Alan and Alex’s first day in the lab:

(See more on YouTube!)

So today I showed up, half an hour early – and too nervous to go inside to reception, so I decided to wait outside for Alan to arrive. When he got there we sneaked in behind someone who had a swipe card, and soon Jenny came down to meet us in reception. As we went up into her lab for the first time we noticed an interesting smell … I was quite glad I had a blocked nose, as apparently it was quite bad according to the others!

I really enjoyed what we did today. Jenny explained how to do our experiment and how it worked, but before we could put on our lab coats and leap into action we had to learn how to use some of the equipment. Practicing with water, we learned how to use the pipetteman and the pipetteboy (Alan kindly demonstrated why the pipetteboy had that name by pretending it was a gun). We then tried (and I personally failed) to open flasks with one hand; I watched with envy as Alan calmly unscrewed the lid and expertly put it back on, whereas I could just about manage to take the lid off but failed to put it back on again. Jenny had to keep holding my right hand down, but I got it eventually.

But after just a little messing around we got straight to work, with Jenny helping a lot of course. Today we knocked out a gene in a cell, and then on Friday we get to see how the absence of the protein that this gene coded for has affected the cell. In brief, we took some cancer cells (and by some I mean probably several thousand) and we mixed them with a solution to separate them from each other and from the dish they were on. We then had to count them using a slide with a grid, which in itself was no problem at all – but alas, after having done no maths for several weeks we had fun trying to work out how much liquid we had to add/take away to get to the concentration we were supposed to have. Needless to say we eventually got the right concentration, but not before we discovered that we actually got it wrong the first time when Alan added his cells and there were way too many!
Finally after centrifuging, incubating and lots of pipetting RNA and some medium from plastic tubes onto our slide, we were able to put our slides away and start the 3 day wait.

I had so much fun today – I got to do a real, proper lab experiment! Things that are probably the most every-day in the world to a lot of scientists, but it was completely new and an amazing experience for me, knowing that this wasn’t just a practical in school but some real lab work! And it was particularly funny when Jenny kept randomly appearing with her video camera filming some of our stressful yet successful endeavours. There was one special moment where Jenny accidentally dropped a bottle of saline solution, though to be fair, she had severe jet-lag. It was only when I got home when I realized how absolutely exhausted I was! But I can’t wait to go back tomorrow.

I’m a sixth-form student studying three sciences and maths for my A-levels (tough but fun, I promise!).

On the 9th of August I am going to start five days of work experience at Dr. Jennifer Rohn’s lab in UCL. I’m really excited since I’ve never worked in a proper laboratory before; I’m interested to find out what sort of experiments take place, and see how the kind of lab experiments you see on TV compare with the reality.

I’m really looking forward to meeting all the scientists who work there, I’m hoping they’ll be fun and interesting to talk to, and that perhaps one or two will let me interview them for my extended project so that I could collect some different opinions on my project topic, which is future treatments for cancer.

I’m really glad that I have this opportunity to work in a lab, not only because it is good experience but also because I’d be working with a woman scientist, which is what I hope to be! And it’s inspiring to see what I can aspire to and what I might hope to achieve some day.

I hope that across the five days I’ll gain not just general experience in working in a laboratory but also some insight into what steps you have to take and what sorts of qualities you need to have in order to get a paper published or to get things done. And of course find out just how long you spend waiting for results to come in.

Ever since I was little I’ve always wanted to do science and now I know it really is the best thing to go into, so many opportunities are opened up to you. I really enjoy studying science, particularly biochemistry, and I’m hoping to do doing a course in Medical Engineering at university. I know that Dr. Rohn’s lab is more Cell Biology than engineering, but I know I will be able to gain a lot of experience and knowledge from working with her and her colleagues.

I am a student currently studying for my a-levels, I have been given a wonderful opportunity to work with Dr. Jennifer Rohn at UCL. I will be assisting her work on cell shape and movement. I’m interested in cancer research and gene therapy and I am writing a related project, it will be great to see some of the research science looking at the fundamentals of biology first hand.

Over the next week I hope to gain knowledge in the practical workings of a lab. I expect there to be busy moments where everything has to be done as quickly as possible, also quieter times where patience is required. I look forward to meeting the scientists who I imagine being like Dumbledore; wise, omniscient and noble. The lab itself will be extremely clean with big white surfaces and whirring machines.

I chose to work in a lab to gain some understanding of scientific research. I plan to study medicine at university and I am interested in what the research side of medical science is like.

I look forward to starting work and hope that I will be able to contribute in some small way to the project.

Our second comic from Nik Papageorgiou (click through for full size):

Who stole our graduate student trainees?

They were last seen huddled around the teaching lab bench, learning how to extract genomic DNA. Next thing we know, they’d vanished without a trace, leaving only their white coats behind.

I haven’t noticed any other riders of the Apocalypse recently, but there have been a few more Drosophila than usual crawling around the lab.

Does that count?

In the wake of the world cup I have been indulging myself with Jonathan Wilson’s wonderful book “Inverting the Pyramid”. I am far from the first to praise it, but nevertheless feel that I should do so here in case anyone might be missing out.

I came late to football. I grew up in England in the seventies and eighties, and for every day in late spring when I watched the coverage of the FA cup final from start to finish, there were ten when the news was made by the thugs and hooligans who saw the sport as simply an excuse for violence. What was worse, I was a weedy asthmatic child blessed with all the coordination of a beetle on its back, with Parkinson’s. I was also among the youngest in my year at school, and with a father who never saw any sport as being worthy of his attention. So I was never going to be a star in the playground. In the idiotic manner of school sports, I found myself again and again playing in goal, on frozen winter days on a full size pitch, watching my school mates far away chasing the ball like a shoal of fish incompetently gulping at a chunk of bread. And all this was in Cornwall, where it is fair to say the opportunities to see the game at the highest level were limited.

The change came years later when I was doing my PhD in London. I found myself in pubs with the game on, and my eyes were drawn to it. Then, one morning I was making myself breakfast when I realised, with something of a shock, that the first thing to enter my head upon awakening for the last two weeks, was Arsenal.

There was no intent. No eagerness to join the great middle class football revolution of the nineties. It just happened, and I didn’t know what to do with myself for a while. Until I began to scratch the itch, and deliberately go to watch games first in the pub, then at Highbury. I was hooked.

About ten years later, this culminated in a conversation with my wife, who declared one day, “You think you’re an intellectual, but you’re not.”

I wanted to know why not. I pointed to my job on the lower rungs of academia, my subscriptions to the London and New York Reviews of Books. Why was I not an intellectual? Her answer was direct

“Because you spend almost every spare moment you have watching, playing, or thinking about football.”

And she was right.

But being the pretend intellectual I am, one of the greatest pleasures I have is the analysis of the game. I delight in noticing the tactical flaws in Maradona’s plan for Argentina which saw them overrun by Germany (they left them way too much space in wide positions to run into, and then surrendered possession and invited them to do so. Spain contrastingly made possession their sine qua non). This is why Wilson’s book is such a joy: he writes about football as if it were both an art and a science.

Let me share one small part of it. Statistics have become increasingly important to the game in recent times, and OPTA provides a wealth of them. But such perspectives have a history. Between 1953 and 1957 the head of the Royal Statistical Society and an RAF officer by the name of Charles Reep gathered data, mainly from English league matches, which they claimed demonstrated conclusively that direct play was the way to score goals. English football was already suspicious of any player with technical ability, and this supported that prejudice. They found that ‘only five percent of all moves consist of four or more received passes and only one percent of six or more’.

As Wilson goes on to point out ‘common does not necessarily equal good… Given long chains of passes were rare, it is hardly surprising so few goals resulted from them.’

And he doesn’t let it go there.‘Reep himself claimed that ‘only two goals out of nine came from moves which included more than three received passes’ (so seven out of nine, 77.8 per cent, came from moves of three or fewer) … If, as those figures suggest, roughly 80 percent of goals result from moves of three received passes or fewer, but 91.5 percent of moves consist of three received passes or fewer, then it surely follows … that moves of three passes or fewer are less effective than those of four or more … Anti-intellectualism is one thing, but faith in wrong-headed pseudo-intellectualism is far worse’.

Ex-ACT-ly! I found myself singing when I read this. Wilson’s writing makes me think of Carl Sagan’s comment that “It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little about it”. And knowing more, as I do now, about football, it only means I am awaiting Barnet and the start of pre season on Saturday even more eagerly than I was before. I am only sad that I am now on the other side of the Atlantic, and so will miss out on the company of my fellow fans, who are among the best people I ever met.

Exhibiting a scientist's flair for multitasking at his leaving do

Our very own Bill has gone off on a great adventure, choosing to become a new professor in an uber-prestigious American university over a more familiar one here in London. We are all absurdly proud of him, wish him well – and hope that once he settles into his strange new environment, he will report back with his usual insight.

The change makes me think, yet again, about the differences between doing science in America versus Europe/the UK. It’s been nearly 14 years since I left Seattle to become a scientist in London. I have been here so long that I only have vague memories of what it used to be like when constant 80-hour weeks were the done thing. The lab turbo-gunner phenotype turns out to have strong environmental components – for better or worse, my lab work ethic is now firmly aligned with what people here would call the “Continental” mode (and what the professors where I did my PhD would call “slacker” mode).

Bill recently sent me a glowing review of the novel Intuition by Allegra Goodman for publication on LabLit.com, although in an email aside said he had been disappointed by the author’s portrayal of the scientists as working all through the night and subsisting on vending machine snacks, which he found stereotypical. This makes me slightly nervous, for the university where Bill has just hung his hat is renowned, amongst American scientists, for precisely that mentality. My hope is that this behavior is more expected of the students and post-docs than of the lab heads!

Today we have the first of several comics from regular LabLit author Nik Papageorgiou, taking a humorous look at his PhD and thesis experiences.

I’m assured they’re only semi-autobiographical.