'DR. NEBULA'S LABORATORY: LIFE WITH LUCY' (Sunday) Dr. Nebula isn't an absent-minded professor, he's an absent professor.
The memoir, which then bore the working title "Honest Jim," was a startling departure from the usual staid accounts of laboratory life.
READING I recently read Latour and Woolgar's fantastic "Laboratory Life," where they observe this weird thing that scientists do — how we make up stories using data.
These nocturnal drills are not simply a way of dealing with the stress of laboratory life, as scientists from Leiden University, in the Netherlands, demonstrated in a charming experiment conducted a few years ago.
This is a sequence of about 5,000 of the chemical bases that make up DNA, and it has a characteristic that is particularly useful for scientists who want to examine it: it seems to prefer laboratory life.The other useful thing about copia is that Drosophila is infested with it.
At the same time, the mandala as a symbol of unity and wholeness may easily obfuscate instances of disruption, tension and conflict emerging in actual laboratory life.
The synthetic cell mandala may work as a psychic aid, guiding researchers in their efforts to face the realities of laboratory life and its adverse impacts.
This is a view suggested by Latour and Woolgar in their influential book Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1986 [1979]).
The good news is that drug discovery is unique in offering multiple career options that let you stay close to science without the daily grind of laboratory life.
Both documents thus highlight an essential reality of laboratory life: Professors with lucrative grants enjoy great power to run their fiefdoms as they see fit, regardless of what rules and agreements say.
By showing how Maffesoli and Knorr-Cetina can supplement one another, we create an encounter between the sociology of emotions and the sociology of science to demonstrate the centrality of emotions in laboratory life.
