{"id":1713,"date":"2009-04-08T23:59:10","date_gmt":"2009-04-08T23:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/04\/08\/lab_daze\/"},"modified":"2009-04-08T23:59:10","modified_gmt":"2009-04-08T23:59:10","slug":"lab_daze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/04\/08\/lab_daze\/","title":{"rendered":"Lab daze"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>People often ask me if I miss working at the bench. The answer is a resounding \u201cno, not even a little bit\u201d.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s not that I hated it at the time \u2013 there are much, much worse ways to spend a day, after all, and I&#8217;ve experienced some of them during a variety of soul-crushing summer jobs. The routine and repetition of doing 24 minipreps (a full rotor) for the fourth time in a week did get to me on occasion, and I always hated resuspending pellets and pHing solutions, but good labmates and music would offset the worst of it. And I had decent hands, it&#8217;s not like I was <em>bad<\/em> at it.<br \/>\nWell, not <em>usually<\/em>.<br \/>\nEveryone has off-days, and in fact a recent conversation in the pub turned to mistakes that everyone is entitled to make ONCE in their lab career without (too much) ridicule from their colleagues. We came up with the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>retrophoresis (running a gel backwards)<\/li>\n<li>using the wrong secondary antibody for your primary<\/li>\n<li>discarding the supernatant and keeping the pellet when you meant to do the reverse<\/li>\n<li>labeling the tube caps instead of the tubes and getting them mixed up<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>setting a gel without the comb in<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The last one made me laugh as I remembered a particularly ridiculous day in Glasgow&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nThere were (of course) mitigating circumstances. My doctor had told me to stop taking my usual antihistamines due to the risk of cardiac side effects (there&#8217;s a long history of serious heart problems in my family, although my heart apparently sounds just fine through a stethoscope). It being Spring, my next ride into work (by the river, then the canal, then through the woods) left me with very watery eyes and a sniffly, itchy nose. I popped one of my new pills (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.antiaging-systems.com\/a2z\/zyrtec.htm\">Zyrtec<\/a>, just say no) and got my restriction digest running. I then got on with the easy, basic, routine task of setting up an agarose gel.<br \/>\nIt was the smell from the microwave that alerted me to the failure of my first attempt. And then the opacity of what was supposed to be a clear solution. And then the fact that the tub of powder from which I&#8217;d (kinda) carefully measured out my \u201cagarose powder\u201d was actually marked \u201cpowdered milk\u201d.<br \/>\n<em>Oh well, easy mistake to make, they&#8217;re kept, um, nowhere near each other on the alphabetically ordered chemicals shelf. And in different coloured tubs.<\/em><br \/>\nYawning in confusion, I threw away the milk and grabbed the right tub and a clean beaker. Double checking at every stage, I made up my 0.8% agarose solution, taped up my gel rig, and poured in the cooling gloop.<br \/>\nComing back upstairs after an increasingly necessary coffee,<br \/>\n<em>Why am I so tired? I actually had an early night and a decent sleep last night, for once. Hmmmmm.<\/em><br \/>\nI stared in disbelief at the solid slab of gel, with no wells for my digested plasmids to be loaded into.<br \/>\n<em>This is not good. I am so confused.<\/em><br \/>\nSwaying gently, I started again.<br \/>\n<em>Agarose powder, check. TAE, check. Tape, check. Comb, check. (Yaaaaaaawn). OK, looks good.<\/em><br \/>\nAfter reading the same sentence of a new paper approximately 756 times, I wandered vacantly back into the lab and stared in complete bafflement at the results of my third attempt.<br \/>\nI&#8217;d set the gel to cool with one of the legs of the rig hanging off the end of the bench, so that the damn thing had set in a wedge shape, with the comb in the unusably thin end.<br \/>\nAt this point I did what I should have done after the first attempt, and went home to bed. Yes, at 11.30 am.  I have no idea how I managed to cycle home without killing myself; all I know is that I woke up at noon <em>the next day<\/em> with no memory of the journey, but with my helmet on the bedroom floor and my bike safely locked up in the back yard.<br \/>\nMy doctor said to go back to the original antihistamines, my heart would probably be fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>People often ask me if I miss working at the bench. The answer is a resounding \u201cno, not even a little bit\u201d. It&#8217;s not that I hated it at the time \u2013 there are much, much worse ways to spend &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/04\/08\/lab_daze\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}