These scenarios are thankfully a thing of the past. Technology and capitalism have together provided instruments and kits that have taken over tasks that back in the 1960s and '70s could occupy weeks to months, and as Sargent's stories show, were occasionally dangerous. The days of labeling your own nucleotides, distilling your own phenol, purifying your own enzymes, or even making your own buffers are long gone. Innovation, the commercialization of reagent production, and simple modern conveniences such as the microwave oven have transformed labs into more efficient and safer places to work.
Forever changing the face of personal computing in the laboratory was the LINC, Laboratory Instrument Computer, so-called to emphasize what this computer's place in the lab was to be—a computer to run instruments. The LINC's designer, Wes Clark, who describes himself as a "would-have-been physicist who got interested in computers," recognized the need for computers in the ...
