With advancing years, I find myself taking on the annoying traits of the older people I used to secretly pity. Yes, the young really don’t know how good they have it, and no, the world would not actually be a better place if we all spent every waking hour wearing tie-dyed T-shirts, protesting about injustice and trying to save the whales.<\/p>\n
\nBut the opposite seems to be happening to me in my scientific life. When I was just starting out in research, I was fascinated by the rise of kits \u2013 those experiment-by-number packs which must surely represent the ultimate lure of scientific youth. The lab in which I did my Ph.D. research wasn’t prone to frivolous spending, but I would watch colleagues in richer labs with envy. These kits never opened doors to techniques that would otherwise not be possible: they just made things easier. It was the same reactions, packaged up in neatly nested bottles and tubes with a handy instruction manual. Typically, the kits involved some pretty major short-cuts, were often less toxic and, probably most admirably, freed you from the tedium of having make all the solutions yourself. Scandalously expensive, they represented all that our betters were constantly warning us against: mental laxness, fiscal extravagance and (the unuttered subtext) the worst possible species of moral weakness. What sort of real<\/em> scientist (we were told) would spend $300 on a kit when he could cobble together the necessary chemistry for a fiver?<\/p>\n \nUrban myths started to circulate, too, near the end of my Ph.D., about candidates caught out in their oral exams when being asked to explain exactly what Solution A did to Substrate B in that shiny blue box. Today’s youth, we heard, had become mindless drones, performing manipulations without truly understanding what they were doing. All of science would surely shudder to a halt.<\/p>\n \nBut, you know what? That never happened. The kits persisted, and increasing numbers of labs started to use them. Time is also money, and what is a better use of time, spending two hours fiddling with an analytical balance and a pH meter, or doing a real experiment with a reagent you prepped in half the time using a kit? I certainly don’t miss the toxicity: as someone whose trendy 1980’s jeans are probably still quarantined in a radioactive landfill somewhere near Bethesda, and who once spent a memorable couple of hours in a Seattle ER getting phenol rinsed from her eyes, I appreciate the clean, safe workflow of modern luminescent detection systems and nucleic acid-binding columns. And as someone who once wasted four months of her life because a technician inadvertently messed up the recipe for a simple buffer, I like the reproducibility and reliability of the pre-made solutions. I still do a lot of stuff the old-fashioned way, but I’m increasingly succumbing to the allure of ease that kits provide. I know they are more expensive, but I do wonder how much money they save in the long run. <\/p>\n \nAt the moment, I’m elbow deep in a wondrous new kit. After successfully completing the three constructs I promised to make for a colleague<\/a>, I’ve got a week left to recombine them into insect virus ‘bacmids’. I may have a Ph.D. in retrovirology, but I don’t know my baculoviruses from my backside. With the kit, I don’t have to. Yes, I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m just following the instructions line by line without having the slightest idea of the biology that will transform my miniprep DNA into one of these do-hickeys capable of creating transgenic insect virus particles. If it all goes to plan, it doesn’t matter. (I feel deliciously naughty just admitting<\/em> that in public.)<\/p>\n \nSo that’s me: the aging kit convert. I think I’m just too old to do molecular biology in a cardboard box in the middle of the road like my grandma used to. Is that so wrong?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With advancing years, I find myself taking on the annoying traits of the older people I used to secretly pity. Yes, the young really don’t know how good they have it, and no, the world would not actually be a … Continue reading