“What is the German word for ‘Western Blot’?” I asked Valerie, the Bavarian PhD student in our lab. We were working at the same lab bench and I’d been pipetting for most of the last hour. My mouth was dry from the sheer concentration it took to stare at a little drop of liquid come out of a tapered plastic tube.

“Western Blot,” she said, pronouncing the W as a V.

Moments like these really make the language barrier here seem unbridgeable.

I’ve been here a week and one day and haven’t reached the point of being comfortable working in total silence around the other people in the lab. I always feel obligated to say something to break the serious atmosphere, even though I notice most of the people here have no problem with it or are working too hard to notice. Half the time I open my mouth I’m probably interrupting an experiment or someone else’s train of thought. Good thing no one ever seems to mind being interrupted.

We are the LMNN, a French acronym for some kind of neuroscience lab. Besides Valerie, there are about 7 other grad students and postdocs in the lab. Katerina, my boss, is a friendly and fastidious Greek woman who is working on her postdoctorate degree in molecular neurobiology. She is visibly happy whenever she has to run an experiment that demands organizational prowess and endless patience. Markus is our second German — he’s a PhD student on loan from the physics department. There is also an Indian, a Pakistani, a French-Lebanese, a Tunisian, and a Cameroonese working here, all under an American professor. Apparently there aren’t any Swiss in our lab because they don’t waste their time with biology PhD’s — a high school diploma in this country can fetch a job worth 3500-4000 francs a month. At worst, that’s $35000 US a year.

Despite the diversity of origins, the fact that we’re all in a lab means everyone communicates in perfect english. In fact, at this school, the Federal Institute of Technology of Switzerland in Lausanne (EPFL), all graduate degrees are done in english. This is probably good news for the Canadian in the next lab over, whose sense of humor is best received in its untranslated mix of dubious French and perfect Franglais. It isn’t so good for me, since I’ve been stuck at the dubious Franglais stage ever since I read le Petit Prince (and only looked at the pictures). There is only one person in my lab patient enough to not respond in english when I speak french to him, but even he gives up and starts speaking english when it looks like it’s taking me too long to understand.

The unusually patient francophone’s name is Martial, and he is from Cameroon. I also asked him how to say “Western Blot,” this time in French.

“Western Blot,” he replied in a French-sounding accent.

“Western blot?” I tried to get the accent.

“Non non, westerne blot,” he said again.

“Western blot.”

“Justement.” That means “exactly.” He turned and went back to work.

There you have it. The language of science needs no translation to be understood across the world. Much like the language of music, numbers, or love.