I wanted to find out exactly who was in charge, whether it was God Himself or whether it was scientists in the laboratory. It was us.
The first experiments on the biological properties of radium were successfully made in France, with samples from our laboratory, while my husband was living.
Just after graduation in 1966, like many of my contemporaries, I applied for research training at the National Institutes of Health. Perhaps because his wife was a poet, Ira Pastan agreed to take me into his laboratory, despite my lack of scientific credentials.
There is a fundamental and culturally learned power imbalance between men and women, and it follows us into the workplace. The violence born of this imbalance follows us also. We would like to believe that it stops short of following us into the laboratory and into the field – but it does not.
Years ago I went into my laboratory and said, ‘Dear Mr. Creator, please tell me what the universe was made for?’ The Great Creator answered, ‘You want to know too much for that little mind of yours. Ask for something more your size, little man.’
Life, work – it’s all very organic and fluid, a laboratory. I always tell people: whatever your thing is, you just have to be in it. Jump in; you’ll figure it out.
The images attempt to capture scientific thought. They represent the physical manifestation of the thought process. Everything in the laboratory is a product of a stream of conscious or unconscious thought.
One works in one’s laboratory – one’s chaotic laboratory – with students and colleagues, doing what one most wants to do – then all this happens! It is overwhelming.
About 1930, our laboratory had obtained a large concave grating and set it up in a Runge-Paschen mounting.
Poland was the racial laboratory of the Nazis. This is where they started to put their abhorrent theories into practice.
The manager believes soccer is a science and the field a laboratory, but the genius of Einstein and the subtlety of Freud is not enough for the owners and the fans. They want a miracle worker like Our Lady of Lourdes, with the stamina of Gandhi.
Changing from biochemistry to law was easy because I was rubbish in the laboratory. I could never decide how much to put in a test tube because I’m not very good at maths.
The war broke out, and for a number of years I lived in darkness, with the memory of the lakes, the trees and the skies of Sweden, until I returned in 1946 to spend two unforgettable years in the laboratory of Hugo Theorell.
I set up a laboratory in the Department of Physiology in the Medical School in South Africa and begin to try to find a bacteriophage system which we might use to solve the genetic code.
During my years at the synchrotron laboratory, I had become interested in the theory of quantum electrodynamics and had decided that what I would most like to do after completing my dissertation work was to probe the short-distance behavior of the electromagnetic interaction.
When I was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory back in the early ’80s is when I first got the idea. The Super Soaker was based on some engineering principles that I applied. I was actually working on another invention which was a heat pump that would use water as a working fluid instead of Freon.
At first, I was able to use a Bunsen burner attached to my mother’s gas stove, but the use of the kitchen as a laboratory came to an abrupt end when a minor explosion involving hydrogen sulphide spattered the newly painted decor and changed the colour from blue to dirty green!
The goal of reanimation research is not to make perfect living copies of extinct organisms, nor is it meant to be a one-off stunt in a laboratory or zoo. Reanimation is about leveraging the best of ancient and synthetic DNA.
I cannot imagine a more enjoyable place to work than in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology where I work.
It is fortunate, I think, that nature is not bounded by human reason and by laboratory work and experimentation, for by the laws of pure reason and by microscopic investigation, it might easily have been proved, long before this, that children could not be born.
The robotic fly that we actually make the most use of in our laboratory is actually not a small thing, it’s a giant thing. It has about a meter wing span, and it flaps in three metric tons of mineral oil. And it is a so-called dynamically scaled fly.
