Noooooooo!!!!!!

In grad school, my experiments were mostly on 6-day old cells which, when the preparation of the patterned substrate on which they grew was factored in, required almost three weeks of preparation. Experiments on primary cells were even more difficult to set up, as I could only obtain the primary cells sporadically. And experiments on primary cells from knockout mice bred without a gene for the protein I was interested in were the most difficult experiments of all, because these mice were not healthy, and therefore the cells were very rare.

My main experiment involved a micropipette with a 75-micron diameter. This may seem small, but micropipettes are usually only a few microns in diameter, so my micropipettes were actually huge on the micropipette scale of things. Because I needed such large ones, I could not forge the micropipettes myself. (I’d explain why, but those readers who don’t already understand why likely don’t care. In short, I needed at least 20 microns of constant inner diameter, and that’s nearly impossible to do for such a large pipette.) So instead of traditional micropipettes, I used a hollow fiber optic waveguide that was commercially available in spools of several yards. I owed this brilliant suggestion to The Husband, who works with lasers and optics and waveguides.

In addition to suggesting I use the waveguides in the first place, The Husband also prepared them for me. His lab had a fancy-schmancy waveguide cleaver which made clean cuts through the glass to create micropipettes about 2-inches long. Without the cleaver, the spool of fiber optic glass was useless, because I couldn’t make smooth-edged pipettes. We never got around to buying the cleaver because The Husband didn’t mind making the micropipettes for me, and I could just pick them up when I saw him on the weekends. Since The Husband lived a 2-hour drive from me, I was always careful to make sure I always had plenty of prepared micropipettes ready at all times.

That’s why it was such a shock to discover that I had only one pipette left the day of my big, big experiment on the knockout primary cells. I couldn’t believe it. I checked and rechecked all of the spots where I kept the pipettes, but that was it. One left. I held up my sole pipette to the light to examine it for defects and try to determine whether I could run an entire experiment with only one pipette, and I dropped it. I had one pipette left, and I dropped it, and it disappeared into the dust on the floor.

I called The Husband in a blind panic and he agreed to make some more and meet me on the Jersey Turnpike in ninety minutes. I had to borrow The Doktah’s car, which was a Chevy Metro. It got great mileage, but it couldn’t go above fifty miles per hour and run the air conditioner. I met The Husband, picked up the goods, and headed back to the lab.

About ten hours after discovering the shortage of pipettes, I finished the experiment. The results were good, and the data comprised a large portion of my thesis, so it was all worth it in the end. But damn.