Thanksgiving week has finally arrived. That’s right….Thanksgiving week. I know that the holiday is officially recognized as Thanksgiving weekend, but try to find anyone who can fully concentrate on their benchwork this week. With a 4-day weekend coming up, experiments have been put on hold, cells have been spun down and frozen and “on-duty” schedules have been arranged. (For those of you who are not familiar with an “on-duty” schedule, it is a great way for some members of the lab to take an extended vacation while other lab members (known as “suckers” in scientific lexicon) passage and feed their cells, tend to their animals and make sure that everything is in working order by the time everyone returns to the lab on Monday morning).
With everyone slowing down their work this week, one would think that the pace of scientific progress may be stymied. Fortunately that is not the case. There is one scientific crusader who is still manning the bridge, making sure that we, as a scientific society, do not fall behind. Just in time for Thanksgiving, Nathaniel Krefman has released two more videos that are bound to rock the world of science. His previous video “I’m Bringin Stickleback” hit the top of the YouTube charts soon after its release (note: the term “top” has not been verified to be statistically significant by independent sources. Furthermore, I am a molecular biologist and not a statistician so I can hardly be expected to be held accountable for silly statistics. As far as I’m concerned, either there is a band on the gel or there isn’t).
In the first of these two videos, we learn about the singer’s bad habits such as his poor aseptic technique (he coughs into culture plates and everything he touches turns to mold) and his tendency to drop and break lab glassware. His lyrics actually leave me wondering whether Nathaniel has timed the release of this video to conveniently get out of becoming one of the lab “suckers” mentioned above. After all, would you leave this guy in charge of your experiments over a long weekend?
The second video written by Mark Grabiner (Krefman’s role in this video was backing vocals, direction and editing), “bright scope, long lab coat” is a wonderful story of romance in the lab where we learn about the Mark’s romantic interest in a scientist with impeccable lab techniques and scientific methodology. For his sake, I certainly hope that Mark does not have the same bad habits that Nathaniel sang about in his first video or the relationship will certainly be doomed from the start).
What a great start to “Thanksgiving WEEK!!!”
Let us know which of these three videos are your favorite and be sure to tell us about other fun science videos that you’ve come across.
