Life Science Tools of the Trade

One of our favorite reps stopped by yesterday (where have you been Rob?) and other than a little chit chat, Rob handed me a flyer on “A Revolution in Resolution”. Basically it was hawking the benifits of a new acrylamide solution that is supposed to give you the resolution of a gradient gel without the pouring nightmares (not to mention “publication quality gels the first time…everytime!”). Unfortunatly we told Rob that we buy pre-cast gradient gels. Now this could lead to the whole topic posted yesterday about lab waste, but instead I will simply pass a conversation I had with hbogerd when I first started in the lab. We had done some cloning (we is misleading as I was a fresh rotation student), and needed to test for protein expression. I came into the lab in the morning and inocently asked when we were going to start pouring our gel (Westerns took two days in the old lab). “You’re living in the stone age” hbogey said with a grin, and then he led me to the cold room and the box of precast Tris-HCL gels.

The discard mentality is here to stay. Perhaps we can find better ways of recycling all this plastic we toss in biohazard bags. Kind of sounds like the discussions that took place as comunities moved toward recycling programs for household and consumer waste.