Microscopes, too!

Rotovap on a flytrap.

I’m a lab planner, and sometimes getting researchers to describe what sort of containment device they need for a given process is like pulling teeth.

• Chemical fume hood? That’s a hood.
• Class II, Type B2 BSC? Also a hood.
• Class II, Type A2 BSC? Believe it not, hood.
• Laminar flow bench? Yep, that’s a hood too.
• PCR dead air box? Somehow also a hood.

Like, surely you’re not doing BSL-2 work in a LAF? Please tell me you’re not doing that.

…and that, son, is why at some point in the distant future the universe will be an undifferentiated soup of unvarying temperature, full of depleted and inert mass slowly evaporating into photons. In the end, everything you’ve ever been, ever done, and ever seen will be nothing more than a diffuse haze of light, racing unobserved and unobservable through a dead and infinite void. Any questions?

I told my wife that from a genetic standpoint starfish are disembodied heads crawling across the seafloor on their mouth, and she was so squicked out that she left the room… Which was, in fairness, my intent, so, uh… mission accomplished?

For some the optionality of it is less important than the notion that if it’s performative, you can be bad at it and therefore make yourself an acceptable target for abuse, and besides that the idea that some roles can be restricted to only those with a certain set of physical characteristics is deeply ingrained in many, be that in terms gender, career, or what have you.

I do lab planning for a living and sometimes I like to play “How Many Houses Could This Instrument Buy?” with my coworkers. Usually it’s something along the lines of 0.1 to 1 houses, but every once in a while we do a process development lab for some biotech firm, and they want to spring for one of those Satorious automated bioreactors. Those things cost “a whole block’s worth of nice houses in a mid-major metro” money.