{"id":2480,"date":"2013-04-03T15:18:44","date_gmt":"2013-04-03T14:18:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/?p=2480"},"modified":"2013-04-03T19:18:59","modified_gmt":"2013-04-03T18:18:59","slug":"in-which-i-dream-of-going-viral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2013\/04\/03\/in-which-i-dream-of-going-viral\/","title":{"rendered":"In which I dream of going viral"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a post I wrote over on the Guardian<\/a> yesterday, I made the comparison between early-career researchers and unknown musicians:<\/p>\n

But how does a younger scientist with a shorter track record, whose “excellence” might not yet be apparent, get his first grant? It must be a lot like getting your first break as a popular musician \u2013 except unlike a bloke with a guitar, scientists can’t film themselves on YouTube performing experiments in their bedroom to garner a reputation. Instead, they need grant money to produce the results that get turned into papers, which in turn prove their excellence \u2013 but without the grant, they’ll never get off the ground in the first place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But then I got to thinking: wouldn’t it be totally cool if one could<\/em> go viral being filmed doing an experiment in one’s bedroom? This is the closest I’ve got to it so far:<\/p>\n

\"Plasmid<\/a><\/p>\n

Our satellite campus doesn’t have an ultracentrifuge, so I recently had to gatecrash a friend’s lab in the Royal Veterinary College across town to do a plasmid prep. If you’ve ever perched in someone else’s digs, you know it’s always a little bit awkward – you don’t know where everything is, and inevitably you’re using up precious bench space that belongs to one of the resident students or postdocs. Ultimately, you end up feeling underfoot and in the way. <\/p>\n

By the end of the prep, after doing the final spin and seeing that lovely white pellet of DNA at the bottom of my tubes, it was approaching 6 PM and the thought of sticking around for the final pellet-dry and resuspension steps seemed tedious. Worse, I wasn’t even sure I could get out of the building after hours without an escort or a pass.<\/p>\n

So I took everything home and finished it off in my living room. (Don’t tell Health and Safety about that G&T on the side.) I was only really nervous when I was riding the Tube, wondering how I would explain the contents of my rucksack if I were stopped and searched by the London Transport Police.<\/p>\n

“It’s just Green Fluorescent Protein,” I could imagine myself pleading as I was hustled away in cuffs. “GFP in a mammalian expression vector. To turn cells green. So you can see them.”<\/p>\n

“Tell that to the judge, lady.”<\/p>\n

But seriously. Could one actually film oneself doing an experiment real-time in one’s bedroom in any way that was meaningful, and would anyone be interested? <\/p>\n

What do you think, Dear Readers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a post I wrote over on the Guardian yesterday, I made the comparison between early-career researchers and unknown musicians: But how does a younger scientist with a shorter track record, whose “excellence” might not yet be apparent, get his … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,19,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-and-safety-gone-mad","category-science-funding","category-the-profession-of-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}