Fascinating! Thanks for posting this. So many of the anecdotes remind me of my days starting out in the wet lab, coming from Bioinformatics (and prior to that medicine)!
Reminds me more of the "writing an OS in Rust" than anything - the tone of "here's this really complicated but exciting field that I'm gradually learning to understand, here's what I learnt, here's what I still don't understand".
My god. it's like he did my rotation in a wet lab. Very similar set of experiences.
BTW: Maniatis as a lab manual set back molecular biology by years! Almost every protocol in the book was wrong, missing some technical component. It's as if "Intro To Python" left out important code statements and just kind of let you figure it out from first principles.
is it easier these days (since ~2000) to outsource lab work to other countries ? i would imagine shipping + people in china / india are much cheaper than even grad students.
One of the interesting areas is "third-party multiservice". instead of acting as an exchange depot (send request to first service, get results back, ship resuls to second service, etc), the idea is to file an order with the first service, and chain the shipping to the next company, etc, so that only the finished product makes it back to the requestor.
Fun to read... I was doing a summer internship that involved DNA sequencing around this same time period, it all sounds very familar. Wet lab work is ultimately what convinced me that I wanted to work in computational biology rather than spending the rest of my life pipetting!
This article details most of my work and correctly characterizes the day to day struggles.
It's been 10 years from the writing of this article, but things haven't really changed all that much. Still waiting on robotics and software to really revolutionize things.
Thank you for having written this. I'm really enjoying reading it and seeing the process of acquiring a whole new domain of knowledge and skills by a person who already has one mastered (rather than one fresh out of college).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 38.1 ms ] threadBrings a smile to my face looking back!
It seems as a biochemical equivalent to the organic chem "porn" blog posts "things I won't work with".
BTW: Maniatis as a lab manual set back molecular biology by years! Almost every protocol in the book was wrong, missing some technical component. It's as if "Intro To Python" left out important code statements and just kind of let you figure it out from first principles.
You can also outsource it within your own country (I'm assuming US here, but Europe also qualifies).
The Atul Butte lab at Stanford uses this: https://www.assaydepot.com/
One of the interesting areas is "third-party multiservice". instead of acting as an exchange depot (send request to first service, get results back, ship resuls to second service, etc), the idea is to file an order with the first service, and chain the shipping to the next company, etc, so that only the finished product makes it back to the requestor.
It's been 10 years from the writing of this article, but things haven't really changed all that much. Still waiting on robotics and software to really revolutionize things.
Heh, had to remember that this was way back in the year 2000, and not everybody had cell phones.