Killing Time

Image: Courtesy of Ken Frauwirth It's not yet lunch-time, and you've just started an ultracentrifuge. The prospect of spending the next six hours watching shiny, spinning objects is next to unbearable. What to do, what to do? "You put some dry ice in an Eppendorf tube and if you stand it up straight, it takes off like a bottle rocket," says one graduate student, who understandably wishes to remain anonymous. "Sometimes we have contests to see who can make it go the highest." It's a universal problem of lab work: playing the waiting game while experiments run their course. "Technology is allowing us to do things we haven't been able to before, but that doesn't necessarily make things faster," says John Latto, a researcher in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Western blot tests, PCRs, and sequencing gels can take hours to complete. The waiting game can get boring quickly, so some activity must kill those endless hours. Some researchers use their waiting hours in a conventionally productive manner by checking E-mail, browsing Medline, multitasking, or--perish the thought--even reading stacks of journals. "There are always other experiments or course assignments I can be working on." says Charles Addison, who recently earned a master's degree in industrial microbiology at Michigan State University, East Lansing. Some, like the anonymous rocket scientist, amuse themselves through the misuse of lab equipment. Still others attempt to combat the sedentary nature of lab work by bringing the outdoors inside. "It's not uncommon to find someone practicing their putting down a hall at night," says Jessica Nadler, a postdoc from the Department of Genetics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "Last year we had a shoot-around where we hung a paper cup from the ceiling, took the aluminum foil from the autoclaved beakers and flasks to make a basketball." Ken Frauwirth was listening to a graduate student's lecture on RNA degradation at UC-Berkeley when he realized the jargon could sound pretty humorous to an outsider. The lecture became the progenitor of single-frame cartoons taking biological humor to strange new places. Frauwirth, now a postdoctoral fellow at the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, says some professors have even requested he put his cartoons, inspired by The Far Side comic strip, on posters for conferences.1 He employs his artistic skills during downtime. Thomas Edison set the precedent for productive use of his time by sleeping on the job, says William Anthony, executive director of the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University. Anthony maintains that a little siesta provides physiological and psychological advantages: It improves one's ability to concentrate, listen to coworkers, and persist on a task. Unfortunately, not everyone can take a therapeutic catnap, Latto says. "These days there seems to be less downtime," he adds. "There's always a stack of E-mail, or something associated with a class you're teaching." Christopher Miller, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a professor of biochemistry at Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass., says that working like a maniac doesn't necessarily result in more productivity. Nevertheless, he also observes that "lazy bums tend to never get anything done either." Perhaps such admonitions give some free thinkers their limits. Even the Eppendorf rocket launcher balks at the suggestion that his principal investigator spring for a video game system as a means of release. "That could get kind of dangerous," he says. Hal Cohen can be contacted at hcohen@the-scientist.com. 1. mail.med.upenn.edu/~kfrauwir/SDSPage/Page1.html

Killing Time

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