to write a letter to one of his sons. Piles of documents on every surface and all over the floor and general chaos, he reasoned, were signs of a man at work, what he called ‘literary or philological preoccupation’.
A clean desk, on the other hand, is the sign of a sick mind.
That’s what I keep saying.
The clutter problem is especially acute for me when I am trying to write. I can just about do lab work, but fiction proves almost impossible unless my environment is calm and tidy. I can revise fiction anywhere (say, looking at hardcopy on a crowded tube train), but the initial creation phase is very delicate, for me.
A certain somewhat famous scientist in these parts was once well chuffed when the Prime Minister, visiting the lab of her supervisor at the time, remarked on her messy desk as being a sign of a hard-working person.
I, on the other hand, being a stroppy git, made no attempt to shake said PM’s hand. I still haven’t forgiven him for NAFTA, among other things.
Also – I’ve probably told this story before, but my favourite thing in the lab where I did my PhD was a bottle in the freezer marked “Monkey serum, 1972”. When my supervisor moved to another university across the country in 1996, I made darn sure that thing got packed, believe me. 😉
Also, I worked in another place where (a) the staff never vacuumed or mopped the lab floors, just used a buffing machine. Net result: shiny floors, and heaps of garbage and dust bunnies hidden under the benches. The cleaning lady also used to mop the carpet in my office, no word of a lie.
hahah. I remember at one particular place the floor used to be polished without being cleaned first.
It was a bizarre as you might imagine. Insects preserved in amber had nothing on this.
My last lab, the PI was a good 8″ shorter than me. He was a slob too (at least in the lab). I am a neat freak with bad OCD. I would (almost) literally follow him round shutting cupboards and closing drawers behind him. He would declaim that I was killing his mojo, I would retort that did he want me taking a week off with concussion or a broken knee if I walked in to/stood up into an open cupboard/desk drawer.
I had my area of the lab, same as when I was a grad student, demarcated with coloured tape (orange), fresh bench-diapers, my pipettes in volume order, my tips in volume order, everything where it should be and a lab timer pre-set to the most common values: 3/5/10/20 minutes.
Hah. My timer was set to 10, 30 and 120 minutes. I also kept the Gilsons in volume order; I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to do that.
When I’m using colored Eppendorf tubes for minipreps, I line them up in rainbow order.
(Unfortunately, this is not a joke.)
Is there any order to speak of?
Actually, I’m jealous you managed to get the full set. We could never find orange ones.
ROYGBV, obviously. (They don’t make them in indigo so I skip that one.)
Ha ha. That reminds me. We had a little microfuge that was broken such that you could spin it with the lid off. This meant you could put primary colored eppies in it, and spin, and make the other colours.
Cool, eh?
I only seem to get points for the volume-order pipettors. But I’ll have a ready-made opportunity to set things right again shortly, which I’ll probably squander on my home environment and have no energy left for the lab. Especially as I’m moving back into an occupied laboratory.
I would (almost) literally follow him round shutting cupboards and closing drawers behind him
When my sister comes to babysit she goes round our house straightening the pictures on the walls. I want to throttle her.
It only just hit me how sad it is to have pre-sets on your lab timer.
Where is the spontaneity?
Ah, that’s what you get when some bastard has used your lab timer and reset it.
We’ve got some possessed timers in our labs that go off randomly. It adds a bit of frisson to the daily grind.
My stack of unread papers has been compared to that of a Nobel prize winner of my boss’s acquaintance, and declared to be both larger and messier.
@Jenny, rumours of someone setting other people’s timers to random times when they’re not looking so that they go off unexpectedly are completely unfounded.
No matter what they say, the size of one’s stack surely matters.
I’ve got a friend who decided only to print off the first page because she realized she never had time to read more than the abstracts, and that way she could fit approximately 25x more papers onto her desk.
The stack of papers (which I also have, like everyone else) reminds me of an interview with an A&R person from a record company (remember those?) I once read. He basically said, “When a band sends me a demo, I put it in a box. When the box is full, I get another box.”
I admire this gentleman greatly.
Also – what kind of fancy-ass timers do you lot have? Preset times? When I was in the lab, they had an on-off button, and you had to set the time every single time you used it.
Also – coloured Eppies?
/goes off mumbling about whipper-snappers
P.S. I have used really ugly dark brown Eppies before… designed for light-sensitive reagents I suppose.
Were they the sort of timers with sand in them?
Heh. No, they were the sort that when they run out of batteries, you spend the rest of the day digging in drawers in the lab looking for replacements.
I had a timer with four different times on it. I usually only used one or maybe two at a time, so I’d set #3 and #4 to different times each day, and then surreptitiously press the start button inside my lab coat pocket if my supervisor called me into his office for one of his “quick chats” or if I needed to pop in there to get the answer to a simple Yes-No question (average duration of said office visits: 47 minutes).
Brilliant strategy, Cath. I once had a labmate who faked a bout of nausea to rush our of her boss’s office, but that requires good acting skills.
Two of my bosses regularly get calls on their cell phones when in seminars or group meetings. If it weren’t for the Morse feedback in the speakers in the former situation, I would have entertained doubts much longer.
One colleague of mine used to get so bored with group meetings that–
but no. I’ll save it for a blog post.
ACID TO WATER!!!!
This is the one thing I remember from my Chemistry degree.
For years I always added tea to milk rather than vice-versa, but Science Has Proved that it doesn’t matter. Another illusion shattered.
For years I always added tea to milk rather than vice-versa, but Science Has Proved that it doesn’t matter. Another illusion shattered.
Which proves that Science isn’t everything.
“They’ll find out!” I stubbornly proclaimed. “Someday they’ll find out that weeds are essentials. Man wasn’t made for such – such neatness. He has to have unimportant clutter to relax in!”
Ingathering: the complete People stories of Zenna Henderson. Return
Technically milk is a bit acidic, so adding to tea is entirely above reproof. Though I don’t think anyone’s ever been injured doing it the other way around.
Acid to water is easy to remember because it’s alphabetical. It’s amazing: I can’t remember my own phone number but I still recall all those stupid mnemonics from my undergrad biology/pre-med classes.
I can still remember the order of the cranial nerves thanks to a mnemonic taught to me by my A-level biology teacher.
On Old Olympus’ Topmost Top, A Fat-Arsed German Viewed A Hop.
Definitely, add tea to milk. Never mind anyone or anything else, I KNOW that adding milk to tea tastes inferior.
The perfect combination, after some years of experiment, is Darjeeling tea added to skimmed milk.
ugh. Skimmed milk. I mean, why?
@Jenny: I never remember my home phone because I never dial it. My mobile number on the other hand is ludicrously easy to remember.
I am happy to report that in our “corporate” lab -we have all styles (slobs to neat-nicks). Everyone has about half a bench (some a whole bench or two – usually based on seniority and slobbery). It’s great though when we have an audit and “all-of-a-sudden” the lab looks like Jenny’s picture.- it is always neat as a pin.
So which end of the spectrum are you, Craig?
One of my favorite mnemonic pertains to taxonomy:
Kings Play Chess On Friday, Grimly Sadistic.
I seem to have a blind spot when it comes to mnemonics. My mind doesn’t work that way.
I did however once memorize all the fish cranial nerves for an ‘A’ Level practical… but ended up merely having to draw the gills.
I never even took a college chemistry course, but the mnemonic I learned (which works much better in New York where I grew up) was:
Do what you oughta, add acid to water
(and, of course, us Web Scientists just google “Acid Water” and get the answer :-))
James, that’s super. In Ohio some people say “oughter”, so it works even better!
Oh yes, I meant to shout that out like Eva did – Acid to Water. Easy way to remember – drop the beaker of HCl into a sink full of water. The other way around doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless your lab plumbing is radically different than most.
Also – “King Philip Can Order Five Great Sandwiches” was the version I learned for taxonomy. And on a related note, “A before O, or up you go” is useful when welding.
@They have to defeat the slack.
@They have to recycle.
@They have to recycle to defeat the slack.
about mnemonics
(expensive internet. Typing minimal)
Jenny: ahh… coloured eppies… I remember asking my old prof for that and my assistant supervisor scoffing and telling me that there were no point in colours at all. Still would like that though.
I was taught; SIV (a girls name) Syra i vatten. The sad thing is that VIS = wise (person) so that would be somehow contrary …water in acid is less than smart 😉
RW: So, what does that mnemonic mean?? KPCOFGS = Kingdom, Phyla, ? , Order, ?, ? and species? I am curious. Obviously I need to repeat the taxonomy rules…
Thank you Eva is good link.
Lazy lost to curiosity. I found out and am still amazed that I forgot class, family and genus. Ah well, I (re)learned something today 😉
Alejandro, that’s actually another website of mine. So thank you!
Is the clasical nomenclature Åsa (Linnaeus, you remember), do not confused.
The only mnemonic I remember, from age 11 or so, is the worst one of many I was told I would never forget as long as I live. There were two in Latin class, and I’ve forgotten the other one, though it finishes “…per, trans, post; (hm hmhm mm mm) Accusative’s the most!”
Think football cheerleaders:
A ab de
Cum ex e
Sine pro prae
Take the ablatae
And there are plenty of others which didn’t make it into the cheer. They might have altered the meter, but for sure none rhymes with ablative.
Asa, class and family I can understand, but how could you forget genera?
I am a bit shocked. 😉
Jenny; I am old soon. I am told you loose memory when you get older 😉
The funny thing is that I will never forget phylum as a word but I almost never remember any examples of them. Firmicutes sure, but others… really??
so much for science … from my history class in high school, i can still recite flawlessly the order of Chinese dynasties from Xia to Manchu (or Qing)
But can you do it backwards, Ralph?
Asa, there’s at least one you ought to memorize: Chordata. I always feel everyone should know which phylum they’re in! Otherwise, you have no…class. What’s more, you’d be well out of…order.
Sadly, “My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets” no longer works.
Our high school biology teacher once got us to make up our own mneumonics for Kingdom-Phylum etc. I have no memory of what mine was, I just remember that some of my friends came up with “Kinky Paul Copley Often Forgets to Groom his Sideburns”, Paul Copley being another teacher in the department… now there’s one mneumonic no-one in that class will ever forget!
Oh, and being from York, I was taught “Rowntrees Of York Gives Best In Value”, yea even within smelling distance of said factory.
Jenny> I guess there is that 😉 And I have class! Just not sure on which type of class…..
then of course that brings my mind to sub kingdoms and sub phylum and the likes… and then I race into the whole “what is a species really??” and “what’s the difference between species and sub species” [bacteria talk mostly now].
ah well, I’ll just try and re-educate myself. Class or no class, that is the not question, but rather which class?