For the microbiologist who has everything.

Kitting out a new cell biology lab on a very limited budget isn’t easy. So recently I’ve immersed myself in the strange and colorful world of online second-hand lab equipment. Unbeknownst to most researchers who work in rich, multi-grant-funded labs, there is a brisk trade out there for used scientific machinery. It makes a lot of sense: why spend £3,000 on a brand-new liquid nitrogen tank when you can pick up a good-quality used one for a tenth of the cost? There’s a lot of junk out there, but amidst the clunkers I’m stumbling over a few finds – tanks, if you will, that little old ladies only drove to the supermarket once a month.

But the marketing and display of some of these websites leaves a lot to be desired. This one is my personal fave thus far:

…might be me.

It’s my last day in this lab. Like the good citizen I am, I have tried to remove all traces myself and make space for my eventual replacement in this itinerant dance that science policy folks like to call “the Churn”. I’ve handed over important or useful stuff and thrown the rest away – except for a few lost pockets of grey area in between, which join the hundreds of other piles of similarly grey stuff that may one day be thrown out when the current denizens have “churned” to such an extent that our initials have long since been forgotten.

In about an hour, I walk out and never come back. And in a few weeks, a new lab adventure will begin.

Boring lunchtime seminar?

Want to distract yourself, but forgot your notepad?

No problem. Just borrow a pen.

My illustrious colleague Dr X shows you how:

>gi|geeky_picture|gb|silliness| Poster hanging on wall of university refectory
FASTAPASTATHEBREAKFASTOFBIOINFORMATICIANS

Lost? All is revealed.

You know you’re a hopeless geek when…

…you get served an onion ring like this, and all you can think about is bacterial plasmid replication forks.

It’s holiday time. Yesterday I finished up my work in the lab, put my cells to bed, cleaned off my desk and headed down to South Kensington for jazz and cocktails with the Labliterati. On Monday, I’m off for an entire week.

It’s always a strange feeling, taking time away from the lab. You get into these rhythms — piling on the experiments until you hardly have time to eat, sit down or take comfort breaks. Their sudden absence is a shock to the system.

But I’m not complaining. We’ll be camping near the North Devon shore. I’ve got two books to read for Fiction Lab: Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman and State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. I’m bringing my fly fishing tackle, a notebook for musing about Novel 4 (which is three chapters in but in need of some advanced sub-plotting), a few decks of cards. Maybe my sketchpad and pencils.

I’m sure my cells will be fine without me.

You know it’s time to wrap up your post-doctoral stint when your hard-drive is full.

I’ve been in this lab a bit more than four years, having bought a MacBook Pro soon after my arrival. This morning, I tried to perform a software update and was informed that the start-up disk did not contain enough room.

I think this is a fitting metaphor for something.

By Nik Papageorgiou.

There is a wonderfully helpful spirit in the scientific community, especially when it comes to sharing reagents and tools. If one lab develops something handy and publishes it in a paper, interested readers need only to drop an email to the lab head and request a sample for their own experiments. (In fact, most journals deem such assistance mandatory, though I don’t think your average researcher needs threats as an incentive to share the love.)

While sometimes such requests fall on deaf ears, in my experience, being ignored or fobbed off is rare. So if everyone is all friendly and touchy-feely about providing stuff promptly, how then can we measure relative kindness?

Clearly, some help is more helpful than others. When it comes to plasmid DNA,  it is relatively straightforward for a researcher to make copies from a tiny, forensic amount of the original. Because of this, it’s become trendy in recent years to send out DNA, not in a goodly amount in a tube, but as spots dried onto a piece of filter paper. This spot can be rehydrated and zapped into E. coli bacteria, which will create copies of the plasmid which you can then liberate from the bugs in large quantities.

No big deal, right? But it does take at least two days, and a few hours of your life manipulating bugs, plates and columns at your bench. Whereas if someone sends you a lovely big wodge of DNA, and you only want to do an experiment a few times, you’d be able to perform it straightaway without faffing around with the cloning step.

Earlier this week, I requested a plasmid from a very big, very famous American lab. I was charmed that the professor answered personally, on the same day he received the email, and that he immediately instructed his post-doc to send it out. I was further charmed by the friendliness of the post-doc, who emailed to say he’d sent it Fedex that very same day.

It had not escaped my notice, though, that if the plasmid arrived today, and there was a goodly amount, I could perform my experiment this afternoon and have slides ready on Monday, which in turn could be imaged and analyzed before I went on holiday that coming weekend – giving me a significant edge on my paper revision deadline. I wouldn’t dare have asked for more than a dried spot, but I was sort of hoping the post-doc would sense my desperate, fellow-post-doc-angst vibes across the many miles between us.

And so it was that the Fedex package arrived. And I knew immediately how the DNA had been sent — the package was flat as a pancake. I fondled it optimistically, but there was definitely no tube in there, not even one of those weeny PCR-sized tubes.

Ah well, I thought philosophically as I roused the bugs from their dormant sleep in the -70 freezer. It’s definitely possible to be too greedy. The lab in question probably sends out hundreds of plasmids a week, and it’s just not practical to feed the five thousand. In fact, the post-doc was doing me a favor: I have way too much on on Monday, and another experiment probably would have tipped the balance.

Besides, I like bacterial work: it reminds me of my lost youth as a bona fide microbiologist.

So let’s hear it for the kindness of strangers, something that definitely makes the scientific world go round.