Author Archives: Jennifer Rohn

The heroine of my third novel has a problem with filing: she is incapable of committing to a concrete decision. Instead of compartmentalizing her papers into simple, broad categories, she has arranged her reprint collection into a drawer of hundreds … Continue reading →

Tedium: it has its uses. Biological research is a complex activity requiring many different approaches. We spend a lot of our time making tools – modified plasmids, say, or a transgenic cell line – and the rest of the time … Continue reading →

Over the past few weeks, I’ve stepped in to help a colleague in need. I can’t go into any details, but let’s just say that owing to an astonishingly pedantic visa renewal technicality, a particular country’s immigration policy has necessitated … Continue reading →

I have always been fascinated by the untold narrative behind the precise dryness of scientific papers. So much is unsaid: the surges of triumph, the stupid mistakes, the bitter failures that litter the road to any accepted manuscript. Chronology is … Continue reading →

It’s Friday in many parts of the world, so I feel compelled to report the results of a very important experiment just performed by Rohn and colleagues. I don’t know about your institute, but our building manager occasionally distributes freebies … Continue reading →

OK, I admit it: Gravity’s Rainbow was even less popular a choice for Fiction Lab than I could ever have imagined. Book clubs, I am reliably and belatedly informed, are supposed to be about good clean fun, fairly easy reads … Continue reading →

Scientific methodology seems to come in distinct phases for me. One month I’m knee-deep in biochemistry; the next it’s all confocal microscopy on cells, or annotating images onscreen. This is part of what I love about research: the familiarity of … Continue reading →

I think there must be a gene for it: the innate ability to think about biological cause-and-effect as an abstract pathway instead of as concrete machinery. Classical geneticists do it effortlessly. Their vocabulary is old and rich: synthetic lethal; partial … Continue reading →

Remember the days when at the end of a postdoctoral stint, you could copy all of your files – documents, spreadsheets, presentations, data images and email – onto a couple of 5¼ inch floppy diskettes and sashay out of the … Continue reading →

It’s a sunny holiday weekend, and a young woman’s thoughts turn to murder. Gastropod murder, in particular. I’ve been doing a lot of gardening over the past few weeks, and it’s all-out war. In addition to the usual complement of … Continue reading →