Some of my happiest moments have happened in the dark.
I have a thing for darkrooms. Perhaps it was a bias promoted in early childhood; my father is an artist and during my formative years he was in the process of transforming from a lithographer and painter into a purveyor of older forms of photography. The smell of fix and developer used to waft out of the basement of our house in Ohio when he was puttering around, and to me these essences are associated with comfort. What could be more magical to a child than images slowly appearing underwater in a tray of smelly witch’s brew? One of my earliest memories is seeing a row of wet transparent rectangles hanging by my mother’s clothespins from a line spun across the darkroom area, bathed in a red glow – the safest sort of light I can imagine.
I didn’t do a lot of dark room work myself until I was in my final year of university. I was taking photographs of plant cell spreads and karyotypes and was trying to get that perfect exposure under a vast, rickety camera contraption. If you asked me to operate one now, I’d have no idea, but I have a strong memory of having to wave my hand over the things I was shooting in order to ‘dodge’ the best exposure, and of mixing up all the developing solutions myself, just like my Dad used to do. (Why didn’t we send these off to be printed professionally? I have no idea.)
In graduate school and beyond, I practically lived in darkrooms. I remember the first time I felt comfortable enough to march right in to a place and unpack my film without a safelight – that amazing proficiency you eventually command with performing tasks blind. The sounds take over: the rippling noise of a film as you shake it out of its heavy foil bag, the snick of scissors clipping the corner for orientation, the beeping and hot breath of the X-OMAT machine. They may have automated the process, but the solutions – decanting through stained tubing into the sink – still smelt exactly the same.
In my department we had only normal doors, so going to develop your film was a solitary experience, though proceeded by a cheerful queue of people down the corridor, clutching their metal cassettes and film boxes as they speculated about how disastrous or glorious their results would be that day. About halfway through my graduate stint, Enhanced Chemical Luminescence suddenly hit the scene and there used to be a lot of tension between people like me doing radioactive Southern blots and sequencing gels (in and out in a jiffy) and those who were so paranoid and unfamiliar with the new technology that they insisted on mixing their reactions in the dark – thereby making the rest of us fret in the queue outside for much longer. I remember the first time someone showed an ECL-generated film at a lab meeting, and we marvelled at the exposure time scribbled on its top: “2 sec”.
It wasn’t until my first post-doc at the Cancer Research UK that I encountered the rotating-barrel door of a modern multi-use darkroom – what a brilliant idea. Rolling into the red-lit room (another characteristic sound, like the rumbling of a train) was a revelation: four people stood inside, calmly working in tandem – at least, I eventually worked out that there were people there as my eyes adjusted to the light. I soon determined that the composition of people in a darkroom determines how chatty they are, and the introduction of a new person can catalyze either gossip or silence. I’m not ashamed to admit that I sometimes conducted social experiments on my own colleagues. Something about the darkness changes the way we interact; it’s like being in a lift, but somehow nowhere near as awkward because no one can see your face.
Above all, darkrooms have been the scene of a thousand little personal scientific dramas. Nearly every major result I ever gathered culminated in that tense, two minute moment waiting for the finished film to emerge from its slot and fall noisily onto the plastic surface of the X-OMAT machine. I’ll describe the most exciting moment of all another time, but even the trivial controls and pilots have all engendered that same heart-pounding attack of mixed emotions: anticipation, fear, longing, wild confidence and crushing pessimism.
Recently I’ve been happy to find myself in a biochemical phase in my lab work. Cell biology is intriguing and can result in beautiful images, but somehow a scientific result doesn’t seem real until you see the bands on a Western blot. The people in my institute aren’t that chatty in the dark, I’ve found, but yesterday evening I shared the room with a congenial man with a New Zealand accent who was quite willing to pass the time. (In that quirky way of large institutions with few darkrooms and an itinerant population of students and post-docs, I actually have no idea who he is and would probably not recognize him if I passed him in the corridor today – the red reflection on his shaved head wasn’t exactly diagnostic.) In addition to talking about the weather, discussing a controversial program about the genetics of race and intelligence he’d watched on telly the night before, and opining that the more pessimistic you feel, the more likely you are to have a good film result – so not true! –, this unknown man also taught me an incredibly useful lesson: you don’t have to wait until the machine beeps to feed in the next film!
“Just stick it in on the opposite side and away you go,” he told me, gallantly demonstrating with his own film when I proved too nervous to try it out myself. I needed empirical evidence, you see. When the next guy rolled into the room (a taciturn specimen who killed the chatty atmosphere in a microsecond), he asked if the machine had beeped yet and Dr Kiwi let me tell him the good news.
It’s nice to know that after forty-something years in darkrooms I still have something to learn.
Admit it. You wrote this all because of that first sentence.
Busted.
You have to admit it’s a blinder, though.
Have you read ‘Earthly Powers’ by Anthony Burgess? It’s a (fictional) memoir of a playwright and it starts, more or less, ‘It was my eightieth birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ahmed came in to tell me the Pope was on the telephone’, and goes on to say ‘You see, I haven’t lost my gift for an arresting opening’.
I should tell you what I thought it was the first time I saw the delivery end of an X-OMAT. Anyone care to take a guess?
Stairway to heaven?
Henry, I’m so sleep-deprived that I read that as “I was in bed with my catalyst”.
The machine was a huge old thing built into the wall, and the darkroom was next to the coffee room. Films came out, and if you were sat there in the coffee room reading Nature you could reach across and check out someone else’s results, especially if they were doing multiple experiments. This was before ECL, so the inconvenience of not being able to check an exposure level wasn’t relevant on the sub-week timescale.
Anyway, when I joined the department and first saw this thing, I thought ‘That’s an odd-looking coffee machine’. It was weeks before I discovered what it actually was.
Oh, I don’t fancy the idea of someone else seeing my data before I do! Because, really, there is nothing uglier than an ugly Western blot. What a strange system!
(I thought you were going to say it reminded you of a horse’s backside. Shows you where my brain is.)
Very strange. Yes, I agree: letting someone else see your data first is a bit like letting someone else see your dirty laundry.
My favorite kind of bad result is the Western that perfectly confirms your hypothesis – when viewed upside-down or in mirror image. Which is why it’s important to label your lanes before running to the boss.
Oh yes. Or at least arrange the blot in such a non-symmetric way that either of the possible results will be immediately apparent.
Above all, darkrooms have been the scene of a thousand little personal scientific dramas.
I’m certain you could write as true a sentence without the word “scientific”.
Now Heather, this is a family blog.
Although when I was writing this post I was wondering whether I could come up with a good euphemism for it, on par with that wonderful expression “mile-high club”.
‘The developer’s club’?
bugger, move that apostrophe one character to the right. Thanks.
How about ‘the over-exposed club’?
‘Dodged not Burned Club’?
The Red-Light Club?
Oh dear. There it was, a nice conversational post about darkrooms and science, with a little bit of double-entendre engendered by the first sentence… and now it’s all gone smutty.
My first real experience in darkrooms was doing in situ hybridization mapping to human chromosome slides, using tritiated probes. This required taking the slide into the darkroom, and in complete darkness (no red safelights here, thankyewverymuch) dipping the slide in liquid emulsion, letting it drain just enough, then
wrapping it upmummifying it in light-proof stuff. Several weeks later, it would be unwrapped and developed (manually) in the same baths of icky chemicals Jenny describes above.The coolest thing was looking at the developed slide under the microscope, and seeing not the “real” data, but the occasional linear trail of silver grains – presumably left behind by an errant photon zipping through the emulsion.
It wasn’t until later that I got to experience the whole X-ray developer/autorad thing, in a large darkroom, barrel door and all. The technician who maintained the developers (plural) was blind, I kid you not one bit.
More entranced by your artefacts, eh? I like the sound of that.
Mmm. Part of this was that those events were uncommon – I guess the photon would have to shoot along in the plane of the slide rather than through it. Also, the “real” data from those slides involved staring down a microscope and counting hundreds of silver grains, deciding on the fly whether they were or weren’t touching a chromosome, and if so, on which band. Much less immediate than the artifacts.
Speaking of artefacts, does anyone know what causes those weird ECL baubles (manifesting as an absence of signal) that tend to show up in whopping great bands, thereby marring your publication-quality image? I’ve heard several theories including ‘bleaching’ and ‘saturation’, but none makes sense. Especially as it’s the shorter exposures that exacerbate the problem.
Richard, I did something similar until a painfully short time ago with 35S-labelled probes, which is how I ended up radiation safety officer for the lab for a five-year stint. If that sounds like a prison term it’s no accident.
Ah, the art of blindly applying liquid photographic emulsion that you’ve gently melted in a warm-but-not hot waterbath in an even layer to precious cryostat sections while trying to draw off any eventual bubbles… my goodness, we have learned a lot of useless skills, haven’t we? Dodging and burning, too, for that matter. At least an artistic photographer might still use that skill.
Henry’s got my vote.
Jennifer, I don’t have an answer for you, except that we’re really happy with the Odyssey system using infrared emission spectra. Probably Molecular Probes could step in and teach us all a thing or two.
Alas, Heather, our HoD refuses to buy us one of those! He thought a third electron microscope would be more useful.
Biochemists are the oppressed species in our institute.
“Dodge”? “Burn”?
Those are menu items in Photoshop, right? 😉
*runs from Jenny’s dad
You can run, Winty, but you can’t clone tool in real life. Unfortunately.
I’ve not much, or indeed any, experience in photographic dark rooms. But I did go to Tate Modern’s new exhibit recently – the latest in the Unilever series. It is a very big and very dark room. An interesting experience.
Re. funny names for scientific groups, I like the Acid Fast CLub which is all about mycobacteria, and the London Muscle Grop . Several years ago one of our IT guys phoned me up asking whether it was OK to publish some web pages he’d been asked to put up for the London Muscle Group – he thought it might have been some kind of naturist bodybuilders club. I think he was disappointed when I told him it was a scientific group.
Lovely evocative post, Jenny (sorry I’ve been so slow to catch up).
Reminded me of some of my own experiences in the darkroom – long days and nights at the synchrotron in the early 1990’s loading fresh film-packs and then unloading and developing the exposed ones. These were diffraction patterns, of course, not gels or blots. Those days are gone now, thanks to the arrival of image plates and now the fabulous CCD detector. I can’t say I miss them, though your piece recalled to mind the smell of place and the sting of the stop solution under my fingernails.
beautifully written. brings back my days as a graduate student.
Thanks, Stephen and Pamela.
Frank, is that Tate exhibition where someone got seriously injured recently? I thought I remembered reading about it. Not everyone excels at moving around in the dark…
Yes, I think there was some problem in the first week it opened. You have to move v-e-r-y slowly.
I can only commandeer the dark in places that are already familiar by touch. The Tate’s been up to a lot of things lately that would never be allowed in the States, for fear of getting sued…
lol…dr. kiwi. how scandalous!
A guy serenaded me once with Californiacation by the RHC in the dark room while we were waiting for a western to develop. I was glad he couldn’t see me trying hard to suppress my laughter…
Damn…that’s desperate!