Avarinne.net

In light of finishing exams and my blog being back to normal, I thought I might do a short post on my very first time working in a lab.

I say my very first time working in a lab. Obviously, like anyone doing any kind of science-based subject, I had been in labs and done experiments. Remember chemistry at school where you were given some labelled glass bottles, most of which were a dirty brown with some unknown flaky white substance growing round the top, and you were told to add A to B and then shake it and see what happens? Except, actually, you were also told exactly what would happen. And there were tidy nice little ‘yes it worked’ or ‘no you did it wrong’ answers. Well, most of my undergraduate university lab experiences were exactly like that. So when I say ‘the first time I worked in a lab,’ I don’t mean the first time I stumbled into a lab which looked exactly the same as secondary school chemistry just ten times bigger and clung desperately to a lab partner who was just as confused and clueless as me.

What I mean is: the first time I worked in a grown-up lab with, you know, real scientists and shit.

And, well, actually, it mostly looked like standard grade chemistry all over again.

Said lab was in a building I’d had lectures in most of the time I was at university. During third year, I had been in there nearly every single day. Only, what I didn’t know about said building is that there is a secret labyrinth of corridors underneath it. I got lost. Repeatedly.

When I eventually found the place I was supposed to be at, it wasn’t a lab at all. It was an office buried deep underground with no windows and about half an inch of space between the desks where people were supposed to sit. No one was there except an unfriendly PhD student who had no idea who I was and no time to talk about it. I was sat at a desk (which I would later find was the absolute-wrong-desk-to-sit-at-how-dare-you desk) and told to do some reading. I got out some journal articles I’d already read and underlined some things I completely understood and got very very bored.

The entire wall was plastered with PHD Comics and post-it notes with weird incomprehensible notes written on them. Such as the ‘go down to -80 notes’ which made -80 seem like a place rather than a temperature. As it turns out, -80 IS a place. It is a dark hole underneath the university where many of the -80 freezers are kept, where no one likes going and the youngest, least experienced runt (read: Me) is always sent to fetch things and later yelled at when things end up in the wrong place.

At one point, my lab supervisor wonders in, requests money for the vending machine and leaves again without mentioning anything about what I should be doing. I frequently ask, and frequently get told to wait for C.

C is the post-doc: a fierce and bitter breed of creature who has been in research too long, doesn’t get paid enough and who has people constantly traipsing through HER lab, messing with HER stuff. Favourite phrases include ‘use your initiative!’ ‘WHO BROKE THIS?!’ ‘It’s not MY fault, I’ve been in research for years. YOU must have messed up my experiment’ etc. She doesn’t arrive until midday, promptly explodes at me for sitting at her desk, punts me to the Masters students’ desk, where two of them are already squished into the corner, and tells me she has no fucking idea what I should be doing, why don’t I?

The Masters students. These are not to be trusted. If something breaks, their fault. Something missing, their fault. I quickly learnt that – though I was at the bottom of the pecking order – I was generally ignored rather than yelled at, which was preferable to the lot of the Masters students. Now, in fairness, these particular Masters students were asking me for advice by the end of the eight weeks I spent in the lab, which I think is a little bit worrying, but they were really nice and often unfairly accused.

The PhD students. These were a mixture. A third year, who was wise and helpful and knew just how to sing to equipment to coax it into life. However, she was also so stressed out that she was prone to anger and passive aggressive notes. Then there was the first year PhD student, who annoyed everyone because he felt stressed but apparently had no right to be. He had not earned his place yet in the lab pecking order. He was very helpful in that he explained to me the things that everyone else assumed every scientist is born with the knowledge of like: ‘put the elastic bands like this or the lids pop off,’ ‘this stuff gives you cancer, don’t touch it.’ Pretty much everything that C would reply to with ‘use your initiative’ or ‘you DON’T know what THAT is?’ However, this guy didn’t speak to you unless you popped right up in his face and forced him to, and he completely freaked out if you moved anything on his bench.

And then there are The Cells. The Cells in this case are HUVECs, or Human Umbilical Venous Endothelial Cells (cells from the lining of veins in the umbilical cord). They are fussy, grow only on media which is 50-100 quid a pop, take ages to grow and very little time to die. They are more important than you or I, mere humans. They are everything to this lab. If they die, all work in this particular lab seems to die with them.

And then there is me. I know nothing. I have been taught nothing in my degree which is useful to working in an actual lab. I am handed pipette guns (which you press up on and the liquid goes up and down on and the liquid goes down) which I had no idea how to use. I was, quite rightly, laughed at. Plus, I had never EVER done tissue culture.

Tissue culture is just what it says on the tin, the culturing of tissue – the growing of the very fussy cells – in plastic flasks. Only it must be sterile. So you carry it out in a massive hood – which looks a bit like this – which circulates the air and filters it to keep it bug free and you must not touch anything with anything. So your pipette tip must not touch the sides of the hood, the flasks, your hands – ANYTHING. And when you’re scared and there is a post-doc looming over your shoulder, your hands shake and you touch everything, contaminate everything and have to start all over again.

Once you get used to it, tissue culture is pretty straightforward. As long as you’re used to your cells and used to their ridiculous needs. Even then stuff goes wrong, but most of the time it isn’t your fault. Probably more like you didn’t beg your cells to live enough times before you put them back in the incubator. You’d be surprised how much sweet-talking – sweet-talking anything from cells to equipment to supervisors – actually works. It works in the lab so that’s science, right there. Science fact.

So mostly what I did was grow some cells, lift them from the flasks and pop them on some plates. Then I got a drug, gave them the drug, left them for the rest of the day and then killed the cells and made lystaes. Lysates are basically where you wash the cells with a bunch of things to make the cells pop but not damage any of the things inside them. Then I took the cell contents and ran SDS PAGE gels – where you separate the proteins in the cell by size – and Western Blotting. Western Blotting uses antibodies. Antibodies, for those of you who don’t know, are produced by the body all the time. They bind their targets very specifically, recognising something unique about a molecule and therefore binding only to that molecule. We produce them in response to anything foreign in our bodies. If you stick your protein of interest into a rabbit, a rabbit will make antibodies against it and you can take those antibodies and use them for Western blotting. This means that you can identify whether the protein you want is in your sample or not, and often you can tell how much is there (relatively). Most antibodies you can now just order on the internet.

I did this many many times. And many many times, it did not work. I would go to my supervisor and say ‘why hasn’t this worked, what did I do wrong?’ and he would say ‘science.’ For biology relies on living systems, systems which are never the same two days in a row, and that react to every tiny little thing you do to them. Therefore, science is never the same two days in a row.

This is frustrating as hell when you need three repeats of an experiment to work before you can even begin to consider your experiment a success. But hell, hate it as I sometimes do, it’s also what makes it wonderful. It’s weird. It’s time consuming. You spend your whole life waiting around for a timer to go off and then you must DO EVERYTHING IN THREE SECONDS FLAT OR THE WHOLE WEEK WAS A WASTE. Often your cells will die for no apparent reason and you’ll have to start all over again. People have no time for stupid questions but even less time for people who make mistakes without asking questions.

99% of science is doing the same boring shit over and over and over again. But then there’s the 1% of the time. The time when you go not ‘eureka!’ but ‘Hmm… that looks weird…’ that you discover something new and exciting and that no one has known before. And everyone in the lab is doing the same thing. And they are all having the days when they feel like throwing their cells (and sometimes you) out of the window, and they are all having the days when the pieces suddenly all fall into place. And it’s great. And talking to them and sharing notes is wonderful and exciting.

So really, I do love it. My first lab experience was weird and stressful, and some of the people in that lab hated everyone and everything and therefore did their utmost to put me off lab work forever. But they didn’t manage. I got my gloved hand stuck to a freezer in -80, pulled a bunch of things out and then couldn’t get them to all fit back in for half an hour. Said freezers call three different numbers going ‘ARGH! WE’RE DEFROSTING’ if they get above a certain temperature. That was not a good day. I’ve put gels the wrong way round and completely invalidated all my work for a fortnight. But hell, there’s just some reason that I keep on going back for more.

So, my degree – and hopefully my job in September – is awesome. And I’ll thank you to remind me of that the next time I’m bitching about how sucky my subject is.