There is a common perception that working as a technician in a biology lab, or any type of lab for that matter, requires a deep understanding of scientific principles and procedures. Having worked in multiple labs in both academia and the private sector, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that a trained monkey could do the job of most lab techs.
About 85% of lab tech work is waiting for something to happen. The next 10% is divided between setting up an experiment, resetting up the same experiment after it failed the first time (and the second, third, fourth...), and then cleaning up the mess you made. The remaining 5% is spent giving your results to your “boss,” (be it a professor, medical doctor, or lab manager) and then being told what to do next.
It’s incredibly repetitive, and I would go as far to describe it as soul-suckingly boring.
Of course, the first week or so of starting in lab is great. Everything’s new and untried, and there’s still the wonder of not knowing and actually caring what the next results will be. When I first started working as a lab tech in Texas A&M’s Veterinary Gastrointestinal Lab, I was in science-nerd heaven.
Wow, look at that! That’s a high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC, for short) machine! I get to actually use it? How fortune smiles upon me! And that, that over there, could it be? An automated scintillation counter! Be still my beating heart!
By week two the HPLC machine and I were no longer on speaking terms and the scintillation counter had threats made against its life.
But as with any defunct relationship, there’s always a back-story. Without getting too technical, my job was to extract and purify a couple of different proteins that are found in the blood and pancreata of dogs and cats. These proteins are used to create diagnostic tests for multiple forms of gastrointestinal diseases and disorders in people’s pets.
Let’s say Rölf, your loyal and stoic German Shepherd, starts having serious issues of the diarrheal variety and gas so bad that “did something die in here?” becomes a household phrase. As a loving pet owner, you would take him to the vet, and the doctor would collect a stool sample (which Rölf already provided several of on the way in). The vet would then pack the sample on ice and ship it to the GI lab at A&M. If the FedEx guy only knew.
On arrival, the lab techs here would test for the presence of a protein called alpha 1-protease inhibitor. Before your eyes glaze over, simply note that this protein is not normally found in feces, so if they find it, that’s bad. It’s presence indicates a breakdown of intestinal integrity, thus the dog isn’t absorbing things properly and has all sorts of digestive issues. We send our findings back to vet, who then makes the formal diagnosis and provides the proper treatment. Soon Rölf is back to his regular patrolling of the backyard, and everyone is breathing through their nose again.
And all of that was made possible by my work. There were similar tests for pancreatic disorders in cats and other GI diseases, both canine and feline specific and each one was dependant on the proteins that I purified. So I did find a certain level of satisfaction knowing that I was helping out a lot of sick pets, and that’s probably what kept me going for as long as I did. At the same time, because I never actually got to see any of the animals, it was very easy to become detached from the work and feel completely unfulfilled.
It didn’t help that the lab’s entire atmosphere was as sterile as a, well, as a lab. We occupied pretty much the entire basement of the Small Animal Clinical Science Building and were divided into two main work groups. On the diagnostic side were a dozen or so lab techs who were primarily undergraduates in a work-study program and were overseen by a couple of lab managers. The other division was the deemed “research,” and it consisted of me alone. I should clarify that on the research side, there were also 5 or 6 graduate students and a post-doc, but each of them had their own project and weren’t really viewed as employees. They on the other hand, didn’t view me as even existing, so they may just as well not been there. The isolation was codified further, in that the rooms that were used by the diagnostic team were on the opposite side of the basement from the room I worked in. The only person that I routinely dealt with was the lab coordinator who I initially interviewed with. I would give him my results, and he would pass them over to the diagnostic side and that was that.
It was all pretty dull and low pressure until, for some reason, our diagnostic tests became really in demand. Then I went from your standard 40 hour work week to setting up camp in the lab and logging nearly 90 hours a week. It wasn’t long before I was falling apart physically, and absolutely collapsing mentally. I am very serious when I say that I had one foot in the grave and would have been all in if it wasn’t for a miracle. A miracle that took the form of a little, black dog.
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