Doofus of the year
The last time I went into a lab, it was to dig out a DNA sample I was sending to a colleague. As I rummaged fruitlessly, I became aware I was being watched through the door by one of the research assistants. He was rubbing his eyes in affected astonishment at seeing me in a lab coat.
This is for a couple of reasons. One is that, like almost everyone, the further I get from my PhD the less I do labwork. And the other is that a considerable amount of my work is now theoretical. The difference between these can be roughly described as follows. In the lab, I would spend hours, days, weeks nurturing and tweaking exotic combinations of chemicals and cells through absurdly complex equipment, before getting a print out and swearing at it. Now, I spend hours, days, weeks nurturing and tweaking exotic combinations of parameters and data through absurdly complex models, before looking at the screen and swearing at it. OK, that’s not quite true. Most of the models I work with are simple – nothing wrong with that, the best ones all are. My point is that there are similarities.
On the other hand, one of the reasons I was enthusiastic to get out of the lab was that I am simply not a natural lab worker. Through long application I have learned to set up and troubleshoot various simple molecular biology protocols, but this is after a considerable rate of failure. Nay, sheer idiocy.
Yes, I have committed my fair share of stupidity. I once forgot to put a filter paper into a machine and proceeded to use a succession of pumps to take the cells I had been lovingly looking after for a week, having isolated them from my own blood, and dump them down the drain. They were meant to stick to the filter paper, but they couldn’t very well do that if there wasn’t any paper there, could they?
The other night I was having a drink with my friend Seb*, who is a much more accomplished and experienced lab scientist than I am or will ever be. This is all the more remarkable because Seb has an almost preternatural ability to home in on and make dumb mistakes. We were swopping tales of lab stupidity, and he told me one to trump all of mine. He had been growing some E. coli, when he received a telephone call. He sat down to take the call, holding the flask of bacteria in his left hand. When the person on the other end of the line asked him what the time was, he proceeded to look at his watch and pour the flask of bacteria into his lap.
Of course this is not stupid in the way that, say balancing your centrifuge tubes containing DNA preps from two different cultures by pouring back and forth between them is stupid. And no, neither I nor Seb have ever done anything like that. But we know people who have.
I think Lablit needs to give room to this sort of scientific experience as well as the noble pursuit of knowledge. Not to celebrate it exactly. Maybe we need a competition, for the most impressive instance of a scientist acting like a total doofus. Jenny, the ball is in your court
*names have been changed to protect the guilty
Good thing I’d be exempt from the competition, because I’d probably win otherwise!
From my PhD supervisor “Do you use agar agar or bacto agar for agarose gels?”. We tried to keep him out of his lab coat too.
Thankfully, I was either perfect in the lab or I have selective amnesia.
A fantastic story circulated in my PhD lab. A story of a girl so stupid, it will instantly make all your mishaps look like well thought through experiments. It’s not really a mishap as much as a total lack of intelligence.
This happened before I joined the lab, and the only reason I even believe it to be true is that there were two people present to observe the mindnumbing idiocy, their stories matched, and they couldn’t have made it up even if they tried.
One day, the girl was completely upset, crying inconsolably. The lab tech asked her what was wrong. “I pricked my arm with the needle!” It was a needle with salmon sperm DNA, so not really toxic or dangerous. Why the crying? And she added “What if I’m PREGNANT!!??”
From a needle, in her arm, with DNA, from a fish.
Epilogue: she went to med school.
We also had a guy in our lab who threw flammable materials in the waste for incineration and didn’t know the difference between ethanol and methanol. He was there for a year, started at the same time as me, and then – wait for it – got into med school and left.
The worst I’ve done myself is along the lines of running a gel in 10x running buffer, making agarose gels with water instead of TAE, switching the electrodes, forgetting the blocking buffer, forgetting to treat cells before lysing them, leaving antibodies out overnight on the bench, forgetting to add the Amp to Amp plates, etc. I just did these things more often than most people, making me not so good at lab work overall.
Eva, thank you. I read that out loud at the meeting I’ve been attending and it got more applause than most of the presentations. Certainly more laughs.
It does remind me of the time I was trying to explain dilutions to a student and asked ‘What’s one thousand divided by one thousand?’ With no hesitation he replied – ‘three!’
And yes. He was a medical student.
Three? I guess it does have three zeroes…
I’m glad salmon-baby girl made people laugh. She also took her one good result home after her stint in the lab. Put the film of the blot up over her bed because she was so proud of having done a working experiment, and was surprised she had to give it back to the lab.