Panda scientist dressed up as pandas?

We can’t let China corner the market on this sort of thing. Come one, guys: let’s do some damage.

Who’s in?

Right. Enough messing.

By Nik Papageorgiou.

By Nik Papageorgiou.

Today I got the results of an experiment I really wish I hadn’t done. Before today, the theory all made sense. Today, this new information has muddied the waters.

Of course I won’t pretend it never happened, sweep it under the carpet, go on as if nothing had changed. Even though it’s a rather minor point to the story, I will still have to regroup a little bit.

Makes you wonder, sometimes, about all the published scientific papers out there. How many of these might be cast into doubt by the next experiment, had it only been performed? When we draw a line under a story and pronounce it “finished”, can we sometimes be cutting off an eventual truth? Yet if we never stopped, how could we ever publish anything? How could we spin our narrative, focus our questions, find our answers?

The more years I am in research, the more provisional it all seems. If I go on like this, will I end up believing in nothing?

A new ruling has come down from on high to our institute, and to many other institutes across the UK who are funded by a particular body which shall remain nameless, which can be summarized as follows:

“Safety goggles must be worn *at all times* in the lab, no matter what you happen to be doing.”

We’re not talking safety glasses, either, with their access to peripheral vision; as I understand it, we all need to wear the sort of goggles that form a tight (hot, sweaty) seal around the face. *All* the time. And no, prescription spectacles are also not sufficient: we either need to wear goggles over them, or order prescription goggles.

Now I am by nature a very cautious person. When I am doing something dangerous, I take the appropriate precautions. If I’m working with caustics, I wear a lab coat, goggles and gloves, and work inside a fume cupboard. If I’m doing with something that might imperil my eyes — such as breaking open a glass ampule or using liquid nitrogen, I wear my goggles and/or a face-shield. I even wear goggles when I’m scraping the minus eighty freezer, because I’ve observed that flying shards of ice can be a real problem, or when pushing a comb into a molten acrylamide gel, because sometimes it splashes.

But, ladies and gentlemen, I must confess that I do not wear safety goggles during the following lab procedures:

1. Sitting at my bench labeling empty plastic tubes with a marker pen (something we molecular types spend an inordinate amount of time doing)

2. Looking down the microscope – about 20% of my time in the lab (ever tried looking down oculars with goggles?)

3. Performing tissue culture with non-hazardous cell lines

4. Performing molecular biology with non-hazardous enzymes and buffers

5. Plating non-hazardous bacteria, or pouring the plates they grow on.

{and a hundred other minor daily tasks}

Well, no longer. Now I’m to be saddled with uncomfortable headgear — and I’ve yet to be convinced that this situation won’t be, if anything, more dangerous because of restricted vision.

You might argue that I’ve been in labs for more than twenty years, so I know what is and is not dangerous, but a newbie wouldn’t have a clue. You’d be right — if it weren’t for the fact that we recently completed a time-consuming, mind-numbingly boring risk assessment exercise, in which I had to type up *every* type of experiment we do in the lab, what is harmful about each step, and what safety gear is required. When goggles were essential, it was noted down, and all new people in the lab are required to familiarize themselves with these documents. So if people are doing what they ought, even the rawest PhD students should know the score — and of course all newbies are supervised by  experienced scientists, who should be imparting their wisdom about safety as well.

We are told that the rationale for the new ruling was an increase in eye injuries. I haven’t seen the numbers, though. The risk assessment exercise was only recently completed: was the increase before this? Were the injured people flouting the rules and not wearing eye protection when they knew they should? (And would these people be the same sorts to ignore the new rulings?) Were the number of injuries more than other mishaps that can occur at the workplace — stumbling down stairs, for example, or banging heads on furniture, or cuts? Did the injuries mostly occur in one building; was there a history there of poor training? I really would like to see the stats.

But meanwhile, it seems we really are stuck with the new rule. I’d be happy to sign a form absolving my employers of any liability were my eyes injured by a freak incident incurred while performing something nonhazardous in a lab and not wearing goggles, but somehow, I fear that’s not an option. We are no longer allowed to take personal responsibility for anything.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the kitchen and use sharp knives to make breakfast. Pity I left my goggles in the lab.

It happens suddenly, when you least expect it. It is a matter of utmost urgency, and requires the entire lab to drop everything else they’re doing and pull together. No one experiment is more important than this intermittent, yet inevitable event.

I am speaking, of course, of your typical Lab Freezer Emergency. Of course we are all in denial about defrosting. We watch, day in and day out, as the frost mounts and it becomes more and more difficult to pull out drawers and closer doors. Of course we know that we should do some preventative scraping but – aside from perhaps the occasional lazy kick which sends shards of ice flying – we can’t really be bothered.

Until that fateful morning when we arrive in to lab and find that the freezer – almost always the one that contains the most precious samples – is frozen in the door-ajar position.

Battle stations. Down your lattes, ladies and gentlemen, put on your white coats and gloves, and grab your favorite implement of choice – metal spatula, 10 mL plastic pipette, Eppendorf rack. No, not you two: you guys turn loaves into fishes and actually find another freezer that has the space to accommodate all the imperiled boxes for a few hours. No, I don’t care if there’s “no room” – make some. Oh, hey: brainwave. Go flirt with that cute post-doc down the corridor and see if he’s got some space. Chop chop.

It’s cold. It’s hard work. It’s – after a few minutes – getting pretty wet on the floor. We free the stuck drawers, liberate the now moist and floppy cardboard boxes, and bang at the ice in turns until we’re all short of breath. Several dozen rolls of paper towels are mush beneath our feet. We fill trays with hot water to speed up the process. And a few hours later, the freezer is ice-free, patted dry and good to go.

All in a day’s work, ma’am. We should take this on the road.

(Editor’s note: I am filing this blog for Bill on his behalf – read on and you’ll see why…)

First of all, apologies. As some of you will know, I recently relocated to the United States. This new adventure has left me with less time for things like writing. Unless that is you count writing papers, grants, and other assorted delights of the academic lifestyle. Such is the life at an uber-prestigious American university.

So with that out of the way, I have to explain why it is that I’m writing now. In fact, I am not writing, I am speaking. The only typed portion of this blog entry, is the first paragraph. After that I am using voice recognition software that I recently bought having fractured my collarbone during a football match. I don’t know how many of you have experience with this sort of software, but I must ask you have to recognize that I will be in unreliable narrator. I will not edit the output until. I will be interested to find out how much of what I say you can understand. And of course this ensures plausible deniability should I say something that people take offense to.

I bought the software, using my startup funds, because of the fact that I did not want to have my productivity adversely affected. This was a foolish which. While the software is perfectly good for things like this, or indeed sending e-mails, it is almost useless for things like Grant applications or papers ends with scientific verbiage.

Under a particular words which it seems to have great trouble if for instance laboratory. He got it right that time but only because I trained it. Other words present a far larger problem. For instance anyone understand what I’m trying to write here? “the relationship between pathogen environments and transmission is not well understood” the only problem with that sentence was the word environments. that should have been appearance. That it should have been here. That it’s it should have been the relevance.

I just said the same thing four times, and each time the software understood that I had said something different. As I’m sure you can understand, this makes writing anything which includes that word on a frequent basis, virtually impossible.

Without question and finding it easier to write than I would if I were only using my left hand, but this is still quite a long way short of the maximum potential. Also, I don’t know about you but a crucial stage of writing for me is sketching things out. I like to put a few ideas down on the page, and then shift around a little bit, and then let the words sink into my head before he decided that what I want to say. This software works better the more you know what you’re going to say indeed when you first start using it you’re told that you should speak like a television newsreader. Which is fine for television newsreader, because they’re reading something out. If you’re trying to create something from scratch, it is far more difficult to know exactly what you’re going to say, and the pauses the arms the cars and things like that can help. The last time I knew exactly how I was going to finish his sentence was when I was studying German.

So in this enforced. Of, if not relaxation, then the ability to raise my eyes from the work in front of me, I deliver what’s been happening in the wider world of science since I moved. Whether I start? In this country stem cell research is under pressure once again. Not to mention the march of the tea party. In fact I was wondering whether and not the software was produced by somebody working for the party given the way that until I trained it, it persisted in rendering the word “evolution” as evil illusion. Meanwhile in the UK, the Guardian has expiated the sin it commits a few years ago and it’s asked its Thursday science supplement. It has done this by producing a home for science blogging and so far, it looks pretty damned good. More recently, a German gentleman with an Italian address, and indeed wearing a dress, has visited the UK. He has said some rather silly things about science and religion. But then I guess you expect that. I don’t think that there’s really anything useful to say about this, other than to say that if you really think that Nancy’s and secularism should be mentioned together, as an example of evil, you ought to look in the modes in your own eye.

As you have probably guessed from the above, while the software is not that bad, it is still pretty bad. Writing anything with it is going to take less time than it would without it, but still lots lots lots more time than it would had I the use of two hands. And so I guess I better get back to it. Talk again before too long I hope.

You should have seen the other guy.

It’s not really like this.

Is it?

By Nik Papageorgiou.

I worked at home today. This is something I do rarely, but sometimes it becomes necessary. This time, I had a long chunk of analysis to do on my computer, a slog with images and spreadsheets that I’ve been putting off for weeks because I just couldn’t find the mental space I needed to make it happen.

Somehow, in the lab, there is always something else that needs doing — cells to tend, papers to read, colleagues’ questions to answer. Only yesterday the ceiling of the tissue culture suite collapsed under a weight of water from a malfunctioning condensation collector and we had to mop up 20 liters of water from the floor as well as hundreds of dripping chunks of ceiling material that looked and felt almost exactly like a dog’s breakfast. The only good part about this episode was being allowed to crack open the shiny “Chemical Spills Kit” and use the fluffy pink absorbent cloths and sand for the first time — but that’s another story.

I always find it amazing how productive I can be at home. One would think that distractions would abound — food, tea, the internet — with no watchful eyes to catch you straying. But in my case, I always end up being far more focused. The hours slid away, interrupted only by a spate of laundry and the need to dash out five or six times to pull clothes from the sunny, wind-swept line before they got re-soaked by repeated cloudbursts. Otherwise I was one with my spreadsheets — and even found myself enjoying them.

Tomorrow I have a queue of experiments as long as my arm, but until then, this serenity is all mine.