I’ll start with the ending: three Mondays ago, after 2 years of work in a lab and several recent months of panic and suffering quiet perseverance, I turned in my thesis. It arrived at the biochem office 51 minutes after the deadline. This was after I wrote an abstract in 10 minutes (4:30pm), an entire (More…)
For one liter of Bennett’s Agar, combine: 10g potato starch 2g casaaminoacids 1.8g yeast extract 2mL Czapek Mineral Mix I’m at lab, making growth medium for bacteria so I can run some ultra-modern, computerized, high-throughput experiments. But I like to imagine that I’m actually at Hogwarts. And that I’m not putting in potato starch, but (More…)
Three years ago, after going on a run with a friend, I said to him, “we are going to run the Boston marathon.” It was a moment of triumphant and wildly inaccurate self-appraisal. What I should have said, of course, was “we are going to squander many months of our youth playing video games and (More…)
There are two computers in the microscope room at my lab. One is for operating the microscope; the other is for chatting with friends. Which makes me wonder why it is such a fancy, obviously expensive piece of equipment. Maybe it’s so I can open more gchat windows and tabs on Firefox. Cutting edge delinquency (More…)