The Holiday Gardener.

I was once lucky enough to sit down at a table for lunch at a conference with a group of fellow science geeks that included a brilliant guy named Roger.

It was December and the conversation invariably turned to people's plans for the upcoming holidays. Roger, who was already quite senior at the time, said that he was planning to go into the lab to do mini-experiments. He went on to explain that he liked to do this because it was the only time of the year when the phone calls and Emails stopped long enough for him to actually get something done. Then, in the first week of January, folks from his group would return to work to find little presents, in the form of small packets of data, that would allow them to start new projects if they so wished.

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This morning we had a group meeting and at the end we started talking about things that need to be done over the holidays when folks aren't around as regularly as usual. 

The smartest person in the group has a ton of things running. As such, she has some cell cultures on the go that won't be ready to freeze down before she leaves next week for an overseas excursion to see grandparents with her young family, a make-up for a trip that was cancelled at the last minute last December due to Omicron.

So. 

Unlike the brilliant fellow mentioned above, I will be going into the lab this holiday season not to do new experiments but instead to do a little gardening, which is what we call routine cell culture.

It's something I'm still good at.*

And it's something I actually enjoy doing.

Especially when no one else is around and I can crank up the music, Christmas carols or otherwise, to eleven.

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*Whenever I do get away from the phone calls and the emails and the zoom meetings and the piazza messages long enough to venture into the lab to do something new and experimental the young kids all run away as fast as they can because they know I will soon start moaning about how I can't find a particular pipette on a specific shelf above a certain centrifuge where I left it two years ago...

Image at the top of the post...A still from a movie of a migrating cell in culture where the adhesion molecules that make its movement possible have been tagged with a protein that fluoresces green...The fellow mentioned in the post helped develop these fluorescent proteins...They allow us to see what is happening within cells in real time...It is an approach that revolutionized cell biology...Previously, the activity and localization of specific molecules could only be observed statically with fixed cells stained, for example, with antibodies...This movie was made by another super smart young person who once was part of my group and used to bring me data presents all the time, not just after holidays...He now has his own lab located in the Centre of the Canuckistanmikitaian Universe.

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