

Diary of an Insane Cell Mechanic (2003) - Snail_Commando
http://www.biolisp.org/diary/diary.html

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dekhn
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.

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philsnow
Is there a new canonical lab manual ?

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dekhn
I don't know. It's possible the manual was updated/improved. Also, service
labs got really cheap, cheaper than grad students.

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philsnow
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.

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dekhn
Sure, this is common.

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/](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.

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cryoshon
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.

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philsnow
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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cryoshon
I didn't write the article, I'm just also a laboratory person.

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shiven
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)!

Brings a smile to my face looking back!

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jweather
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!

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BugBrother
Looks really cool, I'll read it carefully tonight.

It seems as a biochemical equivalent to the organic chem "porn" blog posts
"things I won't work with".

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lmm
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".

