AsianScientist (Jun. 16, 2017) – So you’ve recently started work at a new lab, leaving behind old allies and past grievances to begin anew. The lab coat is white again, a blank slate for fresh sprinkles of Coomassie blue dye and LB broth.
You’re easing yourself into the foreign environment, slowly figuring out how the lab operates while trying hard not to offend anyone. As you observe the habits and working styles of your new colleagues, a sense of déjà vu comes over you. You’ve seen all these behaviors before—in the lab you were previously at!
The ‘selection pressures’ of academia often produce workplace stereotypes that are remarkably similar, regardless of where you conduct your research. Grant calls, experiments and publication quotas are the harsh realities of a career in science, so whether you’re a graduate student or a postdoc, you’ll find yourself adapting in certain ways to survive.
Like biological memes and the digital ones proliferating in cyberspace, some characters in the lab are immortal and ubiquitous. Here’s a collection of ten of them.
- The guru
- The battalion commander
- The beast master
- The statistician
- The nocturnal one
- The hoarder
- The amnesiac
- The borrower
- The coffee addict
- The saboteur
This individual is most likely to be your boss or a senior postdoc who has had years of experience dreaming up hypotheses and designing complex experiments to prove said hypotheses. Imbued with seemingly limitless knowledge and creativity, he or she is a constant source of ideas and advice. Humbly submit your request for assistance and you may glimpse the ancient tome containing handwritten protocols that work 100 percent of the time.
The battalion commander has a horde of undergraduate students or interns doing his or her bidding. By skillfully deploying these ‘soldiers’ on the front lines of scientific research, the battalion commander manages to gather data at a blistering pace despite rarely setting foot in the lab. Here, we see a perfect blending of scientific ambition and desperation for good grades. It’s not an exploitative relationship, just an efficient one.
The beast master, as the name implies, is the go-to person for in vivo experiments. Whether your experiment involves injecting a tumor, inflicting a wound, or generating a conditional knockout mouse model, the beast master knows exactly what needs to be done to maximize discovery while sacrificing the least number of animal lives. This seasoned lab denizen is also a master of the arts of anesthesia and euthanasia, so I’d be careful about getting on his or her bad side.
While everyone else is dressed in labcoats, long pants and covered shoes, the lab’s statistician or bioinformatician simply struts around in bermudas and flip flops. Tasked with crunching data on a computer, the statistician is a paragon of casualness and the envy of everyone else, never having to put on any safety gear except maybe a pair of spectacles with a blue light screen filter to prevent eye strain.
While most of us prefer to get things done during the day, some researchers have inverted their schedules so they only start work at night. Admittedly, there are advantages of keeping odd hours. There’s less competition to use the lab equipment, you’ll enjoy more peace and quiet to think, and the boss is (usually) no longer around. The things that go bump in the night can be quite unnerving, though.
It could be glassware, reagents or eppendorf tube racks, the hoarder is one who amasses a tremendous stash of personal artifacts in the lab. Usually, this trait is accompanied by a compulsive need to label everything with a name tag so that it legitimizes ownership. Unpleasant as these habits may sound, they may actually be essential adaptations in resource-scarce and competitive environments.
If you’ve ever had to repeatedly explain the same protocol to a lab member, you must have already encountered the amnesiac. Despite knowing that memory and recall are often imperfect, the amnesiac somehow refuses to make use of the simplest tools to prevent forgetting – pen and paper. Of course, the amnesiac also often forgets that these tools exist, or forgets to carry them on his or her person.
It’s 8.30 am on a Monday morning and the first email sitting in your inbox is a request to borrow a particular reagent. Sometimes, this request is accompanied by an innocuous statement, “We just need a small amount for a trial experiment.” But respond to this email and you may find yourself obliged to become an unwitting collaborator, otherwise known as the de facto supplier of said reagent until the paper is published.
We all know this individual who cannot hold a decent conversation or tolerate social interaction until he or she has had coffee. Observe the coffee addict during the course of the day and you may actually be able to determine the half life of caffeine in the human body. The other thing to look out for is withdrawal symptoms and mood swings. If coffee isn’t brewing, a storm might be, and you don’t want to be caught up in its wake.
At some point in your science career, you’re almost certain to encounter a saboteur who wreaks havoc in the lab. This person may deplete communal reagents and not replace them, misplace lab equipment or endanger everyone’s cell culture with contamination. You’ll rarely catch the saboteur red-handed, but when you do, he or she will probably claim ignorance or complain about being victimized.
Did you find your colleagues within this list? Or perhaps you may have found yourself. In any case, get along with one another and get back to your experiments!
This article is from a monthly column called Hacking a PhD. Click here to see the other articles in this series.
———
Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: Shutterstock.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.
