Diary of an Insane Cell Mechanic (2003) (opens in new tab)

This article details most of my work and correctly characterizes the day to day struggles.

It's been 10 years from the writing of this article, but things haven't really changed all that much. Still waiting on robotics and software to really revolutionize things.

My god. it's like he did my rotation in a wet lab. Very similar set of experiences.

BTW: Maniatis as a lab manual set back molecular biology by years! Almost every protocol in the book was wrong, missing some technical component. It's as if "Intro To Python" left out important code statements and just kind of let you figure it out from first principles.

Looks really cool, I'll read it carefully tonight.

It seems as a biochemical equivalent to the organic chem "porn" blog posts "things I won't work with".

Fascinating! Thanks for posting this. So many of the anecdotes remind me of my days starting out in the wet lab, coming from Bioinformatics (and prior to that medicine)!

Brings a smile to my face looking back!

Fun to read... I was doing a summer internship that involved DNA sequencing around this same time period, it all sounds very familar. Wet lab work is ultimately what convinced me that I wanted to work in computational biology rather than spending the rest of my life pipetting!