Issue Thirteen, this twenty-first day of June, 2003

'You should tie me down some day'

Late epistle this week, I'm still reeling from the shock of two lab meetings. The first was a conference debrief, of course not instead of but as well as the (ab)normal one, which is now on Thursdays. The theory is that by wiping out Thursday pee em instead of Friday morning, Friday afternoon will be free for the best experiments.

It's not working yet.

We had a good crop of odd phrases from the debrief; as I believe in sharing the joy, here's a selection.

The cranks who work in this area - developmental biology as a whole, that is.

Of an entire session, Sounded interesting but was utterly boring except for the last one and that was nothing to do with the subject.

She's smart, but the rest of the people were on another planet - who knows?

Violent mutants which had something to do with a pact with the devil.

What fun you're all missing. Whee. Actually, I am reminded that you're not all missing it; the Bearded One has been not only subject to the evil eye of the Dark Lord upon his Nazgul, but has been Summoned into the Presence next week. There is no escape.

As to the lab meeting, it looks as if ammonium sulphate has fallen out of favour - we were told just this Thursday that beta octyl-glucoside is 'used frequently' in crystallography and has 'magical properties' and you get better crystals with it. You know, I must try that sometime. Amazingly, we went through an entire ninety minutes of meeting without him once mentioning native gels. But we did have one stunning pearl of wisdom, without which I am surprised we have managed to get anything done. Ready for this? If proteins are not soluble, we've got to find a way of making them soluble. Such insight.

The watchword of this week was 'micromanagement'. Your humble correspondent has been teaching (hah) Sauron how to do molecular biology. Now as you all know, there as many variations (micromanage) on standard protocols (micromanage) as there are practitioners of the art (micromanage). Naturally, Sauron thinks we should test (micromanage) all the different variations and (micromanage) write down (micromanage) the 'best' one and use (micromanage) that one only. Well, I might be able to forgive that, as there is an ounce of sense in the suggestion, but the clincher (micromanage) is his hare-(micromanage)-brained idea that (micromanage) we should (micromanage) do the same (micromanage) experiments on given (micromanage) days of the (micromanage) week so (micromanage) we all (micromanage) know what (micromanage) each (micromanage) other will (micromanage) be doing (micromanage) all (micromanage) the (micromanage) time (micromanage) (micromanage) (micromanage).

I managed to impress the Doctor by my reply to that one. It was along the lines of 'eh, no'.

You know, none of this would be so bad were it not for completely mind-farking incidents such as me trying to explain why he should make up the imidazole (for nickel/His binding) in buffer as opposed to using my 1 molar stock at pH 6.5 . . . even given that I'm actually pointing to the bit in the protocol booklet that says the pH should be greater than 7.5. He said 'it won't matter that much', and guess what the result was? Non-specific binding city!

Mental Emails

A quiet week. The Biological Safety Officer got rather exercised over a request for staphylococcal enterotoxin E, and I quote, this is one of the biohazards covered under the Emergency Counterterrorism Act and you certainly should get in touch with me pdq. Someone else, who should have known better, sent the following message - which I quote so you can boggle appropriately - to the entire message list, Does anyone know a reliable plumber, who could install my washing machine ??.

Lab Rats

My very young apprentice spent 'a boring two weeks trying to get legless'. Stud-muffin got incredibly confused and lied to us. That love oblong is taking its toll, I fear. The Honourable Companion received very encouraging reviewers' (four!) reports from the European MemBers Only journal, about which we were all pleased.

One last item of good news: As some of you know, Sauron has been wibbling about going to Florida and taking me with him to 'encourage' our collaborators. Naturally he wants to do this by getting the 'red-eye' from Los Angeles. I muttered - not quite inaudibly - that I'd rather walk, which caused appropriate sniggers around the lab, and managed to obfuscate the leave calender with 'busy' (yeah, right) weekends such that Sauron admitted we'd have to wait until after the end of July.

And I'm away for two weeks at the beginning of August! Go me!

Off to get two bites at the cherry,

Richard (- wall, head; head, wall).