In which I lose my tubes, and other manifestations of lab rustiness

When you’re a young scientist, it’s the done thing to poke gentle fun at the lab head for being out of touch. For example, when I was a graduate student, we’d all pretend to be horrified whenever our boss, wearing that rare white coat, approached the bench to actually do an experiment. After all, once you reach a certain point in academia, you spend most of your time holed up in an office, meeting with your researchers, writing grants and papers, and dealing with an increasing amount of admin.

I try to pop by my lab as much as I can to chat with my team and see what’s going on first-hand. But sadly, with my full teaching load, I haven’t done an experiment personally for many months.

Next week, as term is winding down, I’m going to treat myself to a small stint in the lab. My new grant kicks in on 1 January, but I’d like to get a head start before the holidays.

Today, I ventured down to the lab to locate some supplies I’d need for setting up a cell culture experiment on Monday.

And was completely lost. Not only has it been a while since I’ve done any lab work, but I realized that I haven’t done any since we moved here this summer. Hence I didn’t know where anything was. Where were the lab coats? The gloves? Which fridge contained personal boxes? Where, in the right fridge, amid the unknown landscape of boxes and tubes, were my own personal boxes?

It’s  a jungle in there.

I managed to orient myself in the end, but it’s a sobering reminder of how quickly one can drift out of touch. And it’s not just the lab layout or basic manipulations either. Techniques move on too. When I last did any serious genetic manipulation, it was all small interfering RNAs. Now the world is abuzz with CRISPR-Cas9 – a methodology I know about only in theory. Imaging modalities move quickly too, as do sequencing technologies. It’s no secret that we oldies rely on young researchers to keep the entire lab abreast of the latest developments.

Dear reader, I found my tubes. And my lab coat.  And I remembered that particular flick of the wrist you need to wrestle the metal canes out of the liquid nitrogen tank – bonus points for not burning myself in the process.

So not entirely past it yet.