Every time I walk by, I feel guilty and look the other way. Not that this helps: I can somehow detect that my neglect is noticed, even when I deliberately take a different route to avoid detection. I can almost sense the wistful disappointment pressing against the back of my head as I carry on down the corridor, the silent pleading for me to turn around. Just once. Just for a little while.<\/p>\n
\nI have not done any serious lab work for nearly three weeks, and my empty bench is breaking my heart. There is a glass partition between the lab and the hallway to my office, you see, and my bench in the closest one to the window. I can see it all there, waiting: my four Gilsons, ranked in order from p1000 to p2; my beakers of sterilized Eppendorf tubes, my stacked boxes of tips. My lucky forceps and my ravishingly beautiful platinum loop. My row of solutions, gently aging now to a fine vintage, their nominal pH gradually decaying into poetic license. My microfuge, my vortex mixer; the long grabby nameless contraption I use to fish out tubes from the liquid nitrogen tank. Timer, pens, calculator. Boxes of fresh polished microscope slides and coverslips; the crusty old plastic lids I use over and over to wash filters. The stained white coat, shapeless and discarded over the back of my stool.<\/p>\n
\nOf course what I am doing instead of benchwork is also called science. I have been finalizing a co-authored paper for publication, fiddling with text and an evil Adobe product that shall remain nameless. I have been processing images for another co-author which involves doing the same unspeakably boring series of commands on ImageJ over and over and over for hours on end. (Note to self: learn how to do macros. Further note to self: freeing up enough time to learn how to do macros will require setting up some macros: entire chain of logic explodes.) I have been dreaming in the dark confocal room as the microscopic eye slices through my fixed cells with glacial slowness and I twiddle dials to alter false-color pixels of gain and offset. And I have been watching timelapse movies of my cells seething across the screen, throwing up blobs and speckles of actin in bizarre configurations. Soon, I will have to start finalizing my screen annotation for publication, which will weld me to a spreadsheet for a good few weeks.<\/p>\n
\nBut in the wings, I have a new gene that is begging to be understood better. I have made wonderful tools that need to be played with, and I have an intriguing hypothesis that I would like to test. But I need to finish what I’ve started, tie up loose ends and clear the decks before I can dive back in. <\/p>\n
\nSo for now, I sit at my desk with a cup of bad coffee and try to ignore the singing. Maybe someone should lash me to the mast<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every time I walk by, I feel guilty and look the other way. Not that this helps: I can somehow detect that my neglect is noticed, even when I deliberately take a different route to avoid detection. I can almost … Continue reading