Life Science Tools of the Trade

About a month ago I received a sleeve of square petri dishes for tissue culture. I am currently looking at retrotransposition in Hela cells and need to count colonies. The little grids caught my eye so I thought I would give them a try. Cells were plated (went well-how could it not) and I went to put them in the incubator. To facilitate air-flow every incubator I have ever used has metal shelves that have evenly spaced holes in them. I placed my stack of plates on the shelf and gently slid them to the back. I watched as the stack tipped, almost falling over. Upon closer examination, each plate has little plastic legs on each corner. These little legs make it impossible to slide them on the incubator shelf. A simple product, ruined by someone’s idea of an improvement. I’ll really be p*ssed if my cells haven’t sat down by tomorrow morning!

I thought I would give our loyal readers a bit of an update from the much anticipated Vender Show which hbogerd spoke about a couple of days ago. hbogerd, hweigand, myself and another co-worker made our way down around 11:30 am and much to our surprize there was still food left. While most of the crowd was checking hbogey out (he is a hansome man) we managed to get some mediocre food, a truely amazing event took place. A very nice gentelman brought more food! Also to our surprize there was the debut of a new food item! Minature egg rolls! We didn’t bother with the stamps, and spoke to a couple of reps that we like. We grabbed a second soda on the way out the door. I hit the vending machine later to make up for the lack of calories earlier.

In the CD player: Jay Farrar: Sabstopol
Experimental procedure of the day : Western blotting

Thank Goodness its FRIDAY!!!

What if every SAB member had their own blog for self-promotion! It would be the perfect spot to post all those references and thank yous ! I just came across a “thank you” for providing reagents and advice in 1997! Imagine that. See for yourself !

POL: P&P Rapid Communication 66:727
… We thank H. Bogerd (Duke University) for the two-hybrid system and
advice on screening procedures and …
www.pol-europe.net/PAPHome/Vol66/rc66727.html - 28k - Supplemental Result - Cached - Similar pages

Tomorrow is yet another vendor show. This unnamed University (probably best known for its basketball program-no, not UNC……….but close) forces the vendors to buy their food through the crappy University food service for these major shows. Somehow, the lure of stale rolls and room temperature luncheon meats and mayonaise draws a crowd. The “food” is usually in short supply and by 11:30, it is usually gone except for lettuce sandwiches that starving students scarf down. There will be a silly promotion that forces you to talk to ten vendors, collecting 10 stamps to collect your very cheesy gift. I usually stop by to support the sales reps that actually do their job: answer questions, give quotes, take care of problems.

Question: Has anyone changed vendors because they were handed a baggie containg a pipet tip, eppendorf tube, glove, etc. at a show?

Musical selection-Warren Zevon, “The Wind”
Book (fiction)-John Dufresne, “johnny too bad”
Books on tape-Lemony Snickett, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book 10, “The Grim Grotto”.
Movie-Napoleon Dynamite (in spite of hwiegand’s intense dislike).
Pet peeve-scientists who only, and constantly, reference their own work.

What is a good enough “prize” to warrant talking to a sales rep? If free food isn’t enough incentive then what is. I’ve seen little plastic squeeze toys, blow up balloons, t-shirts, laser pointers, and in some instances gift cards. Is there a minimum standard of what you get before you’ll talk to a sales rep? What about the strangest thing a rep has passed out. I’m sure somebody out there has received something fairly strange.

In a new lab it’s important to find out where the catalogues are. Yes, many companies have online catalogues, but you can’t beat holding one in your hand, thumbing your way through it, taking note of the coffee stains and the thumb prints (something blue on the ‘C’s) and the little scribbled aides de memoire. These are often totally illegible with time yet provide a link to times and postdocs past and future; a communion with the very essence of Science.

It’s also useful when someone else has already worked out for you exactly which of the thirty-one grades of bovine serum albumin in the Sigma catalogue is appropriate for blocking your plate. You could probably ask your lab manager but she always got the postdoc - yes, your predecessor, who left the country in rather a hurry and took all his notes with him - to order it, and it’s no good asking the boss because, let’s be frank here, bosses inhabit a world that’s consistently pi out of phase with Real Lab Life (TM).

Of course, if you’re setting up a lab (and you haven’t managed to steal catalogues from down the corridor) or you’ve finally got around to replacing the Sigma 1997 edition with something a little less dog-eared you’re going to have to do this from scratch yourself. If you annotate the catalogue, half an hour now spent making sure that this is the correct version of DNase means you won’t have to do it again. It’s the same principle that is behind gene annotation. If someone else has labelled it already you don’t have to do the experiment. Score!

I used to have a pad of those little sticky coloured strips, ‘Post-it’ notes for books, that I’d use to flag pages (and especially the New England Biolab one - more on that next time) or to scribble little messages (like ‘100 g phnl 45s3′. Hmm. My pen smudges on these things) so I - or the grad student I’d just asked - knew what to look for. Now my catalogues all have little yellow mohicans, I can’t read what they say, and I can’t start again because some inconsiderate so-and-so has swiped my pad of sticky strips. Excuse me, I’m just off to have a word with the lab manager.

I didn’t realize hbogerd was so tall! It’s funny how the impressions you get from things like the forum can be so wrong. I had this mental image of a short, bald, hunched figure, clutching a Gilson and muttering imprecations against hwiegand and young, upstart computational biologists while fighting with seventy thousand PCR tubes . . .

Anyway, I didn’t come here to talk about hbogey, I came here to talk about life science suppliers and reps and all that stuff. But first to say hello.

‘Hello’. I’m a thirty-something postdoc in the UK, having a great time at the moment and putting off finding a real job. I’ve got to know a few reps and companies in my time, and as I’m the longest serving member of this lab (apart from the Boss) I tend to get first dibs on dodging the reps. I’m trying to pass that responsibility over to the lab mangler but it’s a long, hard slog.

It’s all right Tamara, I’ll write a proper entry soon. See ya later.

Strange but true. I’m a tall guy (6 feet, 3 inches) and an uninvited sales rep asks me if I would like a sample of their “extra-large” gloves because “you’re a big guy”. I humor them (WHY, WHY, WHY?) and say okay. They hand me ONE glove, which I try on while they watch. My cramped fingers look like a webbed duck foot to which she replies “Oh, our gloves run small.”

Question: Which is lower on the science foodchain: sales rep or tech services?

Exceptions: Susan (Roche) and Rob (ISC).

Music: KGSR/Austin (streaming on the internet-check it out)

Book: Mark Dunn, “Ibid” (fiction)

Yesterday I found myself again asking the question: “Is the free pizza worth making idle chat with some of our local supply reps?” After 15 min or so I found myself giving in to my hunger and wandering in. Of course the room had been arranged so that the pizza was in the back corner and you had to run the “gauntlet” to get there. I resigned myself and started down the isle. By the time I got there I had guessed how many candies were in a jar, and disscussed the high number of features of the new glassware line one of the reps was pushing. After hitting the pizza (which was starting to go cold) I was hit up by one rep who has been trying to sway us toward his company for several years now. That did buy me enough time to finish my two slices and grab a second helping before heading for the door. Freedom.

The real question from all this is, do these shows actually drum up any business? Personally the reps that get the most business from us get it by having comptetitive pricing, following up in person, and providing support when we have trouble with orders or products. And why does the lure of sub-par free food always draw us in? Our University always has large vender shows with the worst food, and crappy door prizes, and yet we wander down everytime and complain how much this all stinks.

Perhaps its just part of our nature…

As t

Uninvited, in strolls the dreaded Sales Rep. I am in the middle of setting up several reactions………….”Do you do PCR? We have the best dNTPs on the planet”………………………………………….I found it insulting, and told him so, to be interrupted and for him to make such an idiotic claim. “Like anyone can even know that Napoleon?”* There must be literally hundreds of companies selling quality dNTPs with purities >99%. I have NEVER had a pcr reaction fail because of “bad”dNTPs. Bad oligos, yes. Bad dNTPs, no. He persisted, telling me he would undersell (meaning undercut if he knew what I currently pay for dNTPs) any vendor and offered me a sample. I refused the sample. I won’t be doing business with Bioline anytime soon.

*Kip’s response to Napoleon’s claim that Uncle Rico’s video “was the worst video in the world”.

Rant time: Do the SAB members constantly posting in the “Humor Forum” really think that crap is funny?

Book suggestion: “Blink” by Martin Gladwell

Playing in the lab: Patty Griffin’s “Impossible Dream”