R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Week 4, Day One

I have a feeling that among scientific circles, the wars between researchers and techs is the stuff of legends. Researchers complain about the lack of efficiency on the part of techs, while the techs rant about the lack of patience and disrespect for established bureaucratic procedure by researchers. I recently developed a new-found respect for the work techs do for us, but to be fair, they really suck at basic math!

Now, molecular work is very deceptive. You don't get a good inkling of the prep work that goes into the raw materials needed.

At McGill, we had the regular undergraduate lab courses in molecular biology and microbiology. The ones where everything you need is right there at your workstation. The plastic and glassware, the dippers and ice and vortex, the shared PCR machines and spectrometers, and solutions in just the right amounts. I even worked at a protein lab whilst there, but since my work involved assisting the post-doc in his work, I spent those seven months pretty much working on DNA extraction, PCR, electrophoresis, and DNA extraction, PCR, electrophoresis and more. Over and over again. Most of them were repeats of those with insignificant results. He was a sweetheart though. He always told me what I was doing, which samples I was using, and what I was searching for in those electrophoresis gels mounted with extracted and amplified DNA. That was as far as the variety went.

Either way, even that work wasn't as close to monotonous as that of the technicians. Every little protocol, standard everyday work like extraction, quantification, PCR, and all kinds of electrophoresis, require an average of three solutions. Solutions besides the regular bench materials like ethanol and distilled water. Solutions weighed and measured in every way possible. Just the right pH, the exact volume down to bare microlitres, not an iota of froth, perfect temperature, some filtered on millipore papers. Solutions that, as luck would have it, aren't versatile enough to be used for more than one procedure! And if you're really lucky, each of those solutions will require three more solutions for prep. And neither one of those nine solutions have any exotic colour. Windfall, yay.

It takes nearly three hours to collect the material, that's how slow things get in some places. Once there, it doesn't go any faster. You have standard protocols for solution prep, and you move progressively. There's the math you need to do to determine what quantities you're using, then the weighing and getting individual ingredients to be in the exact state you need them to be, and finally, the mixing, filtering and autoclaving.

In my lab daze I start to think that the toolbox I've been working at since hours now, is pretty diverse and visually appealing. The lovely Erlenmeyers and graceful long-necked conical flasks with their neat graduations, valves, suction pumps and individually wrapped filter papers. Love who you work with.

Even then, it's only interesting for the first or second time that you're doing the prepping. I do this once, and I'm good for the next 4-6 months. They do this every day. Excruciating.

We're done by five, and it's time to go. I can't believe a whole day went in prepping solutions. It's good to know ahead of time, that you can't take these things for granted when you're doing research. Prep work is lengthy, monotonous and rickety. But, there's always a ton of logging to do to get a tech to do your grunt work, and even then, they work at their own schedules because you aren't the only one they work with. So if you don't plan and book, chances are, your work could either be left stranded or left to waste if it has a short shelf life.

It's also subtly revealing of the investment risk that goes into getting techs to do the base work for your research. You cannot afford to use incorrectly prepared solutions for fiddling with something invisible like DNA when samples are few and hard to come by, which is aways the case, isn't it?