Most scientists enjoy tinkering with little bits and pieces of equipment, kluging together a new thingamajig from the discarded old parts of the broken whozeewhatsit. It's a make-do approach that helps us solve minor (or major!) experimental problems.
Perhaps as a result, labs are havens for pack rats, even to the point of ridiculousness. Broken printer? Well, don't trash it--maybe we'll want to scavenge it for parts one day. (Also, nobody feels like calling around to find out how we dispose of it.)
Two defunct large laserjet printers lurk in the common room of PostdocLab.
Friday, I got fed up with the fact that our primary freezer had such a thick build-up of permafrost that the top shelf had become the Tomb of (8 or 10 bottles of) Unknown Solutions, none of which could be extricated.
So I organized a defrosting. When, after several hours, the ice had melted enough for the bottles to be removed, I announced that I was going to throw them out.
I was met with resistance. "What if someone wants those?"
"Well, someone wrote their initials on here when they made up these drug aliquots, and nobody in the lab has those initials so I doubt anyone was counting on these drugs being here."
"Yeah, but if they're useful we shouldn't throw them away."
"Since the permafrost has been here since I joined the lab nine months ago, it seems safe to assume that these bottles are not in high demand. [Reads off label on a bottle] Do you ever use that?"
"No, but maybe we'll use it in the future."
"Look, do you even know whose initials these are? No? Neither does Advisor. Drugs this old should probably be thrown out anyhow."
"It's only a few bottles, it's not like they take up so much room, I think we should keep them."
"Go to hell."
Ok, it didn't reach quite that stage. (Ok, maybe it did.) My point is, although no one on earth would ever call me a neat freak, I do think that obsolete printers, drug aliquots from 2003, and unlabeled freezer contents are not a good use of our storage space.
So I poured the old drugs over the printers for maximum landfill toxicity, and threw the whole mess out the window.
No, not really. (But I really, really wanted to.)
15 years ago
15 comments:
my mentor has a weird issue with insisting that we order new drugs when we start a new experiment because we don't know if we can trust what's on the shelf/in the freezer, but he doesn't want us to throw away what's on the shelf/in the freezer in case we need it...
now, I'm all for keeping around random pieces of equipment that you can cobble together and give new functions, but there is no practical way to salvage a chemical that has gone bad when working in an ephys lab (we don't even have a fucking fume hood).
I'm finishing at the end of the month and will be going to a lab for my postdoc where everyone has their own fridge/freezer and there is a mandatory lab cleaning day once a year...but the lab does keep around plenty of defunct electrical equipment and encourages tinkering :)
My advisor is a total pack rat. I was cleaning out the fridge one day and came across a tube labeled with 3 letters. Nothing else, just three letters. I didn't have a clue what it was, so I tossed it. My advisor dug it out of the trash can, and spent the next 15 minutes explaining to me what it was, what it was used for and blah blah blah. He then proceeded to tell me that he brought it with him from his post doc when he started the lab 10 or 15 years ago. I suppose the saddest part is that the tube is still sitting in the fridge, and still hasn't been used.
He finally let us get rid of our ancient PCR machine a couple of years after we bought a new one, and my husband then proceeded to scavenge the old one for his lab! What can you do?
My post-doc mentor is a total equioment pack-rat. We had all kinds ancient electronic equipment piled up in the lab. I asked him what some of it was, and he said, "I have no fucking clue, but it sure has a lot of fucking knobs and dials and meters!"
My postdoc advisor also has a pile of oscilloscopes--not one or two, but a pile, maybe 4--sitting in his office. The other day someone commented that one of the scopes was so old it had a round window, like something you'd see on a WWII ship.
Perhaps in these people's pasts there was some incident where they realized that if only they'd kept the Soviet-era radio or whatever, they would be able to do a certain experiment.
But yeah, I think old drugs are really dubious. At least the oscilloscopes are fun to look at.
My office double as storage for old computer parts. I finally put my foot down and excessed eight outdated keyboards and three or four shitty monitors. Then of course my monitor started to act all whacky.
On the other hand, really old (>20 years) samples have been surprisingly useful, so I've got to hand it to my advisor for that. A big chunck of my dissertation comes from samples that had been in storage for over 20 years. Some of them had even been frozen for that long.
I hate the pack ratting/rat packing/packing ratting that goes on in labs!! We currently have 7 people in one small room that is filled with non-functioning equipment from the 1800s and unlabeled bottles with crusty remains of some reagent -- all covered in layers of dust.
This is a waste of space, and a health hazard.. but no one will let me throw things away!
Also.. how does this happen in a lab that is only 2 years old? Argh.
We have a -80C freezer filled with shit from the 1980s. We are most definitely not going to use the old shit. We also have stuff randomly put in boxes that are completely unlabeled. I met with similar resistance not to remove anything from the freezer and do a proper defrosting.
Of course, we have no space to actually put new stuff in there. Makes perfect sense to me! (boggle)
If samples in the freezer are labeled and stored corretcly I see no need of throwing them out (rat storage person as I am). If tubes are unlabled, or not labelled properly + likelyhood that someone will trust the labels and use them= not big. THen throw them out...
I recently realised that I have saved (stored) lots of paper that I have writtin hings before I put it in the lab book or before I rewrote it. It takes up storage space but it is soooo hard to throw it away. Even if I havent looked at it even once in a two year period...
I have had more trouble with pack rats than you know. My grad lab was filled with them. Lots of retarded shit that didn't work, "just in case". I am a cleanse and purge kind of girl, myself. I go through my wardrobe twice yearly to get rid of stuff. It makes me feel fresh and unencumbered.
I'm in a lab with a consistent capacity of 12 to 18 postdocs/grad students for the past 20 years. Our PI and our lab manager are both pack rats. I've survived two lab cleanups during my time in the lab. During the first, we found some ancient pumps. We didn't even know what they were. My PI informed us they were his first HPLC pumps-more than 25 year.
Cleaning out freezers, I have found boxes upon boxes of HPLC samples or protein samples from experiments run 10 years ago. I was informed by the lab manager that these were the boxes of things that people thought were their most important/valuable samples when they left, so "we" cataloged and stored them, where they now take up precious -80 space. Everything that's going to be published has been published from those samples! Even if someone wanted to rerun an experiment from 10 years ago, (a) chances are they won't be able to figure out what the samples actually are, and (b) if you're really interested in it, you're going to start with fresh samples. It's not as though these are hard-to-obtain tissue samples. They're from reactions with purified proteins that we express and purify on a regular basis.
I think some people do it just for the nostalgia.
Hehe! I didn't even think about our HPLC mess! We have a whole HPLC that doesn't work at all, complete with a computer so old it took us about an hour to figure out how to turn it on. We also picked up about a dozen columns of unknown condition when another PI left. All this, and I've seen someone use our working HPLC maybe 5 times in 5 years. And yet the broken HPLC continues to take up about 1/3 of the lab's bench space. My PI says maybe we should find a shelf or something to put it on. I just roll my eyes!
Hey, at least it's not two slots full of your PI's 15 yr old aliquots in your ONLY -80 freezer. Cause he might totally run experiments one day you know.
And 15 yr old brain sections are STILL GOOD, OK!!
Hey you'll all be glad of those old oscilloscopes after the armageddon comes and we have to try to piece our ability to do science back together from scratch with no fancy equipment and things like computers!
I'm with you on this one. If it's unidentifiable, it's going in the trash. End of story.
I'm currently working in two labs, and the contrast is amazing. The PIs are similar ages, have been at the university a similar length of time (both came from elsewhere). One has a spacious feeling, mostly newer equipment, clean benches, and says this is full capacity.
The other is the extreme of clutter, old broken equipment, not an inch available, and still packing people in and hanging on to old broken junk and refusing to replace it even when it is broken more of the time than it is working.
Guess which one I'd rather work in?
It's quite mind-boggling.
I have to admit though, arlenna has a point. What will we do after armageddon?
And here I thought only archaeology labs became havens for pack rats. The one I once worked in contained things like CPUs from 1985 and--inexplicably--ten-year-old cans of corn, before it was vigorously cleaned out-- but that stuff sounds tame compared to what's described here! We didn't have to deal with freezers . . .
By the way, it is long past time for me to blogroll you.
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