Comment on true love is rare
nednobbins@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Are there any lab scientists that don’t hate their pipettes? My wife used to complain constantly about getting cramps from those things, especially those multi-drop dispensers.
Her explanation was always that biotechs can afford robots to do the pipetting but academia is budget constrained and grad students are (were) cheaper than robots.
AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
I really enjoyed it. I haven’t used a pipette in a few years because most of my focus is more computery nowadays, but I really miss the zen of pipetting. My arms did ache after a long day in the lab, but I sort of liked that. I think it stems from a deeply silly part of me that enjoyed how sciencey I felt when using a pipette.
It helped that when I first started my undergrad studies, I seemed to be much better at it than many of my peers — a boon which was compounded by being good at being systematic in a manner that caused me to make fewer mistakes and thus finish labs sooner, despite taking longer to get started doing the actual wet lab work.
I especially liked the practicals where we used a spectrophotometer to measure the initial rate of an enzyme catalysed reaction. Pre cutting out squares of parafilm for mixing the cuvette, organising my workspace so everything was in arm’s reach and unlikely to be knocked over during the rush stage, the stressful tension of carefully adding reaction reagents (sans enzyme) to the cuvettes, ensuring I wouldn’t get them mixed up — it felt like gearing up for a difficult boss fight in a video game. All culminating in a frantic flurry to perform efficiently once I set the reaction going and had to start taking measurements. If a protocol required us to take another spectrophotometric measurement of each cuvette 2 minutes after the initial one, I could just do it one at a time, and twiddle my thumbs waiting. That would be far too simple however, and I relished the challenge of taking the initial readings of another few cuvettes in that time, until I would have liked 4 or 5 going at once. If I misjudged my abilities, I’d end up not taking the second reading of the first cuvette in time and I’d likely need to prepare a replacement sample for the one I’d botched up. It was the kind of low stakes, high intensity pressure that I live for.
Even before I stopped doing wet labs, I never did as much fun pipetting as I did during undergrad labs (which makes sense, given that they’re drilling you with the skills), but I always look back fondly on those labs.
Except when I got one of the shit pipettes. They did the job, but they were not nice to use and it’d be enough to make me grumpy for the whole day.