TC Police

Dear Labmates,

It's that time again: the annual tissue culture good citizenship rant! But this year I ask that you not think of me as the tissue culture Gestapo, but rather as your friendly neighborhood tissue culture Stasi agent. You see, we cling to the Socialist Dream that we can all live and work together in a functional, dissident-free tissue culture room. We are, however, not averse to using violent methods to acheive our peaceful, utopian ends.

That said, here are some issues that need to be addressed lest you feel the wrath of the Ministry for TC Security.

1) When in the TC hood, if you think that your pipet has touched ANYTHING (your hand, any surface, the outside of a bottle), throw it away - definitely do not put it back into a bottle, especially into a bottle that might be used by other people (such as common PBS). Don't put it in your own bottle, either, because if your personal media gets contaminated it can contaminate others' media later. Similarly, if you think ANYTHING non-sterile has touched in any way the pipet tips or pasteur pipets that live in the hood, take the whole box out of the hood and put it on my bench. I will use it. Seriously. The same goes for any common PBS or H2O that is living in the hood and may be unclean.

2) Clean the hood with ethanol after you use it. Spray all the items in the hood with ethanol when you are done, including markers. Don't steal the markers. Turn on the UV lights at night to kill lingering germs.

3) Incubators. Oh, labmates. Labmates, labmates, labmates ... The Stasi is looking at you. The Stasi knows that they themselves are not innocent of partaking in some irresponsible incubator activities, but the Stasi's cells are apparently more sensitive than your cells are to incubator contamination, which is why the Stasi is particularly concerned about this topic. The Stasi has also noticed that there is a lot of nastiness in the incubators, and since the Stasi has been out of town, the Stasi knows that they did not put it there.
Labmates, if you SPILL MEDIA in the incubator, ORGANISMS WILL GROW. Bacteria will grow, and nasty fungi will grow. The Stasi in fact identified the "mysterious white stuff" in the top right hand incubator as some kind of filamentous fungus, possibly a type of Candida. Candida is found on all of us and is mostly harmless UNTIL IT GETS INTO CELL CULTURES AND THEN IT MAKES CELLS DO ALL SORTS OF BAD THINGS THAT AFFECT THE STASI'S EXPERIMENTS AND PROBABLY YOURS, TOO!!!!! The Stasi knows this because the Stasi has tested it, and guess what - the presence of even a miniscule amount of badness in the incubator is enough to ruin an entire experiment when one is using fibroblats in serum-free medium without antibiotics, as the Stasi does.
Today the Stasi looked at the other incubators and noticed "mysterious white stuff" in at least two of them (top middle and top left). The Stasi also notices brown patches on the incubator shelves were presumably media was spilled at some point and is now providing delicious food for all sorts of organisms, from mycoplasma to eukaryotes.
If you spill, clean it up!
Also, if the Stasi finds random plates hanging about in the back of the incubator that are old, or are not labeled and dated (the Stasi admits to not always doing this, but it is wrong), or even that look old and/or dubious, the Stasi is going to bleach them and throw them away. If this happens to you, don't come crying to the Stasi, because you have been warned. The Stasi will blame you if anything goes wrong with their experiments, and they know where you live.
To call the incubator I just cleaned "dirty" would be an insult to the Golden Age of Biofilms that was flourishing therein. Please, people, let's not let it get to that state ever again, okay?

4) Biohazard bins should not be allowed to become over-full.

5) Clean up the Coulter Counter area.

6) If you have anything to add, just cc the lab, don't pester the Stasi with it personally. The Stasi cares about the needs of the collective and has other things to do besides listening to personal grievances.

Thanks, and keep up the good work, Comrades!

Guest Post - Springy Challenges Framing In Ostensibly Not Racist Liberal NY Times

To the editor:

I am surprised that you wrote that British Muslims enter the US through a "loophole," as though they take advantage of a weakness in the law ("U.S. Seeks Closing of Visa Loophole for Britons," May 2, 2007). The long-established Visa Waiver Program permits all British citizens to travel to the U.S. for 90 days. Your article implies that Muslims are given equal privileges by accident.

You also state that the British government resists American racial profiling of its citizens because it is fearful of a Muslim "backlash." Perhaps it is upholding British laws against religious and ethnic discrimination. Fearful of rising Islamophobia in their own press, many European liberals seek xenophobia-free reporting from the New York Times. Please don't let your standards drop.

sent . . . off . . . committee meeting report . . . think mind has melted . . . neither PI nor self murdered in fit of rage . . . however, note that week is yet young . . . must eat . . . sleep . . . have a hot bath . . . aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh