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.

Our lab just received the galley proofs for a long-awaited paper, and as one of the authors I’ve been asked to help check them for typos and minor editorial changes. In reading the list of queries from the editor, I was surprised by the following comment:

“We try to avoid the use of ‘novel’ in titles. [The gene] has always existed, so not novel in the true sense of the word.”

I’m not sure how I feel about this. Yes, technically the editor is correct. But the word ‘novel’, when applied to a gene, is universally understood to mean ‘heretofore unappreciated in this process’ – and is a hell of a lot shorter.

One of my colleagues said that, practically speaking, you wouldn’t be able to publish anything if it wasn’t novel, so in fact the adjective might be a bit superfluous in the title anyway.

I don’t know. It just seemed a bit…picky.

Summer has finally descended upon London. The undergraduates have disbanded, so canteen queues are short and only post-grads lounge on the quad. Weekly lab meetings and seminars are often canceled due to key people being out of town. Out the lab window, plane trees toss their heads in warm gusty breezes, the sun shines against hazy lavender-blue and the smell of cut grass recalls a thousand June afternoons back home in Ohio, being stuck in a classroom with only a few interminable days separating me from a seemingly infinite summer vacation. (To a child, three months is like three years.)

It is hard to ignore the pull of June as I sit at my computer, crunching data, or in the air-conditioned chill of the laboratory, pipetting fluids and setting up reactions. The only thing that keeps me sane is that when I finally get home, the twilight seems to linger forever: even long after sunset, all of London is aglow, and the moon shines silver through the trees.

What in the name of Darwin’s arse is THIS?

Two letters to the guardian, the first spewing a pile of garbage which manages to somehow combine eccentric views on climate change, MMR and swine-flu into a melange of utter, know-nothing knobbery. The latter gathering together a bunch of fluffy feel-good cod philosophy which would disgrace a not-very-bright sixth former.

And here’s the annoying thing. Both of them neutralise criticism in advance, by claiming that ‘true scientists’ will recognise the veracity of their stance. I have to tell them, sometimes when people disagree with you, it’s because you are talking ill founded toss.

A colleague and I were trying to work out how to use an ancient but useful piece of equipment we’d recently unearthed in a pile of junk abandoned by the previous inhabitants of the lab – a semi-dry Western blotter. Of course the manual had been lost to the mists of time, but there was a helpful diagram inscribed on the side.

“This says we need to put it against the anode,” my colleague said.

“Is that positive or negative?” I asked. “I can’t remember.”

“Me neither.”

We took a poll of random people – the student using the ImageQuant machine in the corner; a post-doc taking a short-cut through our lab; even the mild-mannered guys who were currently camped out calibrating all of the institute’s pipettors. Not a single one could remember the difference between an anode and a cathode.

” ‘Anode’ sounds sort of negative,” my colleague mused. “You know, like asocial or asymmetric.”

“Why don’t you check Wikipedia?” asked one of the pipette guys.

The Twitterverse and blogosphere are positively quivering in outrage about the way the media covered Nature Neuroscience’s recent paper suggesting a molecular role for pain relief in a mouse model for acupuncture. This blog post is not about the science or the finding; and to put it into context, I don’t believe there’s evidence that acupuncture works beyond placebo in humans, either, either before this paper or after.

But what intrigues me is the response of the non-mainstream media (i.e. Twitterers and bloggers). All of their complaints are valid, particularly the often restated point that “mice aren’t humans and you can’t extrapolate”. But what strikes me is that you could levy the same charge against many, many papers published weekly in high-profile journals that use animal models to study human diseases or biology. Some of these papers are covered by science bloggers, who are just as critical, but somehow not nearly as outraged. I just think it’s interesting that because what’s being studied is something people don’t believe in, making overstated claims about mouse models is somehow more repugnant than what happens every day in the press.

Is it because giving the apparent stamp of scientific approval to alternative medicine is ultimately more harmful than validating this week’s cure for cancer? I think that’s probably the most likely explanation, but would be curious to know what others think.

I just ran across the following sentence in a scientific paper:

“Drosophila is a unique model system to analyze genetic interactions and transcription complexes in vivo.”

Really? First I’d heard that model organisms like yeast, frogs, fish, worms and the like were out of a job.

I first heard the story of Henrietta Lacks and her amazing HeLa cells in the mid 90s, while working in a virology lab in Memphis Tennessee. Then, as now, I was struck by the combination of pathos and science fiction. The former comes from the way that the cells arise from a tumour that killed Lacks at an appallingly early age, robbing a family of its wife and mother in the callous way tumours do. Yet the scientific advances to which those cells have contributed have saved unknown thousands of lives. The science fiction comes from the way that the cells, now growing in labs throughout the world, have come to outweigh many times over the body of the woman they killed. They are hardy specimens. Tissue culture weeds capable of over-running less fecund replicators. Given the enormous numbers of copies of their DNA, it is arguable that Henrietta Lacks’ genome together with the mutations which gave rise to the tumour, is the most selectively successful human DNA there has ever been – albeit operating through its extended phenotype of being useful to cell biologists.

And a fat lot of good that did poor Henrietta, whose story is at last told in a new book, titled ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot, which I am looking forward to reading. From this review in the Guardian it sounds like it redresses some of the balance. It’s true that Lacks herself, unlike her cells, was largely forgotten until recently. The person who first told me about her got her name wrong, reporting it as ‘Helen Lang’, and mistook the primary tumour for the breast (Lacks died of ovarian cancer). And there is something about her case that fits all too well into medical science’s shamefully cavalier attitude to the patients who supply the raw material. While the way in which some journals   insist on using the word ‘patient’ rather than ‘case’ can seem irritating and inappropriate at times it should be supported insofar that it can help remind us that a case is a patient, and yet more, a patient is a person.

We should go out of our way to remember the people who have contributed to our research, and who though they have suffered appallingly, have indirectly relieved the suffering of others.

I’ve been showing a newbie how to work with bacteria, and today her transformation plates were sprinkled with dozens of lovely colonies. I described to her how she should inoculate a single colony into antibiotic broth and left her to it.

After lunch, she came to my desk with a worried crease to her brow.

“What it it?” I said.

“The colony,” she said. “Are you sure it’s going to work?”

“It’ll work,” I said.

“But…I couldn’t actually see anything on the tip before I put it into the broth.”

“It’ll work.”

“Are you sure there was anything on the tip?”

“Show me the plate,” I said. She did so, and pointed out the colony she had selected, now smeared into a tiny linear smudge by the action of the sterile plastic yellow tip she had used to collect it.

“It will work,” I said. “It’s all down to the wonders of exponential growth.”

She didn’t look entirely satisfied, but come tomorrow, I’m sure she’ll be convinced by 100 mL of frothy bacterial goodness.

I was just reading a new protocol for staining yeast cells. At first it was all very routine: Wash cells…fix cells…make cells permeable…stain cells…

But then I hit the next step, and it made me smile:

“You will need to make nice with a microscopist. They have specialized (and expensive) equipment you need access to, and a ton more expertise than this protocol will give you.”