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\nAll change: the new lab moves in<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nThe room’s history pressed down on me. The outgoing lab head was a well-known scientist, a tough act to follow and difficult to forget with the momentous surname scribbled over everything not bolted down. To judge by the silence, broken only by the hypnotic hum of fume hoods and refrigerators, I was probably the only person on the entire floor. This was it \u2013 I finally internalized that my odd career move was more or less irrevocable. At least for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n
\nAnd then one of the Ph.D. students arrived, followed by a post-doc, and another. The dreamlike humming was replaced with laughter and chatter: an entire lab to unpack and set to rights. We were all in it together, wondering where the cold room was, how to order notebooks, on which shelf to store this or that box. I began to accumulate new possessions: pipetting devices, pens, pipette tips, colored tape, a box of nitrile gloves, Eppendorf tubes, test-tube racks. The tools of my trade, still as familiar as my own body. I tried not to let anyone see me turning them over and over in my hands like precious artifacts as I set up my square-meter of bench space in the designated bay, negotiated with my neighbor about placement of gas burners and Vortex mixers. With no accumulated detritus of several years to unpack, like the others, I was put in charge of unloading and alphabetizing the lab chemicals, agarose to citrate to glutaraldehyde to potassium nitrate to sodium chloride to yeast extract, all lined up in neat rows. I had forgotten the way labs smell, acrid with the hundreds of substances only thinly contained. I had forgotten how many times you have to wash your hands, how an entire day can go by without actually sitting down.<\/p>\n
\n \nSo now I am a scientist again. How do I feel?<\/p>\n \nStrange. I lost track of how many times the new institute denizens asked me that routine question, So what lab did you come from?<\/em> No straightforward way to reply, though I refined my spiel with practice, trying out this or that tack until the balance seemed right. I was amused at how many people seemed horrified: Why would you want to come back?<\/em>, as if I were some prodigal representative from the World Beyond. (_The same reason you are here_, I yearned to reply but didn’t.) With only one day in the lab before the weekend, mostly spent arranging things, HR induction, touring the building, drinking cocktails with the rest of the institute, it all feels rather dreamlike now. Until I actually perform my first experiment, my occupation will probably retain this sense of being a bit hypothetical. Yet my editorial past feels equally unreal now, four years shed like a flimsy skin. <\/p>\n \nWhere does this leave me? Wide-eyed, ready for whatever might come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This past Friday, my interrupted career as a scientist resumed. My first day in the lab came equipped with its own intrinsic shock absorber, coinciding as it did with the entire lab moving into a new institute \u2013 all of … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.lablit.com\/images\/Gilsons.jpg\")
\nHome is where you hang your Gilsons<\/strong><\/p>\n