My postdoc Advisor recently hired on a part-time tech. This guy is straight out of a prestigious college, looking to tech for a couple of years before going to grad school. (Why can't he find a full-time job? Don't know.)
Tech did a little techwork in college, although he doesn't speak of it with much enthusiasm. I was moderately against hiring Tech, but Advisor didn't ask me and went ahead with him.
Yesterday, I was training Tech in some histology he'll be doing for us. Yap, yap, PBS, yap, yap, Triton, yap, yap, pipette, yap, yap, wait what? You say you don't know how to....pipette?
Sweet Jeebus.
(Non-biomedical readers may find this post quite dull. Feel free to stick around, I'm just giving fair warning.)
This led me to try to remember the first time I wielded a Gilson. I can't. I teched in college, and did reams of PCR, so for sure I knew how then (although given my utter failure to produce substantive results with said PCR project, in retrospect I wonder....)
Did I learn in a lab class in college? Huh, maybe. I also teched between high school and college, and perhaps I even learned then.
Dr Hyde remembers his first pipette experience. He says that for a long time he didn't realize there was a second stop. He also says that for several months he pipetted with his forefinger. "That doesn't give you carpal tunnel....if you don't do very much of it," he muses.
The memory of this made us both clutch our sides laughing. Pipetting with your forefinger! What green little lambs we once were.
I now have one of those green little lambs under my wing, so to speak.
Apparently I have forgotten to teach Tech that you have to make a controlled release movement. Two of our pipettes had fluid up in their special no-no holes by the end of the day.
I blame myself. I am becoming that most hated of things, the person who teaches badly because she's forgotten what it's like not to know.
But seriously? How do you reach age 22 and express interest in a biomedical future and not know how to fucking pipette?
15 years ago
18 comments:
Dr. Jekyll, I think that you are probably the exception to the rule in terms of your ingrained pipetting ability )perhaps you have the pipetting gene?). I vividly remember learning this little skill as a senior in college doing an undergrad research project. Like Dr. Hyde, I didn't realize the second stop was functional -- I thought the pipette was just "sticky" and pushed past the first stop every time I sucked fluid up. I could figure out why my PCR didn't work -- it's because I was adding like 10x more of everything than I actually needed. That was how I learned to never trust that anyone actually knows how to do anything.
Now, now, Dr. Jekyll- I have no idea what this Gilson instrument is that you speak of, but I can get through the day. :) Pipetting is easy enough to get the hang of, so this torture will not last long.
When I first started using pipets as an undergrad, I continually made the mistake of ejecting the entire tip (containing the sample)instead of just the fluid inside of the tip. The grad student with whom I was working wanted to kill me.
I have absolutely no recollection of when I learned how to pipet either...I worked in a physics lab in college, so it couldn't have been then...maybe in college biochem or genetics lab? I really have no clue...and all of those things were less than 10 years ago. I must say there are worse things someone could come in not knowing (how to calculate molarity, for example...although this is also easy to teach and doesn't leave you with sticky Gilsons and yes, I have come across students that know how to pipet and don't know how to calculate molarity because someone always told them exactly how much of each chemical was needed and they never translated what they learned in their basic chemistry class to skills they needed in a lab).
I must say I actually laughed out loud while reading this post. I do remember learning to pipette (genetics lab in college), but I knew very, very little else when I entered grad school. The proof: I thought I knew how to load a DNA gel and ended up sticking the entire pipette tip down into the wells, which of course meant it ran like shit.
Your point is a good one, though. It's hard to remember no knowing things that are now second-nature. I hope for your sake that Tech is a quick learner. I'm still checking every calculation that our new grad student does...despite his being in the lab for 6 months now (and, yes, they're often wrong).
I'd just like to point out that every single one of you said that you learned pipetting in college. This person did not....
CandidE, I totally made that mistake all the time when starting to pipette!
Neurostu and SGG--he's a little hazy on calculations too. Expect a plethora of posts about this guy.
I think I learned how to pipette with a Gilson when I started work as a baby tech at Prestigious Institute. Looking back, I am frankly astonished at the patience of the tech who showed me everything. Granted, I know I was a quick study (don't believe I ever pulled up liquid into the no-no hole of my Gilson (which is easily the best description of that part of the pipette I've ever heard)), so perhaps my determination made up for my horrendous lack of knowledge. I worked in a plant pathology lab and a neurophysiology lab as an undergrad, so I had no mol/cell biology experience prior to being a tech. Hence, a lot of frustration in my first few months there.
Hmmm, may that's the reason he couldn't get a full time job?
I learned to pipette from a fabulous lady who let me work for her when I was an undergraduate. I still remember when she taught me to do serial dilutions with a multi-channel pipette.
I can remember learning to pipet - it was in my 8th grade science class. I went to a poorly-funded rural school with no science labs to speak of so they brought these people in from the university nearby to teach us a unit on DNA. We got to extract mouse DNA from tissue (I don't think they let use do the phenol step) and coil it up on capillary tubes. Then we "solved a mystery" for a forensics unit using microsatellites to determine paternity...I got to pipet all the reagents for the PCR reaction and load the electrophoresis gel. (I can't believe I actually learned and remembered all that stuff as an 8th grader...I'm sure most of my classmates were bored out of their skulls with it).
Wielding that pipet made me feel like I was on the verge of a major breakthrough. From that day forward I told everyone who would listen that I was going to be a genetic engineer when I grew up. I am such a geek. Now I'm a grad student in a molecular genetics lab and I spend 2/3 of my day moving clear liquids from one receptacle to another with my trusty Gilson. My thumbs are so ripped!
For the life of me though I can't do molarity/dilution calculations in my head and I rarely trust them on paper either. Instead I use this site: http://www.graphpad.com/quickcalcs/Molarityform.cfm
I get the answer, then do it in my head to make sure it makes sense. Good luck with your minion.
I did not learn how to pipette until I was in grad school and then was made fun of for not knowing. All colleges / universities are different when it comes to availability of practical lab courses. Here at Big Canadian University NONE of the undergrad science degrees have hands on classes, there is not enough space or time to teach all the undergrads science students.
My old uni (where I did my undergrad and masters) is a much smaller university (what Americans refer to as liberal arts??). All biology, physics, molecular biology / biochemistry, and chemistry degree programs have hands on courses. If you graduate from one of those programs you should know how to use a pipette and many other techniques (westerns, gels, PCR, transvections etc). MY degree program also had a hands on lab course but it was for physiology type experiments, which are very different from basic science type techniques. Don't be too hard on new Tech, remember no one is born knowing everything, we need to have someone teach us at least once
how do you get hired as a TECH if you don't know how to pipet?!? That's a really basic skill; I agree that everyone has to be taught these skills at some point, but when you hire a tech, I'd hope they'd come with some skills. Training takes a lot of time.
huh, I've been pipetting for 20 years now and had no idea it had a brand name of "gilson" - totally thought it was 'pipetman'^TM. Just looked in my drawer- lo and behold. I remember being taught to pipet - in my second undergrad lab job after I screwed up my first by not knowing how to pH my solutions...
I learned to pipette in the first molecular class I took in college. How does a prestigious school not train someone how to pick up a pipette?!
My PI, on the other hand, was recently teaching one of the grad students how to run a protein gel. The pipette he took from the lab tech's bench stunk of mercaptoethanol for a week.
More depressingly, one of the undergrads formerly in our lab recently tried to get a job as a tech and was given a lab skills quiz. He failed the molarity question. This was the guy who was previously making all of the buffers and antibiotic stocks for the whole lab!
I have seen so much bad pipetting over the course of my career, I try not to ever watch anyone in my lab pipette, or I'm afraid I'll see something that'll give me ulcers. Examples:
(1) Suddenly completely releasing the plunger to suck up a solution instead of slowly letting it rise.
(2) Expelling sub-microliter volumes into an Eppendorf tube by just pointing the pipet tip into the tube and pressing down instead of expelling it visually onto the wall of the tube.
(3) Pipetting submicroliter volumes using a P200.
Anon @ 11:36, thanks for the link! I will plan on training him up and then giving him the website.
I totally use that Graphpad site for my molarity calculations. The sad part? It will rot your brain - I have become so dependent on it that I don't trust my own math (which is usually right, but I still don't trust it until I plug it into the calculator). It has a very lovely "diluting stock solutions" function that I am very, very, very fond of.
BTW, where'd your new comment function come from? It's much more streamlined than the previous one (that I'm also using).
On more than once occasion, I have been assured by undergrad lab techs that "of course!" they know how to use a pipette. I have then seen various pipetting sins committed, including pushing past the stop before uptake, ejecting the tip into the solution, and my personal favorites... sucking up solution into the pipette and proceeding to a) wave said pipette around like a baton as they gesture while speaking or b) LAY IT DOWN on its side (yes, still full!). I never take anyone's word anymore, and all new undergrads and new grads have to complete a "honing your pipette skills" exercise before they're allowed to do anything else in the lab.
On a related note, I also had to explain proper use of our balance to one one student.
DGT, I have no idea why the comments displayed like that yesterday. I didn't do anything to make it happen, and I didn't do anything to make it stop.
As with much of my life, it remains a mystery...
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