The end of the year is approaching and we celebrating attending seminar on lab safety and how to be more responsible scientists. During the 3 hours seminar, Hanna, Alejandro, Bente and Catherine gave very useful input on "do" and "don't" in the lab.
So for all you scientists out there; we have put together the essential list of do's and don'ts for a safe and enjoyable lab Christmas (loosely inspired from the seminar and a recent Guardian news article).
Do…
- Rack up some brownie points by dropping hints around the boss that your very important experiment will be running over Christmas and New Year's and will need your constant supervision (even though you've actually booked an extended dirty weekend in the Canary Islands. The boss is not planning on being in, so she'll never know.)
- Bribe your labmates with the above cookies so they don't rat on you.
- Send Christmas cards to all your bitterest scientific competitors around the world, implying that you're a lot closer to a "breakthrough" than you actually are.
- Finish and send off your manuscript to your favourite journal on Christmas Eve – the editors will sincerely appreciate your thoughtfulness, because honestly, they won't have much to clear off their desks before close of play.
Don't…
- Spike your cell cultures with sherry as a "festive treat" for being so good.
- Work too near the gas burner in your new sparkly Christmas jumper.
- Put Wham!'s Last Christmas on a repeating loop. Because everyone is tense enough as it is.
- Grow red and green bacteria in a Petri dish spelling out "Let's conjugate!" and present it to the grad student you fancy in the lab next door. That will never end well.
And above all…
Don't forget to take some well-deserved time off- a few extra days is not going to prevent you for getting that Nobel Prize in 2020.
Would like to wish all our friends and colleagues a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Let 2020 be a prosperous year with many new scientific achievements.