Stealing shit from biologists.
November 20th, 2009 by LiqCSomething I like about the US is that all the lab supplies are pretty much the same. You can walk into any lab in the country and start cooking the same day. This is obviously thanks to a long-time scientific tradition that, among numerous other things, demands a prompt and steady supply of labware. Otherwise, putting all the pieces together from assorted selection of various relics is often the rate-determining step of a reaction. Browse through the pictures to check out what chemistry labs look like on the other side of the pond. I am proud for my people. We won’t be panicking if a little sports event and bad weather deprive us of some commodity. We’ll milk the mother Earth itself if we have to.[1] The Western way of doing things is very convenient, and very expensive. Every now and then I feel that something’s missing from this symphony of churning rotovaps, hissing gas lines, and door to the outside world being opened to deliver more shiny crystals for conversion to brown poop. Is it a gentle whistle of an old kettle? Faint murmur of zombies in the postapocalyptic dungeons?
Biologists steal from chemists all the time, although they mostly go for bigger fish with a Scandinavian flavor. Are you ready to encroach on the bioland?
I started with disposable plasticware. I think the clickity-snap of pipettors could fit well in the synthetic symphony. Luckily, our experimental work is not 95% pipetting, although, let’s face it, pretty redundant as well. We’re blessed in that we don’t give a fuck about trace contaminants in the plastic. Stuff does leach out of the polypropylene Eppendorfs and pipette tips, but not in the amounts that mess up the chemistry. I actually withdraw my 0.55 mL of CDCl3 with a regular 1 mL Gilson pipette all the time and don’t see anything odd upfield from 2 ppm, except for water. Exposure of the pipette to organic solvents is not as damaging as rumored, unless you soak them in DCM. Biologists, on the other hand, are quite fastidious, and they won’t touch your pipette that you used for organic stuff. Thus, the balance of force is restored. Sort of. Other than that, pipette tips (especially 0.02 mL) work great as TLC spotters; Eppendorfs will store your samples. Little centrifuges are handy for retrieving milligram quantities of solids. If you have a vacuum centrifuge, it will work as a rotovap.
Go, my fellow chemists! Time to raid and pillage.
[1] Sarcasm alert.
Update: I actually checked if any plasticizers would leach from the Eppendorfs by exposing them to several solvents for some time and taking mass-spec. Didn’t see anything above the baseline in all cases except for methanol. Turned out that the whole drum we’ve been using was contaminated with some PEGgy crap. We ended up sending it back. If you see a weird peak, consult with this handy list of common MS contaminants (thank you, labmate!) I can only add bis-triethylammonium mono-TFAte (317.3) and the same thing from DIPEA (373.3).
Sometimes, it’s nice to know that there are labs dirtier than mine.
We had a hood in our lab which has not been used for about a year. I was shocked how fast this unattended space became a community dumpster. I think over a couple more years it could’ve turned into something even worse than shown here – and this one took decades.
I wish Milkshake had pictures to go along with his crazy Czech lab stories. A picture can tell a thousand words, even if most of those words are some derivative of “fuck.”
One does not have to go all the way back to 70s and 80s – I re-painted my hood bright orange 2 weeks ago thanks to a large-scale experiment that would not stir – especially not during the quench…
The one in your brand new trillion dollar building?
yea, the one new building that totally sucks. The architects will be the first ones to be lined up when the revolution happens.
I’m some sort of weird hybrid between a biochemist/molecular biologist and an organic chemist and I’m happy to see chemists stealing from biologists! I was always made fun of by my synthetic organic prof for my propensity for using micropipettors over syringes for non-volatile, non-corrosive materials…but they are so goddamn effective and easy to handle. Epis are also great for storage of small amounts of material, and i imagine as long as there is no solvent present they should work just as well for synthetic applications.
I <3 the nice pipettors. We use them ALL THE TIME for device work…and we don’t see significant problems from solvent use. (The ubiquitous plastic syringes are polypropylene too, IIRC…and in general no one seems to worry too much about them.) They’re wonderful for working with small volumes, which we often do…and the poor synthetic chemists who send us material should be thankful for that.
You’re probably using positive displacement pipettes, though. They’re more expensive but more accurate and robust.
Nope…just normal micropipettes.
OMG, it looks like somebody was murdered in that lab ;p
Uncle Al made one contribution to biochemistry in his undergrad days. A confrere could not get a phosphatase assay to work, nor could his lab as a whole. Resolving the problem obvously required mutant intelligence. Bottom line,
“Should you guys be using a phosphate buffer?”
They did not evince gratitude. Biology, like string theory, is deeply flawed. Though it keeps grant funding flowing by disgorging least publishable bytes, it has no idea what it is doing overall. As in the second rate movie Contact, meaning hides not in the data but in the primer. Theory of Experiment teaches us confounded variables cannot be individually analyzed to any usefulness.
A single failed reaction is a setback. A million failed reactions are a combinatorial library.
Chemists. The people under God.
Fuck yeah.
Precisely what I’ve been telling everyone here: chemists actually THINK.
That’s right. Biologists have made zero, zilch, nada contribution to science over the last fifty years.
Biologists leave their lab at 5pm and draw seven-membered benzene rings (then add the double bonds in wrong places…) They use Falcon tubes and superstition on daily basis. They put concentrated HCl into a leaky plastic bottle and wonder why the nearby 0.01mg precision balance stops working after while. They worry all the time about ethidium bromide genotoxicity and epinephrine teratogenic properties but nitrosomethylurea spilled on the bench fazes them not. And so on.
I have nothing against biologists, in the same way I have nothing against people who get to pick lettuce for living – it is not really their fault they didn’t quite make it as pre-meds.
Bwahahaha!
Do they have to get cells high so they could munch on diazomethane?
Of course not–the biologists who contribute to science are actually chemists! This is why they get the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, right?
We were centrifuging solutions of carbon nanotubes in dichlorethane in Eppendorf tubes and then depositing the solution onto substrates. Under AFM, there was all kinds of crap everywhere, which was eliminated when we bought some teflon tubes instead.
I imagine AFM is quite sensitive. And you’re probably using not tap water but double-distilled dihydrogen monoxide (if your stuff has to touch water for any reason).
My point was that plasticware is great for regular wet organic chemistry.
I am always happy to hear others are thinking outside of the box. I will make deviations from protocol especially when it comes to equipment. I usually get the ‘you are supposed to do it this way’ or ‘you shouldn’t be doing that,’ but the reasoning is always ‘because that is how I was shown’ or ‘that is what XYZ said.’ I mean if there is a good reason then fine, but I fear too often some are just following the herd.
A great way to get in trouble in a certain setting. Been there.
your blog name is soooooo xtal nerd awesome.
Thanks for the compliment
The problem is that sometimes you can’t know if it’s just dogma, or if there was in fact a very good reason that still exists but that people lost track of, that led to the approach being enshrined.
True, sometimes you can’t know, but as in example mentioned in the post – using pipettes to dispense liquids seems like a good idea.
I also try to get find out the reason when I learn a new technique by asking why and that way not only do I learn, but can help others in the future.
Agreed, as long as you don’t forget that those pipettes need periodic maintenance to stay accurate, something a lot of chemists forget
. I meant more along the lines of things that are on the finicky or dangerous side… in general, there’s no reason not to innovate, but in my experience it’s also not something to be done casually.
Oh, definitely. When I was working for the environmental lab we calibrated them either monthly or quarterly–can’t remember which. (We also checked/calibrated balances before every use, which was perhaps overkill, but takes all of five minutes…)
Good reminder. Here is a video that may help those who are thinking about using pipettors and do not have experience calibrating them:
http://www.benchfly.com/video.php?video=87
Funny, but I was so focused on the myriad safety hazards that it took me a while to realize there was a teakettle in there… meanwhile I think it might be possible to get tetanus just from looking.
Gram-positive bacteria? Nay, radiodurans is the only thing that will live there.
That lab is farking AWESOME! I wish I had one in my kitchen. I think I could use my Mum’s old frying pan too! I think I could also steal a cylinder of Ar or N2 from somewhere.
But seriously, the cook who made that (meth) lab could have done some cleaning once in a while. Would it have killed him to use some Mr. Sheen or some BAM!?
This is actually an academic lab that used to do good science. The professor is really old now (80+) and can’t support many (any?) students. He’s still teaching though, and he’s very good at this, too.
SERIOUSLY?! Is the Prof. Russian or some other form of Eastern European. I mean I have heard horror stories but I never thought I would see the likes of this. I mean seriously, that is a frying pan in the background there isn’t it? And what kind of Institute these days would allow such a health hazard? Especially after all the crazy horror stories we have been hearing lately. I really find that so hard to believe, I mean how did they achieve the red and yellow stains and ZOMG that is a kitchen sink. I mean seriously, that is NUTS!
Nobody’s using the frying pan to cook food. It’s a handy thing to have in the lab. I’ve used one for dehydrating sodium acetate. It’s quite beautiful – first it melts its three crystallization waters, and then solidifies. The kettle is for tea though.
Yes, this is in Russia. (I’ve never worked in this lab but I know several people who have and went on to get PhDs in the US). This is in chemical technology institute which cares this –><– much about research.
i worked in a high potency suit that resembled that slop jar. i guess i was part of the problem by refusing to clean it
I like the red teapot on the lab jack! Is that part of the reaction?
What the fuck…takes balls to work in a lab like that.