How to be the most popular kid in grad school
First, it's really important that you have a Liberal Arts education and are able to see the connectedness of all disciplines. Second, it also helps if you are lazy. Too lazy to empty your pipet tip discard cup:
Meet Tip Explosion. She represents many things, but a few obvious ones are the ever-upward progress of Science, the tremendous amount of non-biodegradable waste produced by Science, and that there's always some shithead in your lab that has to "be different."
To be fair [to myself], Tip Explosion was born quietly and without exploitation. In all simplicity, she was just the product of much pipetting. See?
This is how pipet tips come. Just like a carton of eggs! Then you push the end of your pipet into the pipet tip like so:
Then you draw up an aliquot [great Scrabble word] of whatever colorless solution you happen to be working with, and put it into another tube-- usually on ice. Molecular things enjoy being chilled.
Then you ditch your dirty tip in your discard cup.
Today I destroyed Tip Explosion. She was becoming unstable and I had quite a bit of pipetting to do. So yet another metaphor might be that, whilst in the pursuit of Scientific Knowledge, most fun things are usually destroyed.
3 comments:
One of my freshmen freaked out during a reaction rate experiment because she had no idea what an aliquot was. She sure ended up having to redo that particular kinetics run!
Ah. These are the questions one asks *before* taking the pipet in hand!
Welcome to Graduate School Lena!!
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