\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.lablit.com\/images\/Irobot.jpg\")
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\nBut spare a thought, if you will, for the tool-making \u2013 the necessary foundation for all those dreams. The unglamorous activities that will never, in themselves, lead to fame and glory. Indeed, the repetitive manual labor typically required to make tools is considered to be a lower-caste occupation, often ferreted out to undergraduate interns or outsourced altogether, and scarcely worth more than an acknowledgement in most papers.<\/p>\n
\nI have to admit, though, that there are times in my life when I have not minded taking on such thankless chores personally. When existence in that messy parameter space outside of the laboratory known as ‘real life’ becomes overwhelming for whatever reason, the manipulations of science can be a safe haven. But the catch-22 is that it is precisely when things are particularly turbulent that it difficult to concentrate on higher intellectual pursuits. The mind slides away from rigorous analysis, from creative brainstorming, from the angelic highs of dreaming up the perfect hypothesis and how to test it. So in those cases, mindless tedium can becomes a solace of sorts. <\/p>\n
\nI have a vivid memory of one night in the lab back in Seattle when I was a graduate student. It was about three in the morning, and \u2013 following an explosive romantic break-up \u2013I’d found myself almost instinctively getting on my bike and heading for the one place where I knew I could find safety and distraction. <\/p>\n
\nThe lab at three a.m. is your kingdom. I recall putting an Offspring album onto the CD player as loud as it would play and working up about a hundred minipreps from pelleted bacteria that I’d been accumulating in the freezer. (I still can’t hear the song ‘Come Out And Play’ without flashing back to that night.) And I found that there was a fearsome joy in the ritual and thoughtless annihilation of so many tubes, cranked through conveyor style: lyse, precipitate, neutralize, extract. Pipette, mix, decant, spin. The DNA crashing out of solution in satisfying white puffs, collecting reassuringly at the bottom of the tube, going clear on drying, then gelatinous in dissolving. Everything controlled and entirely predictable. Quantitate, digest, elecrophorese, photograph. Thoughts somehow both focused and entirely absent from the world in that haze of discrete little steps. <\/p>\n
\nThat night, I was a robot \u2013 and I needed to be. Equally, in the past week, my cloning work has been the calm in the eye of a little storm, the point of focus that has kept me getting up every morning to incremental nanosuccesses as the new tools slowly progress down that belt. In a few days it will all be over but the sequencing, and my normal experiments will resume.<\/p>\n
\nPerfect timing. At least I hope so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tedium: it has its uses. Biological research is a complex activity requiring many different approaches. We spend a lot of our time making tools \u2013 modified plasmids, say, or a transgenic cell line \u2013 and the rest of the time … Continue reading