At Home in the Lab
The physical space of the bioscience lab itself is rather unremarkable: a small office with two separate wet laboratories for experiments just down the hall. One is for handling viruses, so I have only seen it through a small window in the door. The office space itself is carved into the PI’s room with two glass walls and a door, while the remaining L-shaped space is filled with a conference table, a flat panel TV, six desks separated by cubicles, and another larger desk in one corner that remained mostly unoccupied before the shutdown. It is in this small space, with postdocs and technicians sitting in front of their laptops, that a great deal of science – to the buzz of florescent bulb and air circulatory systems – quietly happens.
As they sit at their desks, the scientists are preparing and reviewing data files of experimental results; investigating previous publications (to learn about new methods, for example); drafting protocols (experimental recipes); preparing presentations, articles, and grant applications; and, of course, emailing. They get up frequently, often without comment, and leave the office carrying laptops or grabbing keys, heading off to the benches in the lab to start or check on experiments. Sometimes they approach each other with questions, again towing their laptops, peering together at images on the screen or asking one another about whether a particular order of reagents has arrived, typically in whispered exchanges.
In the actual labs where they “move liquid around” (as one postdoc described the “basic skills of molecular biology” to me), these bioscientists are tuned into the sounds of the machines and other equipment they use for experiments: the electrical humming of a previously broken incubator can be reassuring while waiting to see if it will reach the necessary temperature, a sign that it is truly working properly again; the predictable dishwasher-like chugging of the microchip electrophoresis machine confirms that the experiment has started and is running properly. And it is at the benches that the scientists also begin to talk more casually, helping each other and laughing or gossiping, without the concern for disruption that structures the quieter exchanges in the office.
The lab itself, however, is a place that is co-constituted by the lab members across these physical spaces and other virtual situations. Indeed, scientific work is situated both on site as well as telepresently, just as the borders of the lab are porous. As Mody argues: “The boundary between lab and world always remains somewhat flexible and contestable, where sound environments both constrain and enable this ambiguity” (Mody 2005: 181). In fact, the lab is guided by currents of telepresence that I still only have a small window into, like the virus lab. For example, meetings in-person with the PI before telework were often punctuated by silence, by shared time examining the details of a publication or of a particular experimental image. The PI might request the postdoc to “go back” or “zoom in,” as both looked onto a single computer screen, sorting and interpreting visualized results into data. Later I learned that these details, evidence of experimental outcomes – such as histograms of long-read DNA sequences or prior publications that the lab was using to justify or support its own research questions and experimental methods – had been documented and circulated in this shared online space, made and worked on collaboratively by all. Indeed, the information exchanged in these electronic formats was constantly referred to by the PI and lab members, emerging not only in meetings but also present in the background of almost any conversation.
My initial introduction to this large electronic subterranean cavern was through an email invitation from the PI, received when I began visiting the lab weekly in person, to join the lab’s online calendar. This shared online document is a visual mark-up of when the PI might be unavailable, when visitors to the lab were scheduled, or when the PI or other lab members would be out of the office or traveling for a conference as well as for marking weekly-recurring internal meetings. In addition to the calendar, I learned gradually that everyone was also simultaneously balancing at least three additional applications or web platforms (not counting email) for communicating, sharing the detailed results of their experiments and protocols, either in progress or complete (their scientific “notebooks”), and coordinating shared experimental or operational tasks (for example, which mice litters were to be weaned and when). One of their responsibilities, then, as scientists and members of the lab, was to maintain their presence in these spaces, to participate, to document, to be familiar with what was there – keeping up-to-date, in other words – and to recall that information later during meetings and conversations. The PI referenced this expectation during an online weekly meeting when, realizing he had failed to track a postdoc’s updated experimental data, apologized his oversight with, “That’s alright, you must have posted it when there was a lot going on, because usually I would catch it.” This reply reflects that, even without direct references or reminders, these online conversations and exchanges were considered to be part of necessary everyday engagements. While the closure of the lab transitioned the scientists even more fully into these shared electronic connections, telepresence had already often been prioritized over face-to-face communication. For example, when a postdoc mentioned during the weekly lab meeting that a piece of lab equipment wasn’t working properly, the PI reminded them that if they waited to discuss this during a regularly scheduled meeting rather than document it immediately online, then it was already an unnecessary delay in communicating the problem and moving towards a resolution.