Question: what is it like working in a lab????

Nathan Langford answered on 29 Jun 2012:

Hi tardis,

That very much depends on what type of lab it is. In terms of the people, it’s generally kind of fun, because you get to know the other people working in your lab quite well – and you’re often working with them on things – so it’s generally a fairly friendly, relaxed atmosphere. Or at least, that’s true in the good labs I’ve worked in.

But I’ll tell you a couple of the weird things in the different types of labs I’ve worked in.

Dark Labs —
In my old field, we worked on what we called “single-photon experiments”. That means the entire point of the experiment was to create single photons. These are individual, *very* small packets of light that need very special ultrasensitive detectors to see them. But because they are so sensitive, you can easily overload them (blow the electronic circuits, in fact) just by shining a small LED light at them. So I spent a lot of time during my PhD working in a completely dark lab, with walls and roof painted black, all the windows blocked up, the detectors wrapped up as much as they could be and then very carefully using single LED lights to see what we were doing. Now you got used to this pretty quickly (and actually got pretty good at seeing in the dark too, after a while), but it was still pretty weird. We would go in in the morning, spend most of the day in the dark and then sometimes it was already night time by the time we came out. Fortunately, however, my lab was in Australia, so we would get plenty of sunshine when we left the lab for lunch. (Although then it was reeeeeally bright – we would come out of the lab and immediately hide behind our sunglasses and still have to squint!)

Clean Labs—
In my new field, we use special nanofabrication techniques to make our experimental samples. This means that we have to work in what is called a “clean room”. Because the environment inside these clean rooms is kept ultra clean, you’re not allowed to go inside them without getting completely suited up in a full body suit (which people call a bunny suit), with covers for your shoes and gloves for your hands and a hood over your head. Once your in this suit, you can’t get into your pockets for anything, like a tissue, and you can’t touch your face with your gloves, or you need to change them. (There are some clean rooms where you even need to wear face helmets and masks.) It’s a bit like those “disease outbreak” movies where you see those scientists in full body suits trying to discover the source of the virus. And if you’re working with light sensitive materials, sometimes you have to work in a room with only red lights or only yellow lights to protect the samples.

So there are some strange situations you have to work in sometimes in a lab, but that can be kind of fun too…

Cheers,
Nathan.