Yep, my lab a decade or more ago was pretty spiffy. The cabinets were gleaming, the bench-tops were unblemished, the floor shone, and the equipment was brand-new and, most importantly, worked(!). After a decade of work by 2-3 dozen postdocs and graduate students, the cabinets are succumbing to the rigors of being wrenched open and slammed shut and crammed with oversized items. The bench-tops have seen one too many Coomassie Blue spills and are covered by an assortment of flasks and bottles, some of which are rather dusty and contain strange organic growths. The floors reveal the passage of many dirty sneakers, the remnants of acid and solvent spills, and a Plexiglas-covered area where some radioactivity was accidentally dropped several years ago! The once new and working equipment has either stopped working altogether or has been through one more ‘band-aid’ repair, and it is definitely not state-of-the-art. But, we muddle through OK. The PCR machine works fine (if you light the incense stick, wear the necklace of colored test-tubes and chant the special incantation); the tissue-culture hoods are sterile if you spray the surface with 70% propanol, and the incubators hold at 37°C and 5% CO2 in air; the bands on gels are still tight, and our antibodies are as specific as they were on the day we made them; and, we have enough computer power to reposition satellites. We continue to teach students with methods that have not changed much, overheads and chalkboards; personally, I do not like to use Powerpoint for teaching, although computers are useful for showing movies.
So what type of lab do I juxtapose against mine that makes me feel that I live in the Stone Age? No, not that of a new investigator, nor of someone who belongs to the Howard Hughes, Wellcome Fund or Max Planck (in time their labs will look like mine). No, I am talking about industry, biotech. This is where new gleaming labs are being built, architect designed to look impressive and to be functional. Here, there is no need to placate the Trustees by designing an edifice to fit to the style of the surrounding gothic buildings that were hand crafted a century ago. No need to maximize space within labs (how many benches can you crunch into an 800-square-foot room) or to design one-style-fits-all space. Here is where you’ll find state-of-the-art and, most importantly, working equipment - truly the difference in technology between a club and a heat-seeking missile launcher, although it is fair to say that the end result will be the same. Here too are the young, motivated and, most importantly, pre-trained workforce. Not much training goes on here to distract the workforce from experiments and results. All told, here is where broad research programs can be initiated, where advances can be made at a spectacular rate, and where technical innovations can be implemented quickly.
So why not leave behind my smelly cave, the out-of-date materials and methods, and my teaching duties? I guess I like what I do. I like the atmosphere in my lab, the fact that the walls are impregnated with the sounds of students talking and working, the discussion of good experiments, the excitement of new results, the disappointment of experiments that did not work and papers that were rejected. I like the fact that our science is still driven by hypotheses and models. I like the fact that we are not slaves to the latest technologies and machines. I like training the next generation of scientists and teachers, and no I don’t mind if some of them go into biotech. I’ll continue to evolve, albeit very, very slowly. Life in the Stone Age is not so bad.
Damn, the fire just went out, and I had used the last of the moss and kindling! I wonder if the clan next door will let me use one of their Duraflame logs?
