{"id":675,"date":"2008-10-11T20:05:09","date_gmt":"2008-10-11T20:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2008\/10\/11\/in_which_science_becomes_a_high_craft\/"},"modified":"2008-10-11T20:05:09","modified_gmt":"2008-10-11T20:05:09","slug":"in_which_science_becomes_a_high_craft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2008\/10\/11\/in_which_science_becomes_a_high_craft\/","title":{"rendered":"In which science becomes a high craft"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have written <a href=\"http:\/\/network.nature.com\/people\/UE19877E8\/blog\/2008\/06\/11\/in-which-the-italians-also-pass-muster\">before<\/a> about my admiration of the roll-up-your-sleeves ingenuity of scientists who, when faced with an obstacle, choose to create a <a href=\"http:\/\/network.nature.com\/people\/UE19877E8\/blog\/2008\/06\/02\/in-which-i-admire-an-act-of-ingenuity\">solution<\/a> with materials to hand. But truly great things have been afoot in my laboratory last week. <\/p>\n<p>\nIt all started on Monday with the buzz of a power drill emanating from a disused bay on the other side of the room, still heaped with the junk and detritus of its decamped former inhabitants. When I followed the noise to investigate, I found that a space has been cleared amidst the broken equipment, expired plasmid prep kits, bottles of solutions with dates from the 1990s scribbled on their faded tape labels, and the bashed-up old pipettors of another era.<\/p>\n<p>\nAt this improvised workbench, one of our Italian post-docs has been modestly and methodically crafting a microfluidic chamber from scratch, the sort that is normally machine-tooled to allow the study of living cells subjected to laminar flow. Preparing moulds for the tiny chambers is usually expensive and fussy. But our post-doc found another solution on the internet that he was keen to try. Apparently you can use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shrinkydinks.com\/\">Shrinky-Dinks<\/a>, a substance that, as most Americans will recall from their childhood, can be cut out and then baked in the oven to produce smaller, hardened, clear-plastic ornaments. (To get the full effect of the unfolding story, you have to say the word <em>Shrinky-Dink<\/em> with an Italian accent. Hint: the word <em>Dink<\/em> has two syllables.) <\/p>\n<p>\nBut some clever engineer who didn&#8217;t have the budget for a clean room recently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rsc.org\/Publishing\/ChemTech\/Volume\/2008\/01\/Shrinky-Dink_microfluidics.asp\">discovered<\/a> that you can make perfectly serviceable microfluidic chamber moulds using &#8220;only a laser printer and a toaster oven&#8221;. The ink patterns \u2013 or something that you score onto the proto-Shrinky-Dink polymer yourself \u2013 shrink to a microscale relief with heating. Thereafter, you pour polydimethylsiloxane onto the mould, cure it and \u2013 <em>allora<\/em> \u2013 peel it off.<\/p>\n<p>\nOur post-doc has been experimenting, drilling, baking and gluing for days now, and just yesterday he finally got his prototype \u2013 cobbled together with a few bolts and some sawed-off syringe barrels \u2013 working well enough to create the required turbulence-free flow of cell culture medium into his chamber. We crowded around in awe, watching the pink fluid ooze into the tiny little canals on the plastic. I felt a stab of envy, being wholly unable to imagine myself ever creating anything like that. I wouldn&#8217;t even know where to start. <\/p>\n<p>\nBut I am just happy to be around people who do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have written before about my admiration of the roll-up-your-sleeves ingenuity of scientists who, when faced with an obstacle, choose to create a solution with materials to hand. But truly great things have been afoot in my laboratory last week. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2008\/10\/11\/in_which_science_becomes_a_high_craft\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675","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=675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}