I used to be part of a rich lab, and now I run a poor one.

It’s sometimes fun to find creative ways to perform your experiments on a budget, but it can be a little painful when you have to compromise on equipment. When it came time to buy a new piece of kit to measure concentrations, I had to go for the rock-bottom make of spectrophotometer – and even that was almost a little bit too expensive. Having spent the last few years completely spoiled on a lovely machine known as the NanoDrop – which can measure concentrations in a single droplet of liquid suspended on a tiny pedestal – we are now entirely old-skool, using old-fashioned cuvettes in a version of spectrophotometer that would not have looked out of place in my PhD lab back in the early 1990s.

I am definitely not complaining; anyone who’s ever worked in a lab with no spectrophotometer at all will appreciate the frustration that its lack causes. So I’m trying to be philosophical about my latest addition to the lab.

It’s totally retro-chic.