Lab Voodoo
Today, class, I would like to address the very important topic of lab voodoo. You know you have some. Little oaths and incantations you might employ to feel an element of control in an otherwise chaotic world. Or magical type explanations you might resort to when things go wrong (or right!) for no discernable reason.
You don't really believe the lab voodoo . . . but you don't entirely not believe it, either.
As scientists, we are proud of our empricism. We tout our analytical abilities, our skills at problem-solving. We reject (if we are not Michael Behe) supernatural explanations. We do not believe in interventionist gods.
Or so we say.
Let me entertain you with some examples of lab voodoo and magical thinking culled from real life.
1) The cloning ritual.
I worked with a post-doc who, every time he did a transformation with a new vector, would sing the Transformers theme song: "New Transformers - more than meets the eye." He made me sing it, too. I mean, he wouldn't let go of the pipettor until I sang. I think he's got a faculty position now, in the South someplace.
Similarly, but less ritualistically, every time I transform and see "XL1-Blue" on the little box in the freezer, I sing a song that was in our program musical spoof a few years ago. (Lyrics can be found below.*)
2) Action at a Distance.
This is the belief that actions unrelated to an experiment can affect the outcome of that experiment. For example, I know that the only reason my ligation worked yesterday was because I prophylactically did another restriction digest of the same plasmid with the same enzymes just in case the first one didn't work. Every biologist knows that had I not done that, there would be no way in hell I would have had any colonies from that ligation/transformation today. Right? Extra effort makes experiments work if performed prior to knowing whether it will be necessary. It's sort of like how taking an umbrella guarantees that it won't rain.
3) The "phase of the moon" hypothesis.
My lab mate many years ago was breeding mice. She was crossing heterozygotes to generate knockouts. Knockouts should have been occurring with a frequency of 1/4. Over the course of a year, the percentage of knockouts did in fact work out to 25%.
BUT: she would go for three months - three months, I'm not even kidding - without getting a single knockout, and then she would get three knockouts in one litter of six mice three times in a row. From the same parent mice! That was the most extreme example, but over two years she would only see knockouts in spurts separated by long dry spells. She tried to link it to the season, to the cleaning products used in the mouse room, to the mouse food, to the geneology of the parents, but nothing ever explained it. Must be, we reckoned, the phase of the moon.**
Hence, "phase of the moon" became shorthand for repeated occurrances that had no obvious cause. Like, sometimes your PCR reaction that has been working just fine for a year simply stops working. For no reason. You re-optimize. You find a new recipe. It works for a while, then stops working. You go back to the original recipe, which now works. For no reason at all. Phase of the moon.
4) The Magic Touch.
There are often many ways to do the same thing, and often there is no real difference between how effective one method is compared to another. For example, we used to always adjust the amount of transfection reagent to the amount of DNA we were using. Someone in lab history had optimized transfection protocol and had determined that this was necessary. Then a certain lab member I will refer to as the Magic Man said he didn't do that and eventually everyone stopped doing that and just used the same amount of reagent no matter what the transfection (depending on cell type, of course). No one noticed any change in efficiency. So much simpler! Why didn't we do this before? Another example: we used to always use nitrocellulose for Westerns, and life was fine. But then Magic Man switched to PVDF membranes. Voila! PVDF is so much better! PVDF is the way forward! Now we use PVDF, and life is good. Or, I'm on the microscope doing live cell imaging and the cells keep karking it. Magic Man, what do I do? Magic Man assesses the situation and tells me to use HEPES buffer. I am using HEPES buffer! Try it again, says Magic Man. I do - guess what. Now the cells are smiling happy little cells.
This is the power of Magic Man: even if he just tells you to do what you had been doing already, suddenly you will see bands/staining/transfection/live cells where previously you had been seeing smudge/no staining/no transfection/dead cells.
Thus, when there are multiple ways of doing something, always ask Magic Man. It doesn't matter which one you do, so long as you have Magic Man's blessing to do it that way.
5) The Sunny Saturday Rule.
If you come into lab on a sunny Saturday when everyone sane is at the beach, there is simply no way that shit is going to work. No way. Why did you even bother? You knew it wasn't going to work. Ditto starting an experiment after the dinner hour. Dude, you shouldn't be in lab at 10 pm. You shouldn't ever skip dinner. And you certainly shouldn't go into lab when you could be at the beach! But you do it anyway, thinking you are virtuous and hard working.
Ha ha ha, the lab orixas giggle, dancing madly around the ducts overhead. Silly person! We'll show you what happens to keen little experimentors!
But you never learn, do you? You think, I'll just get this done and then I can go to the beach secufre in the knowledge that I have advanced the cause of science.
Obviously, then, it rains on Sunday.***
What's your lab voodoo, boys and girls? Commentez-moi, sil vous plait.
* To the tune of Like A Virgin:
"Like a roton, transforming for the very first time. Like a ro-o-o-o-ton, experimenting with E. coli . . . " Now the whoah-whoah-whoah part: "XL1-blue ... DH5-alpha (ah!) ... One-shot TOPO ten! (uh, uh, uh!) New pipets, and you're set. Make us proud, now you're on your own, cause we'll make you feel ... Yeah, we'll ma-ay-ay-ake you feel - there's no gene you can't clone!"
**By which we meant not so much the predictable, monthly phase of the moon (it wasn't that, we checked) but the more complex moon-in-second-house, Jupiter-aligns-with-Mars type of astrology thing.
***This final piece of voodoo is related to the Action at a Distance theory. Together they prove conclusively that the universe has a juvenile sense of humor and enjoys a good snicker at earnest people's expenses.
You don't really believe the lab voodoo . . . but you don't entirely not believe it, either.
As scientists, we are proud of our empricism. We tout our analytical abilities, our skills at problem-solving. We reject (if we are not Michael Behe) supernatural explanations. We do not believe in interventionist gods.
Or so we say.
Let me entertain you with some examples of lab voodoo and magical thinking culled from real life.
1) The cloning ritual.
I worked with a post-doc who, every time he did a transformation with a new vector, would sing the Transformers theme song: "New Transformers - more than meets the eye." He made me sing it, too. I mean, he wouldn't let go of the pipettor until I sang. I think he's got a faculty position now, in the South someplace.
Similarly, but less ritualistically, every time I transform and see "XL1-Blue" on the little box in the freezer, I sing a song that was in our program musical spoof a few years ago. (Lyrics can be found below.*)
2) Action at a Distance.
This is the belief that actions unrelated to an experiment can affect the outcome of that experiment. For example, I know that the only reason my ligation worked yesterday was because I prophylactically did another restriction digest of the same plasmid with the same enzymes just in case the first one didn't work. Every biologist knows that had I not done that, there would be no way in hell I would have had any colonies from that ligation/transformation today. Right? Extra effort makes experiments work if performed prior to knowing whether it will be necessary. It's sort of like how taking an umbrella guarantees that it won't rain.
3) The "phase of the moon" hypothesis.
My lab mate many years ago was breeding mice. She was crossing heterozygotes to generate knockouts. Knockouts should have been occurring with a frequency of 1/4. Over the course of a year, the percentage of knockouts did in fact work out to 25%.
BUT: she would go for three months - three months, I'm not even kidding - without getting a single knockout, and then she would get three knockouts in one litter of six mice three times in a row. From the same parent mice! That was the most extreme example, but over two years she would only see knockouts in spurts separated by long dry spells. She tried to link it to the season, to the cleaning products used in the mouse room, to the mouse food, to the geneology of the parents, but nothing ever explained it. Must be, we reckoned, the phase of the moon.**
Hence, "phase of the moon" became shorthand for repeated occurrances that had no obvious cause. Like, sometimes your PCR reaction that has been working just fine for a year simply stops working. For no reason. You re-optimize. You find a new recipe. It works for a while, then stops working. You go back to the original recipe, which now works. For no reason at all. Phase of the moon.
4) The Magic Touch.
There are often many ways to do the same thing, and often there is no real difference between how effective one method is compared to another. For example, we used to always adjust the amount of transfection reagent to the amount of DNA we were using. Someone in lab history had optimized transfection protocol and had determined that this was necessary. Then a certain lab member I will refer to as the Magic Man said he didn't do that and eventually everyone stopped doing that and just used the same amount of reagent no matter what the transfection (depending on cell type, of course). No one noticed any change in efficiency. So much simpler! Why didn't we do this before? Another example: we used to always use nitrocellulose for Westerns, and life was fine. But then Magic Man switched to PVDF membranes. Voila! PVDF is so much better! PVDF is the way forward! Now we use PVDF, and life is good. Or, I'm on the microscope doing live cell imaging and the cells keep karking it. Magic Man, what do I do? Magic Man assesses the situation and tells me to use HEPES buffer. I am using HEPES buffer! Try it again, says Magic Man. I do - guess what. Now the cells are smiling happy little cells.
This is the power of Magic Man: even if he just tells you to do what you had been doing already, suddenly you will see bands/staining/transfection/live cells where previously you had been seeing smudge/no staining/no transfection/dead cells.
Thus, when there are multiple ways of doing something, always ask Magic Man. It doesn't matter which one you do, so long as you have Magic Man's blessing to do it that way.
5) The Sunny Saturday Rule.
If you come into lab on a sunny Saturday when everyone sane is at the beach, there is simply no way that shit is going to work. No way. Why did you even bother? You knew it wasn't going to work. Ditto starting an experiment after the dinner hour. Dude, you shouldn't be in lab at 10 pm. You shouldn't ever skip dinner. And you certainly shouldn't go into lab when you could be at the beach! But you do it anyway, thinking you are virtuous and hard working.
Ha ha ha, the lab orixas giggle, dancing madly around the ducts overhead. Silly person! We'll show you what happens to keen little experimentors!
But you never learn, do you? You think, I'll just get this done and then I can go to the beach secufre in the knowledge that I have advanced the cause of science.
Obviously, then, it rains on Sunday.***
What's your lab voodoo, boys and girls? Commentez-moi, sil vous plait.
* To the tune of Like A Virgin:
"Like a roton, transforming for the very first time. Like a ro-o-o-o-ton, experimenting with E. coli . . . " Now the whoah-whoah-whoah part: "XL1-blue ... DH5-alpha (ah!) ... One-shot TOPO ten! (uh, uh, uh!) New pipets, and you're set. Make us proud, now you're on your own, cause we'll make you feel ... Yeah, we'll ma-ay-ay-ake you feel - there's no gene you can't clone!"
**By which we meant not so much the predictable, monthly phase of the moon (it wasn't that, we checked) but the more complex moon-in-second-house, Jupiter-aligns-with-Mars type of astrology thing.
***This final piece of voodoo is related to the Action at a Distance theory. Together they prove conclusively that the universe has a juvenile sense of humor and enjoys a good snicker at earnest people's expenses.
posted by Joolya at
5:17 PM
5 Comments:
Err...none? Maybe it's because I got my wetlab training in a BL3 lab where everyone has two separate techniques (one in BL3, one out of it), so it's kind of hard to maintain voodoo.
Admittedly, if I have fifteen plates in an experiment, fourteen of them are generally controls.
i'm definitely into the "if i do all these extra things that really aren't necessary then the one thing i want to work will more probably work".
my sunny saturday rule is the "if i'm working when i'm not supposed to be working" theory. as in, if i'm working when i'm not supposed to be working then nothing will work.
but i do know people who have large molecular biology shrines on their bench.
I work with Mycobacteria which take 3weeks to grow up on a plate. This is a long time to be in an incubator so contaminants are a problem sometimes. When you are waiting 3 weeks for results, having to redo an experiment is worthy of tears. A lot of tears were shed in my first year. Now, I do everything in 4's. I dont know why I picked 4 and did not try triplicate plating, but I chose 4 once and did not have any contaminants so I do 4 every time. 4xthe work. 4xthe fun I mean.
PS Who is this Magic Man and WHERE DO I FIND HIM!!???
PS again: I love your blog, I wish I were half as witty!!!
The one thing that I have learned (working mostly with computers as I do) is that there are certain phrases which must NOT ever be uttered. EVER. No matter what you are thinking, you must keep your teeth firmly shut on these or suffer the consequences.
These phrases include, but are not limited to:
"This is really simple. Nothing in this part could go wrong."
"This will only take a minute."
"I've done this before, don't worry."
"Oh, you won't need a rollback for this. What we're doing is perfectly safe."
...You get the idea.
BTW, 5 stars for this post. FanTAStic. You've got it pegged, and you gave me a much-needed laugh today!
Re #2:
Actually I find that if I set up a reaction twice, with the presumption that at least one won't work, then they will both work. Fantastically. Better than anyone would ever believe.
However if I get all cocky and start setting up the next step in the protocol (i.e., getting out the ligation reagents, working out the calculations, etc.) before confirming that the digest has worked . . . well, then I will inevitably have to repeat the digest.
What's worse, if I try to plan my week bright and early on Monday morning, with the assumption that everything will work when it's supposed, then I get absolute and utter failure. Normally what I planned for, say, Monday will finally be finished on Friday.
***
Crap all of those things (particularly #3 and #4) just make me want to injury myself and others. What's sad is that every single "voodoo" example is dead on. Everyone I know believes this and will shape their actions around them. One more reason I'm getting the hells out of science. I simply have no patience.
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