Laboratory Lab Quotes

After scientists broke open the coat of a lotus seed (Nelumbo nucifera) and coddled the embryo into growth, they kept the empty husk. When they radiocarbon-dated this discarded outer shell, they discovered that their seedling had been waiting for them within a peat bog in China for no less than two thousand years. This tiny seed had stubbornly kept up the hope of its own future while entire human civilizations rose and fell. And then one day this little plant's yearning finally burst forth within a laboratory. I wonder where it is right now.

My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe. The machines drone a gathering hymn as I enter. I know whom I’ll probably see, and I know how they’ll probably act. I know there’ll be silence; I know there’ll be music, a time to greet my friends, and a time to leave others to their contemplation. There are rituals that I follow, some I understand and some I don’t. Elevated to my best self, I strive to do each task correctly. My lab is a place to go on sacred days, as is a church. On holidays, when the rest of the world is closed, my lab is open. My lab is a refuge and an asylum. It is my retreat from the professional battlefield; it is the place where I coolly examine my wounds and repair my armor. And, just like church, because I grew up in it, it is not something from which I can ever really walk away. My

Much as I admired the elegance of physical theories, which at that time geology wholly lacked, I preferred a life in the woods to one in the laboratory.

The mind is the laboratory where products, both fake and genuine are manufactured. People grow wild weeds, others grow flourishing flowers!

Natick Labs and precursor the Quartermaster Subsistence Research Laboratory have extended shelf lives to near immortality. They currently make a sandwich that keeps for three years.

When I was five I came to understand that I was not a boy. I still wasn’t sure what I was, but it became clear that whatever I was, it was less than a boy. I saw that my brothers, who were five, ten, and fifteen years older than I, could do all of our laboratory play in the outside world.

The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise…

I don't like museums, I like labs.

Labs, too, can become machines. In science, it is more often a pejorative description than a complimentary one: an efficient, thrumming, technically accomplished laboratory is like a robot orchestra that produces perfectly pitched tunes but no music.

An invention is a responsibility of the individual, society cannot invent, it can only applaud the invention and inventor.

The men preferred to think they worked not in a laboratory but in what Kelly once called “an institute of creative technology.

A first-rate laboratory is one in which mediocre scientists can produce outstanding work.

It was as if a mad scientist had sold all of his important tools and chemicals at a yard sale, leaving a makeshift laboratory of scrap materials that the neighbors didn't want.

laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. I am afraid of laboratories, because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them artificially, out of their context. You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.

Just as scientists test a theory by taking it into the lab and mixing chemicals in a test tube to see if the results confirm the theory, so we test a worldview by taking it into the laboratory of ordinary life.

Each candidate was to deliver two stool specimens to the Lovelace laboratory in Dixie cups, and days were going by and Conrad had been unable to egest even one, and the staff kept getting after him about it. Finally he managed to produce a single bolus, a mean hard little ball no more than an inch in diameter and shot through with some kind of seeds, whole seeds, undigested. Then he remembered. The first night in Albuquerque he had gone to a Mexican restaurant and eaten a lot of jalapeño peppers. They were jalapeño seeds. Even in the turd world this was a pretty miserable-looking objet. So Conrad tied a red ribbon around the goddamned thing, with a bow and all, and put it in the Dixie cup and delivered it to the lab.

The lab workers acknowledged that radium was a dangerous material to handle “unless proper safeguards are provided.”9 Consequently, the men in Radium Dial’s laboratories were provided with them: Kjaer noted that operators were “well-protected by lead screens” and also given vacations from work to limit their exposure.

My laboratory is a place where I write. I have become proficient at producing a rare species of prose capable of distilling ten years of work by five people into six published pages, written in a language that very few people can read and that no one ever speaks. This writing relates the details of my work with the precision of a laser scalpel, but its streamlined beauty is a type of artifice, a size-zero mannequin designed to showcase the glory of a dress that would be much less perfect on any real person. My papers do not display the footnotes that they have earned, the table of data that required painstaking months to redo when a graduate student quit, sneering on her way out that she didn’t want a life like mine. The paragraph that took five hours to write while riding on a plane, stunned with grief, flying to a funeral that I couldn’t believe was happening. The early draft that my toddler covered in crayon and applesauce while it was still warm from the printer. Although my publications contain meticulous details of the plants that did grow, the runs that went smoothly, and the data that materialized, they perpetrate a disrespectful amnesia against the entire gardens that rotted in fungus and dismay, the electrical signals that refused to stabilize, and the printer ink cartridges that we secured late at night through nefarious means. I

Following those tiny footprints all throughout Iraq, Huxsoll’s teams

In 1948, while working for Bell Telephone Laboratories, he published a paper in the Bell System Technical Journal entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" that not only introduced the word bit in print but established a field of study today known as information theory. Information theory is concerned with transmitting digital information in the presence of noise (which usually prevents all the information from getting through) and how to compensate for that. In 1949, he wrote the first article about programming a computer to play chess, and in 1952 he designed a mechanical mouse controlled by relays that could learn its way around a maze. Shannon was also well known at Bell Labs for riding a unicycle and juggling simultaneously.

In the cases of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, substantial evidence is now emerging that these syndromes may result from unusual infectious microorganisms that are not detected by the typical laboratory tests. Special, sophisticated lab tests such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests can, however, detect these invaders. A growing number of peer reviewed papers are now confirming the presence of these microorganisms in these particular illnesses.

Sebastian Thrun, previously the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and now the head of Google’s autonomous car lab, feels the benefits will be significant. “There are nearly 50 million auto accidents worldwide each year, with over 1.2 million needless deaths. AI applications such as automatic breaking or lane guidance will keep drivers from injuring themselves when falling asleep at the wheel. This is where artificial intelligence can help save lives every day.

I started out studying literature, but soon discovered that science was where I actually belonged. The contrast made it all the clearer: in science classes we did things instead of just sitting around talking about things. We worked with our hands and there were concrete and almost daily payoffs. Our laboratory experiments were predesigned to work perfectly and elegantly every time, and the more of them that you did, the bigger the machines and the more exotic were the chemicals that they let you use.

...give a great deal of attention to keeping his managers and his technical people as interchangeable as their talents allow. The barriers are sociological... To overcome this problem some laboratories, such as Bell Labs, abolish all job titles. Each professional employee is a "member of technical staff.

Right now, I see the country of my birth moving backward. It has dumped the Paris Agreement, it’s close to dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, and the United States Department of Agriculture is in very bad shape. The United States Department of Energy, which funded my lab for more than a decade to study greenhouse gases, has shut down most of its work on climate change, and NASA is under pressure to do the same. I left the United States in 2016 and moved to Norway because I believe that my laboratory will have more support here and because I am worried about the future of science in America.

While the politicians ?" asked Jakub, and went on: "I'll tell you. If science and art are in fact the proper, real arenas of history, politics on the contrary is the closed scientific laboratory where unprecedented experiments are conducted on mankind. There human guinea pigs are hurled through trap doors and then brought back onto the stage, tempted by applause and terrified by the gallows, denounced and forced to denounce. I worked in that lab as an assistant, but I also served there several times as a victim of vivisection. I know that I created nothing of value there (no more than those who worked with me did), but I probably came to understand better than others what man is.

For many years there have been rumours of mind control experiments. in the United States. In the early 1970s, the first of the declassified information was obtained by author John Marks for his pioneering work, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate. Over time retired or disillusioned CIA agents and contract employees have broken the oath of secrecy to reveal small portions of their clandestine work. In addition, some research work subcontracted to university researchers has been found to have been underwritten and directed by the CIA. There were 'terminal experiments' in Canada's McGill University and less dramatic but equally wayward programmes at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan and numerous other institutions. Many times the money went through foundations that were fronts or the CIA. In most instances, only the lead researcher was aware who his or her real benefactor was, though the individual was not always told the ultimate use for the information being gleaned. In 1991, when the United States finally signed the 1964 Helsinki Accords that forbids such practices, any of the programmes overseen by the intelligence community involving children were to come to an end. However, a source recently conveyed to us that such programmes continue today under the auspices of the CIA's Office of Research and Development. The children in the original experiments are now adults. Some have been able to go to college or technical schools, get jobs. get married, start families and become part of mainstream America. Some have never healed. The original men and women who devised the early experimental programmes are, at this point, usually retired or deceased. The laboratory assistants, often graduate and postdoctoral students, have gone on to other programmes, other research. Undoubtedly many of them never knew the breadth of the work of which they had been part. They also probably did not know of the controlled violence utilised in some tests and preparations. Many of the 'handlers' assigned to reinforce the separation of ego states have gone into other pursuits. But some have remained or have keen replaced. Some of the 'lab rats' whom they kept in in a climate of readiness, responding to the psychological triggers that would assure their continued involvement in whatever project the leaders desired, no longer have this constant reinforcement. Some of the minds have gradually stopped suppression of their past experiences. So it is with Cheryl, and now her sister Lynn.

Lawrence’s relentless drive for ever larger and more powerful cyclotrons epitomized the trend toward the kind of “big science” associated with the rise of corporate America in the early twentieth century. Only four industrial laboratories existed in the country in 1890; forty years later there were nearly one thousand such facilities. In most of these labs a culture of technology, not science, was supreme. Over the years, theoretical physicists like Oppenheimer, devoted to pure “small” science, would find themselves alienated from the culture of these big labs, which were often devoted to “military science.

One of those was Gary Bradski, an expert in machine vision at Intel Labs in Santa Clara. The company was the world’s largest chipmaker and had developed a manufacturing strategy called “copy exact,” a way of developing next-generation manufacturing techniques to make ever-smaller chips. Intel would develop a new technology at a prototype facility and then export that process to wherever it planned to produce the denser chips in volume. It was a system that required discipline, and Bradski was a bit of a “Wild Duck”—a term that IBM originally used to describe employees who refused to fly in formation—compared to typical engineers in Intel’s regimented semiconductor manufacturing culture. A refugee from the high-flying finance world of “quants” on the East Coast, Bradski arrived at Intel in 1996 and was forced to spend a year doing boring grunt work, like developing an image-processing software library for factory automation applications. After paying his dues, he was moved to the chipmaker’s research laboratory and started researching interesting projects. Bradski had grown up in Palo Alto before leaving to study physics and artificial intelligence at Berkeley and Boston University. He returned because he had been bitten by the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial bug.

He stood up, rushed to the fanned-out glossy company brochures. His finger landed on one in the center. Three stylized gold crowns. Corona Labs—BRINGING THE FUTURE TODAY. “This,” he said, finger tapping. Each time he touched the paper it seemed to get warmer. This turned out to be the brochure for a new company. Catherine picked it up, showed it to her husband. “I thought I knew more or less all the research labs in the country, but this is a new one.” Mac turned the glossy paper over in his big hands. There was a videolette loop embedded in the paper, all the rage nowadays. Some smiling woman in a lab coat endlessly raising a test tube in triumph, putting it down, raising it . . . Nick was shaking with tension. The logo, the name Corona Laboratories meant nothing to him, but still they shone in his mind.

The Company We Keep So now we have seen that our cells are in relationship with our thoughts, feelings, and each other. How do they factor into our relationships with others? Listening and communicating clearly play an important part in healthy relationships. Can relationships play an essential role in our own health? More than fifty years ago there was a seminal finding when the social and health habits of more than 4,500 men and women were followed for a period of ten years. This epidemiological study led researchers to a groundbreaking discovery: people who had few or no social contacts died earlier than those who lived richer social lives. Social connections, we learned, had a profound influence on physical health.9 Further evidence for this fascinating finding came from the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Epidemiologists were interested in Roseto because of its extremely low rate of coronary artery disease and death caused by heart disease compared to the rest of the United States. What were the town’s residents doing differently that protected them from the number one killer in the United States? On close examination, it seemed to defy common sense: health nuts, these townspeople were not. They didn’t get much exercise, many were overweight, they smoked, and they relished high-fat diets. They had all the risk factors for heart disease. Their health secret, effective despite questionable lifestyle choices, turned out to be strong communal, cultural, and familial ties. A few years later, as the younger generation started leaving town, they faced a rude awakening. Even when they had improved their health behaviors—stopped smoking, started exercising, changed their diets—their rate of heart disease rose dramatically. Why? Because they had lost the extraordinarily close connection they enjoyed with neighbors and family.10 From studies such as these, we learn that social isolation is almost as great a precursor of heart disease as elevated cholesterol or smoking. People connection is as important as cellular connections. Since the initial large population studies, scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology have demonstrated that having a support system helps in recovery from illness, prevention of viral infections, and maintaining healthier hearts.11 For example, in the 1990s researchers began laboratory studies with healthy volunteers to uncover biological links to social and psychological behavior. Infected experimentally with cold viruses, volunteers were kept in isolation and monitored for symptoms and evidence of infection. All showed immunological evidence of a viral infection, yet only some developed symptoms of a cold. Guess which ones got sick: those who reported the most stress and the fewest social interactions in their “real life” outside the lab setting.12 We Share the Single Cell’s Fate Community is part of our healing network, all the way down to the level of our cells. A single cell left alone in a petri dish will not survive. In fact, cells actually program themselves to die if they are isolated! Neurons in the developing brain that fail to connect to other cells also program themselves to die—more evidence of the life-saving need for connection; no cell thrives alone. What we see in the microcosm is reflected in the larger organism: just as our cells need to stay connected to stay alive, we, too, need regular contact with family, friends, and community. Personal relationships nourish our cells,

Because the second wave was so much more severe than the first, a lot of people refused to believe it could be the same disease. It had to be terrorism. They didn't care what medical experts kept telling them, about how it was the nature of influenza to occur in waves and that there was nothing about this pandemic, terrible though it was, that wasn't happening more or less as had long been predicted. No, not bioterrorism, others said, but a virus that had escaped from a laboratory. These were the same people who believed that both Lyme disease and West Nile virus were caused by germs that had escaped many years ago from a government lab off the coast of Long Island. They scoffed at the assertion that it was impossible to say for sure where the flu had begun because cases had appeared in several different countries at exactly the same time. Cover-up! Everyone knew the government was involved in the development of bioweapons. And although the Americans were not the only ones who were working on such weapons, the belief that they were somehow to blame--that the monster germ had most likely been created in an American lab, for American military purposes--would outlive the pandemic itself. In any case, according to a poll, eighty-two percent of Americans believed the government knew more about the flu than it was saying. And the number of people who declared themselves dead set against any vaccine the government came up with was steadily growing.

WHY ADDICTION IS NOT A DISEASE In its present-day form, the disease model of addiction asserts that addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease. This disease is evidenced by changes in the brain, especially alterations in the striatum, brought about by the repeated uptake of dopamine in response to drugs and other substances. But it’s also shown by changes in the prefrontal cortex, where regions responsible for cognitive control become partially disconnected from the striatum and sometimes lose a portion of their synapses as the addiction progresses. These are big changes. They can’t be brushed aside. And the disease model is the only coherent model of addiction that actually pays attention to the brain changes reported by hundreds of labs in thousands of scientific articles. It certainly explains the neurobiology of addiction better than the “choice” model and other contenders. It may also have some real clinical utility. It makes sense of the helplessness addicts feel and encourages them to expiate their guilt and shame, by validating their belief that they are unable to get better by themselves. And it seems to account for the incredible persistence of addiction, its proneness to relapse. It even demonstrates why “choice” cannot be the whole answer, because choice is governed by motivation, which is governed by dopamine, and the dopamine system is presumably diseased. Then why should we reject the disease model? The main reason is this: Every experience that is repeated enough times because of its motivational appeal will change the wiring of the striatum (and related regions) while adjusting the flow and uptake of dopamine. Yet we wouldn’t want to call the excitement we feel when visiting Paris, meeting a lover, or cheering for our favourite team a disease. Each rewarding experience builds its own network of synapses in and around the striatum (and OFC), and those networks continue to draw dopamine from its reservoir in the midbrain. That’s true of Paris, romance, football, and heroin. As we anticipate and live through these experiences, each network of synapses is strengthened and refined, so the uptake of dopamine gets more selective as rewards are identified and habits established. Prefrontal control is not usually studied when it comes to travel arrangements and football, but we know from the laboratory and from real life that attractive goals frequently override self-restraint. We know that ego fatigue and now appeal, both natural processes, reduce coordination between prefrontal control systems and the motivational core of the brain (as I’ve called it). So even though addictive habits can be more deeply entrenched than many other habits, there is no clear dividing line between addiction and the repeated pursuit of other attractive goals, either in experience or in brain function. London just doesn’t do it for you anymore. It’s got to be Paris. Good food, sex, music . . . they no longer turn your crank. But cocaine sure does.

Suddenly he felt his foot catch on something and he stumbled over one of the trailing cables that lay across the laboratory floor. The cable went tight and pulled one of the instruments monitoring the beam over, sending it falling sideways and knocking the edge of the frame that held the refractive shielding plate in position. For what seemed like a very long time the stand wobbled back and forth before it tipped slowly backwards with a crash. ‘Take cover!’ Professor Pike screamed, diving behind one of the nearby workbenches as the other Alpha students scattered, trying to shield themselves behind the most solid objects they could find. The beam punched straight through the laboratory wall in a cloud of vapour and alarm klaxons started wailing all over the school. Professor Pike scrambled across the floor towards the bundle of thick power cables that led to the super-laser, pulling them from the back of the machine and extinguishing the bright green beam. ‘Oops,’ Franz said as the emergency lighting kicked in and the rest of the Alphas slowly emerged from their hiding places. At the back of the room there was a perfectly circular, twenty-centimetre hole in the wall surrounded by scorch marks. ‘I am thinking that this is not being good.’ Otto walked cautiously up to the smouldering hole, glancing nervously over his shoulder at the beam emitter that was making a gentle clicking sound as it cooled down. ‘Woah,’ he said as he peered into the hole. Clearly visible were a series of further holes beyond that got smaller and smaller with perspective. Dimly visible at the far end was what could only be a small circle of bright daylight. ‘Erm, I don’t know how to tell you this, Franz,’ Otto said, turning towards his friend with a broad grin on his face, ‘but it looks like you just made a hole in the school.’ ‘Oh dear,’ Professor Pike said, coming up beside Otto and also peering into the hole. ‘I do hope that we haven’t damaged anything important.’ ‘Or anyone important,’ Shelby added as she and the rest of the Alphas gathered round. ‘It is not being my fault,’ Franz moaned. ‘I am tripping over the cable.’ A couple of minutes later, the door at the far end of the lab hissed open and Chief Dekker came running into the room, flanked by two guards in their familiar orange jumpsuits. Otto and the others winced as they saw her. It was well known already that she had no particular love for H.I.V.E.’s Alpha stream and she seemed to have a special dislike for their year in particular. ‘What happened?’ she demanded as she strode across the room towards the Professor. Her thin, tight lips and sharp cheekbones gave the impression that she was someone who’d heard of this thing called smiling but had decided that it was not for her. ‘There was a slight . . . erm . . . malfunction,’ the Professor replied with a fleeting glance in Franz’s direction. ‘Has anyone been injured?’ ‘It doesn’t look like it,’ Dekker replied tersely, ‘but I think it’s safe to say that Colonel Francisco won’t be using that particular toilet cubicle again.’ Franz visibly paled at the thought of the Colonel finding out that he had been in any way responsible for whatever indignity he had just suffered. He had a sudden horribly clear vision of many laps of the school gym somewhere in his not too distant future.

In the mid-twentieth century, the subfield of cosmology—not to be confused with cosmetology—didn’t have much data. And where data are sparse, competing ideas abound that are clever and wishful. The existence of the CMB was predicted by the Russian-born American physicist George Gamow and colleagues during the 1940s. The foundation of these ideas came from the 1927 work of the Belgian physicist and priest Georges Lemaître, who is generally recognized as the “father” of big bang cosmology. But it was American physicists Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman who, in 1948, first estimated what the temperature of the cosmic background ought to be. They based their calculations on three pillars: 1) Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity; 2) Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery that the universe is expanding; and 3) atomic physics developed in laboratories before and during the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bombs of World War II. Herman and Alpher calculated and proposed a temperature of 5 degrees Kelvin for the universe. Well, that’s just plain wrong. The precisely measured temperature of these microwaves is 2.725 degrees, sometimes written as simply 2.7 degrees, and if you’re numerically lazy, nobody will fault you for rounding the temperature of the universe to 3 degrees. Let’s pause for a moment. Herman and Alpher used atomic physics freshly gleaned in a lab, and applied it to hypothesized conditions in the early universe. From this, they extrapolated billions of years forward, calculating what temperature the universe should be today. That their prediction even remotely approximated the right answer is a stunning triumph of human insight.

The popular social network Twitter is handing over to data scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s famed Media Lab every message ever tweeted. It’s part of a five-year $10 million program to develop new ways to understand and use social networks. The school is setting up a Laboratory for Social Machines,where researchers will work on methods for understanding public opinion through the messages we post online. The lab will be able to analyze all new Twitter messages in real time, as well as the company’s archive of all previous tweets.

Laboratory tests are the next set of important numbers to know. Here are the key lab test numbers you need to know:   1. Complete blood count   2. General metabolic panel with fasting blood sugar and lipid panel   3. HgA1C   4. Vitamin D   5. Thyroid panel   6. C-reactive protein

The era of garage biology is upon us. Want to participate? Take a moment to buy yourself a molecular biology lab on eBay. A mere $1,000 will get you a set of precision pipettors for handling liquids and an electrophoresis rig for analyzing DNA. Side trips to sites like BestUse and LabX (two of my favorites) may be required to round out your purchases with graduated cylinders or a PCR thermocycler for amplifying DNA. If you can’t afford a particular gizmo, just wait six months—the supply of used laboratory gear only gets better with time. Links to sought-after reagents and protocols can be found at DNAHack. And, of course, Google is no end of help.

It was only after World War II that Stanford began to emerge as a center of technical excellence, owing largely to the campaigns of Frederick Terman, dean of the School of Engineering and architect-of-record of the military-industrial-academic complex that is Silicon Valley. During World War II Terman had been tapped by his own mentor, presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush, to run the secret Radio Research Lab at Harvard and was determined to capture a share of the defense funding the federal government was preparing to redirect toward postwar academic research. Within a decade he had succeeded in turning the governor’s stud farm into the Stanford Industrial Park, instituted a lucrative honors cooperative program that provided a camino real for local companies to put selected employees through a master’s degree program, and overseen major investments in the most promising areas of research. Enrollments rose by 20 percent, and over one-third of entering class of 1957 started in the School of Engineering—more than double the national average.4 As he rose from chairman to dean to provost, Terman was unwavering in his belief that engineering formed the heart of a liberal education and labored to erect his famous “steeples of excellence” with strategic appointments in areas such as semiconductors, microwave electronics, and aeronautics. Design, to the extent that it was a recognized field at all, remained on the margins, the province of an older generation of draftsmen and machine builders who were more at home in the shop than the research laboratory—a situation Terman hoped to remedy with a promising new hire from MIT: “The world has heard very little, if anything, of engineering design at Stanford,” he reported to President Wallace Sterling, “but they will be hearing about it in the future.

Over the next 50 years, Vail’s organization—eventually called the Bell Telephone Laboratories—produced the transistor, the solar cell, the CCD chip (used inside every digital camera), the first continuously operating laser, the Unix operating system, the C programming language, and eight Nobel Prizes. Vail created the most successful industrial research lab in history, and AT&T grew into the country’s largest business.

My pounding heart stole the words to reply to that. He took my hand, kissing the knuckles gently, sending trails of fire along the length of my arm. “I’ve made you another batch of treatment. It’s in the lab.” “But Father …” “He left before dawn. He won’t be back for hours.” EVEN WITHOUT MY FATHER’S overwhelming presence, the laboratory still gave me chills.

We and our partner laboratories, which may be commissioned by us to carry out some analyses of your test, take the protection of your data seriously. Only you have access to this information. Your information will not be disclosed to unauthorized third parties. After the analysis, all samples will be destroyed.

In an email to Robertson, the whistleblower Sunny described how Ranbaxy used hidden areas of the plant to store and cover up testing machines that were not connected to the company’s main computer network. He was referring to the crucial high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) machines, the workhorses of any good testing laboratory. The bulky machines looked like a stack of computer printers. Once a drug sample is mixed with a solvent, injected into the machine, and pressed through a column filled with granular material, the machine separates out and measures the drug’s components, including impurities. It displays them as a series of peaks on a graph called a chromatogram. In a compliant laboratory, HPLC machines would be networked with the main computer system, making all their data visible and preserved. During a recent inspection, Sunny wrote, the unauthorized HPLC machines were kept in two ancillary labs: “Ranbaxy creates small such hidden areas where these manipulations can be done.” Sunny estimated that some thirty products on the U.S. market did not pass specifications and advised Robertson that the agency needed to raid Paonta Sahib and Dewas, just as it had done in New Jersey, to find the evidence. He warned, “The move has already started in Ranbaxy to share such details of problematic products personally and not on emails or letters.” But because the U.S. Attorney had no jurisdiction in India, the FDA couldn’t execute a search warrant there. Robertson felt thwarted: “People said, ‘You need to go to India.’” But her response was, “What am I going to do [over there], knock on people’s doors and hope they talk to me? I don’t have authority over in India. It’s all a voluntary, good-faith system.” The case had crashed like a wrecking ball into the overtaxed agency, exposing the fact that the FDA had no effective way to police a foreign drug company.

Graedon was sick of waiting for the FDA’s test results. He spoke with experts about what could produce the symptoms that patients were reporting. He even reached out for help to independent laboratories. Tod Cooperman, the president of ConsumerLab in White Plains, New York, was quick to join his cause. ConsumerLab tested the 300-milligram dose of Teva’s Budeprion XL against that of GSK’s Wellbutrin XL. The results revealed the likely source of patient distress: the generic dumped four times as much active ingredient during the first two hours as the brand name did. Graedon compared the effect to guzzling alcohol. “If you sip a glass of wine over the course of two or three hours, you’re not going to feel drunk,” he explained. “But if you drink the whole thing in fifteen minutes, you’re getting too much too fast.” The Graedons believed that this “dose dumping” explained why many patients were experiencing signs of overdose, such as headaches and anxiety, followed by symptoms of withdrawal, including renewed depression and suicidal thoughts. Teva flatly rejected the ConsumerLab report and claimed that the independent laboratory’s testing method was “inappropriate.” The FDA was silent.

In 1963, Choh Hao Li, chairman and lone tenured faculty member in the Institute of Experimental Biology at Berkeley, announced that he had isolated and purified his sixth pituitary hormone, lipotropin. The magnitude of such a feat is clear considering that only one other person had ever purified a hormone, and that person was not coincidentally a student of Li's. The purification of lipotropin should have been a reason to celebrate; however, Li's colleagues at Berkeley acknowledged but did not rejoice in his success. As they perceived it, endocrinology was a scientific field that came out of the clinical sciences, which meant that Li's research was completely unsound, and they put enormous pressure on him to change his scientific topic. When that did not work, Wendell Stanley tried to 'promote [Li] out of the Virus Laboratory,' then later University Chancellor Clark Kerr threatened to discontinue the Institute for Experimental Biology because it did not fit with Berkeley's commitment to pure research. Things got infinitely worse for Li, of course, because he became perceived as less qualified with each professional achievement. [...] C. H. Li's travails at Berkeley are only half the story. In 1969, five years after transferring from Berkeley to UCSF, Li and his laboratory assistants assembled a highly complex synthetic version of human growth hormone (HGH) that was biologically active and could promote the growth of bones and muscle tissue. Rather than ignore or criticize the work, however, journalists waxed eloquently [sic] about Li's creation of HGH. One described it as no less than a panacea for most of the world's problems. Others clearly saw specific applications: 'it might now be . . . possible to tailor-make hormones that can inhibit breast cancer.' Li's discovery of synthetic HGH 'constituted a truly . . . great research breakthrough [that had] obvious applications,' ranging from 'human growth and development to . . . treatment of cancer and coronary artery disease.' Desperate letters poured in too; athletes wanted to know if HGH would help them become faster, bigger, stronger, and dwarfs from all over the world begged for samples of HGH or to volunteer as experimental subjects. Unlike at Berkeley, Li's discovery made him a hero at UCSF. None other than UCSF Chancellor Phillip Lee described Li's discovery as 'meticulous, painstaking, and brilliant research' and then tried to capitalize on the moment by asking the public and their political representatives to increase federal support of bioscience research. 'Research money is dwindling fast,' repeated Lee to anyone who cared to listen. 'We've proven than synthesis can be done, now all we need is the money and time to prove its tremendous value.' It is not surprising that federal and state money began to pour into Li's lab. What is shocking, however, is how quickly Li achieved scientific acclaim, not because he changed, but because the rest of the world around him changed so much.

To successfully launch a product, generic drug companies must tread in reverse through this obstacle course. Once a generic company zeroes in on a molecule, and its scientists figure out how it operates in the body, its lawyers get to work to establish how well protected it is legally. The next step takes place in the laboratory: developing the active pharmaceutical ingredient by synthesizing it into ingredient form. That alone can take several years of trial and error. Once successful, the finished generic has to take the same form as the brand, whether that be pill, capsule, tablet, or injection. Formulating it requires additional ingredients known as excipients, which can be different, but might also be litigated. Then comes testing. In the lab, the in-vitro tests replicate conditions in the body. During dissolution tests, for example, the drug will be put in beakers whose contents mimic stomach conditions, to see how the drugs break down. But some of the most important tests are in-vivo—when the drug is tested on people. Brand-name companies must test new drugs on thousands of patients to prove that they are safe and effective. Generic companies have to prove only that their drug performs similarly in the body to the brand-name drug. To do this, they must test it on a few dozen healthy volunteers and map the concentration of the drug in their blood. The results yield a graph that contains the all-important bioequivalence curve. The horizontal line reflects the time to maximum concentration (Tmax) of drug in the blood. The vertical line reflects the peak concentration (Cmax) of drug in the blood. Between these two axes lies the area under the curve (AUC). The test results must fall in that area to be deemed bioequivalent. Every batch of drugs has variation. Even brand-name drugs made in the same laboratory under the exact same conditions will have some batch-to-batch differences. So, in 1992, the FDA created a complex statistical formula that defined bioequivalence as a range—a generic drug’s concentration in the blood could not fall below 80 percent or rise above 125 percent of the brand name’s concentration. But the formula also required companies to impose a 90 percent confidence interval on their testing, to ensure that less than 20 percent of samples would fall outside the designated range and far more would land within a closer range to the innovator product.

After the active ingredients are manufactured, the additional ingredients chosen, and the principal laboratory and clinical tests conducted, the formula then moves to the manufacturing floor to see if it can be made on a commercial scale. As the manufacturing runs become larger, the processes become harder to control. If something can go wrong, it will. You can build a fortress of current good manufacturing practices around the drug-making process and still “shit happens,” as Malik liked to say. Conscientious manufacturers try to protect against past disasters and prevent new ones. But because manufacturing plants are operated by humans, the systems will break down, no matter how perfectly designed they are. For example, Johnson & Johnson’s epilepsy drug was fine until the company stacked it on wooden pallets that likely leached solvents into the medicine. At Mylan’s Morgantown plant, one lab technician left a note for another stating that he had to “rig” a hose on the equipment to get it to work properly—a word choice that easily could have shut down the plant had an FDA investigator stumbled across it and suspected fraud instead of primitive problem-solving. The only remedy for this variability is for plants to adhere scrupulously to good manufacturing practices and create real-time records of each drug-making step. The resulting data serve as a blueprint for finding and fixing the inevitable errors, a process that FDA investigators scrutinize. How well and how closely did the company investigate itself? The goal is to address a problem “in a way that it never happens again,” as Malik explained.

Many know that LSD, a synthetic molecule, was born in a laboratory in Switzerland and consumed for the first time by a chemist as he rode home on a bicycle. But fewer are aware of some of the more quirky traits of the family of chemicals that lysergic acid belongs to: the ‘ergot alkaloids’. All alkaloid drugs are interesting in their own way, but the ergot alkaloids are particularly curious. One: they are product of a parasite. Two: they have a saint. Three: they have ‘uterotonic’ qualities. Ergot alkaloids – including lab-born LSD – can induce contractions in the womb. LSD’s wild relatives have been employed to induce birth in delayed and difficult conditions (as well as abortions

(Courtesy of BioVir Laboratories, Inc.) Three years after Koch and Hesse switched to agar-based media, another assistant in the laboratory, Richard J. Petri, designed a shallow glass dish to ease the dispensing of the sterilized molten media. The dishes measured a little less than a half-inch deep and 4 inches in diameter. This Petri dish design has never been improved upon and is a staple of every microbiology lab today. The size

You need to have a diploma from nursing school and be certified as a registered nurse.             Ideally, you should have at least two to three years of clinical experience as an outpatient nurse or as an emergency room nurse.             You should be certified in Basic Life Support and Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS). Some cruise lines request Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) certification as well.             You may need to have experience in dealing with laboratory procedures and basic x-ray procedures as there is not likely to be a lab tech or x-ray tech on duty.             You should have a background in general medicine and/or emergency medicine.             You should have past experience caring for patients in a trauma, cardiac care, emergency care, or internal medicine practice.             Because cruise liners travel to often to foreign lands and have people of all different cultures on board, you may need to have knowledge of other languages besides English.   As

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THE HAZMAT SUIT was stifling and Luca Ginelli could barely catch his breath as he studied the monitors. Thanks to the research laboratory's state-of-the-art microsphere nanoscope, the young lab technician could easily

Turning hard material (e.g., bones) into fossils is easy in a lab setting, but in 1993, scientists were even able to make fossils from soft animal tissues! New York Times’ Science Watch reports: Scientists have for the first time produced fossils of soft animal tissues in a laboratory. In the process they discovered that most of the phosphate required for the fossilization of small animal carcasses comes from within the animal itself.

Would anyone test the memory of human children by throwing them into a swimming pool to see if they remember where to get out? Yet the Morris Water Maze is a standard memory test used every day in hundreds of laboratories that make rats frantically swim in a water tank with high walls until they come upon a submerged platform that saves them. In subsequent trials, the rats need to remember the platform’s location. There is also the Columbia Obstruction Method, in which animals have to cross an electrified grid after varying periods of deprivation, so researchers can see if their drive to reach food or a mate (or for mother rats, their pups) exceeds the fear of a painful shock. Stress is, in fact, a major testing tool. Many labs keep their animals at 85 percent of typical body weight to ensure food motivation.

LINUS PAULING WAS WRONG about megavitamins because he had made two fundamental errors. First, he had assumed that you cannot have too much of a good thing. Vitamins are critical to life. If people don’t get enough vitamins, they suffer various deficiency states, like scurvy (not enough vitamin C) or rickets (not enough vitamin D). The reason that vitamins are so important is that they help convert food into energy. But there’s a catch. To convert food into energy, the body uses a process called oxidation. One outcome of oxidation is the generation of something called free radicals, which can be quite destructive. In search of electrons, free radicals damage cell membranes, DNA, and arteries, including the arteries that supply blood to the heart. As a consequence, free radicals cause cancer, aging, and heart disease. Indeed, free radicals are probably the single greatest reason that we aren’t immortal. To counter the effects of free radicals, the body makes antioxidants. Vitamins—like vitamins A, C, E, and beta-carotene—as well as minerals like selenium and substances like omega-3 fatty acids all have antioxidant activity. For this reason, people who eat diets rich in fruits and vegetables, which are rich in antioxidants, tend to have less cancer, less heart disease, and live longer. Pauling’s logic to this point is clear; if antioxidants in food prevent cancer and heart disease, then eating large quantities of manufactured antioxidants should do the same thing. But Linus Pauling had ignored one important fact: Oxidation is also required to kill new cancer cells and clear clogged arteries. By asking people to ingest large quantities of vitamins and supplements, Pauling had shifted the oxidation-antioxidation balance too far in favor of antioxidation, therefore inadvertently increasing the risk of cancer and heart disease. As it turns out, Mae West aside, you actually can have too much of a good thing. (“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,” said West, who was talking about sex, not vitamins.) Second, Pauling had assumed that vitamins and supplements ingested in food were the same as those purified or synthesized in a laboratory. This, too, was incorrect. Vitamins are phytochemicals, which means that they are contained in plants (phyto- means “plant” in Greek). The 13 vitamins (A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, C, D, E, and K) contained in food are surrounded by thousands of other phytochemicals that have long and complicated names like flavonoids, flavonols, flavanones, isoflavones, anthocyanins, anthocyanidins, proanthocyanidins, tannins, isothiocyanates, carotenoids, allyl sulfides, polyphenols, and phenolic acids. The difference between vitamins and these other phytochemicals is that deficiency states like scurvy have been defined for vitamins but not for the others. But make no mistake: These other phytochemicals are important, too. And Pauling’s recommendation to ingest massive quantities of vitamins apart from their natural surroundings was an unnatural act. For example, as described in Catherine Price’s book, Vitamania, half of an apple has the antioxidant activity of 1,500 milligrams of vitamin C, even though it contains only 5.7 milligrams of the vitamin. That’s because the phytochemicals that surround vitamin C in apples enhance its effect

Double diffusion made possible, for the first time, the mass production of precise, high-performance transistors. The technique promised to be highly profitable for any organization that could master its technical intricacies. Shockley therefore quit Bell Labs and, with financial backing from Arnold Beckman, president of a prestigious maker of scientific instruments, started a company to produce double-diffusion transistors. The inventor recruited the best young minds he could find, including Noyce; Gordon Moore, a physical chemist from Johns Hopkins; and Jean Hoerni, a Swiss-born physicist whose strength was in theory. Already thinking about human intelligence, Shockley made each of his recruits take a battery of psychological tests. The results described Noyce as an introvert, a conclusion so ludicrous that it should have told Shockley something about the value of such tests. Early in 1956, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories opened for business in the sunny valley south of Palo Alto. It was the first electronics firm in what was to become Silicon Valley.

MURRAY HILL’S FIRST BUILDING—Building 1, as it was eventually known—officially opened in 1942.4 Inside it was a model of sleek and flexible utility. Every office and every lab was divided into six-foot increments so that spaces could be expanded or shrunk depending on needs, thanks to a system of soundproofed steel partition walls that could be moved on short notice. Thus a research team with an eighteen-foot lab might, if space allowed, quickly expand their work into a twenty-four-foot lab. Each six-foot space, in addition, was outfitted with pipes providing all the basic needs of an experimentalist: compressed air, distilled water, steam, gas, vacuum, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. And there was both DC and AC power. From the outside, the Murray Hill complex appeared vaguely H-shaped. Most of the actual laboratories were located in two long wings, each four stories high, which were built in parallel and were connected by another wing.

By intention, everyone would be in one another’s way. Members of the technical staff would often have both laboratories and small offices—but these might be in different corridors, therefore making it necessary to walk between the two, and all but assuring a chance encounter or two with a colleague during the commute. By the same token, the long corridor for the wing that would house many of the physics researchers was intentionally made to be seven hundred feet in length. It was so long that to look down it from one end was to see the other end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling its length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions, and ideas would be almost impossible. Then again, that was the point. Walking down that impossibly long tiled corridor, a scientist on his way to lunch in the Murray Hill cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.

And so, in labs that neither they nor we will ever seen, more millions of animals must endure internal bleeding, convulsions, seizures, paralysis, and slow death. A stroll through the laboratories of Pfizer or any other pharmaceutical company, of Emore or many other universities, of the EPA, Consumer Safety Commission, Food and Drug Administration, Department of Defense, and a dozen other federal agencies would reveal similar scenes. It is easy to say, a priori, "It has to be done - it's the safety and progress." But we ourselves neither pay that price nor even look at the cost.

And there was, finally, another place on West Street where new ideas could now spread. Attendance was allowed by invitation only. Some of the Labs’ newest arrivals after the Depression had decided to further educate themselves through study groups where they would make their way through scientific textbooks, one chapter a week, and take turns lecturing one another on the newest advances in theoretical and experimental physics. One study group in particular, informally led by William Shockley at the West Street labs, and often joined by Brattain, Fisk, Townes, and Wooldridge, among others, met on Thursday afternoons. The men were interested in a particular branch of physics that would later take on the name “solid-state physics.” It explored the properties of solids (their magnetism and conductivity, for instance) in terms of what happens on their surfaces as well as deep in their atomic structure. And the men were especially interested in the motions of electrons as they travel through the crystalline lattice of metals. “What had happened, I think, is that these young Ph.D.’s were introducing what is essentially an academic concept into this industrial laboratory,” one member of the group, Addison White, would tell the physics historian Lillian Hoddeson some years later.

Spookier still, Bell's theorem has now been proven time after time after time. It took a few years to create lab equipment sensitive enough and accurate enough to make the necessary measurements, and they ultimately used photons rather than electrons for the experiments, but since the 1970s physicists have repeatedly confirmed the theory's predictions in the laboratory. Einstein and company was wrong; the Copenhagen gang was right. We create reality.

In all, SARS-1 had been the subject of six outbreaks since its last-known natural occurrence, each one the consequence of its escape from a laboratory: one time each in Singapore and Taiwan, and then four separate escapes from the same lab in Beijing.69 Another instance where an experiment in China had gone awry, and triggered the global spread of a novel virus, had occurred in 1977 and involved a strain of H1N1 influenza.

Masterpiece Laboratories is an online marketplace for sales of used and vintage lab equipment. Search our used and vintage lab equipment, some of which are operational, some needs repair, and others are just for parts. None of the equipment is refurbished and therefore will be sold as-is with a policy of no return. Our vintage lab products are for testing laboratories, chemists, engineers, academic universities, set designers, and collectors.

On 28 January 2020 one of Harvard’s most senior faculty members, chemist and nanoscientist Dr Charles Lieber, was taken away in handcuffs when the FBI alleged that he had been recruited into the Thousand Talents Program. The Department of Justice alleges that between 2012 and 2017 he was paid $50,000 a month plus generous living expenses to set up a lab at Wuhan University of Technology and transfer his knowledge.78 Lieber failed to disclose his China links to Harvard, even though the Wuhan centre was called the ‘WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory’.

Without any way to predict the difficulty of obtaining new knowledge, and without any tools to assess its market value, how could someone bet money on it? As one venture capitalist for Kleiner Perkins puts it, “We don’t fund science experiments.” In some respects, then, this leaves a gap. While it is frequently the case that new knowledge can arise from academia or a government laboratory and then secure venture capital afterward, it seems a more difficult proposition in Silicon Valley than it was long ago in New Jersey. The value of the old Bell Labs was its patience in searching out new and fundamental ideas, and its ability to use its immense engineering staff to develop and perfect those ideas.

The laboratory had taken damage during the attack, as rampaging ghuls smashed instruments and overturned tables. They were beaten back by Dr. Hoda, who whipped up an alchemical concoction that melted the undead to soupy puddles. You just didn’t mess with her lab.

Although the nucleus might have been recognized by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the late 17th century, it was not until 1831 that it was reported as a specific structure in orchid epidermal cells by a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown (better known for recognizing ‘Brownian movement’ of pollen grains in water). In 1879, Walther Flemming observed that the nucleus broke down into small fragments at cell division, followed by re-formation of the fragments called chromosomes to make new nuclei in the daughter cells. It was not until 1902 that Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri independently linked chromosomes directly to mammalian inheritance. Thomas Morgan’s work with fruit flies (Drosophila) at the start of the 20th century showed specific characters positioned along the length of the chromosomes, followed by the realization by Oswald Avery in 1944 that the genetic material was DNA. Some nine years later, James Watson and Francis Crick showed the structure of DNA to be a double helix, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins, whose laboratory had provided the evidence that led to the discovery. Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA from the Wilkins lab had been the key to DNA structure, died of cancer aged 37 in 1958, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Watson and Crick published the classic double helix model in 1953. The final piece in the jigsaw of DNA structure was produced by Watson with the realization that the pairing of the nucleotide bases, adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine, not only provided the rungs holding the twisting ladder of DNA together, but also provided a code for accurate replication and a template for protein assembly. Crick continued to study and elucidate the base pairing required for coding proteins, and this led to the fundamental ‘dogma’ that ‘DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein’. The discovery of DNA structure marked an enormous advance in biology, probably the most significant since Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species .

And so, in labs that neither they nor we will ever seen, more millions of animals must endure internal bleeding, convulsions, seizures, paralysis, and slow death. A stroll through the laboratories of Pfizer or any other pharmaceutical company, of Emory or many other universities, of the EPA, Consumer Safety Commission, Food and Drug Administration, Department of Defense, and a dozen other federal agencies would reveal similar scenes. It is easy to say, a priori, "It has to be done - it's the safety and progress." But we ourselves neither pay that price nor even look at the cost.

Telstar was slightly bigger than a beach ball—about three feet in diameter—and as heavy as a man—170 pounds. After it was assembled in a laboratory in Hillside, New Jersey, then tested at Murray Hill and Bell Labs’ Whippany, New Jersey, facility, it was transported to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a Delta-Thor rocket launch scheduled for the second week of July 1962. Though it was spherical in shape, Telstar’s surface had seventy-two flat facets, giving it the appearance of a large, bizarrely decorated gemstone. In the end, though, it served as an almost perfect example of Pierce’s contention that innovations tend to happen when the time is right. Indeed, Telstar was not one invention but rather a synchronous use of sixteen inventions patented at the Labs over the course of twenty-five years. “None of the inventions was made specifically for space purposes,” the New York Times pointed out. On the other hand, only all of them together allowed for the deployment of an active space satellite.

I have the greatest respect for conservation biologists. I care very much about conserving the rain forest and the wildlife in Indonesia, but I also found it disheartening. It often feels like you are fighting a losing battle, especially in areas where people depend so heavily on these natural resources for their own survival. After graduation, I decided to return to the original behavioral questions that motivated me. Although monogamy—both social and genetic—is rare in mammals, social monogamy is the norm in birds. Plus, birds are everywhere. I figured that if I turned my attention to studying our feathered friends, I wouldn’t have to spend months on end trying to secure research permits and travel visas from foreign governments. I wouldn’t even have to risk getting bitten by leeches (a constant problem in the Mentawais*). Birds seemed like the perfect choice for my next act. But I didn’t know anyone who studied birds. My PhD was in an anthropology department, without many links to researchers in biology departments. Serendipitously, while applying for dozens of academic jobs, I stumbled across an advertisement for a position managing Dr. Ellen Ketterson’s laboratory at Indiana University. The ad described Ketterson’s long-term project on dark-eyed juncos. Eureka! Birds! At the time, her lab primarily focused on endocrinology methods like hormone assays (a method to measure how much of a hormone is present in blood or other types of biological samples), because they were interested in how testosterone levels influenced behavior. I had no experience with either birds or hormone assays. But I had spent the last several years developing DNA sequencing and genotyping skills, which the Ketterson lab was just starting to use. I hoped that my expertise with fieldwork and genetic work would be seen as beneficial enough to excuse my lack of experience in ornithology and endocrinology. I submitted my application but heard nothing back. After a while, I did something that was a bit terrifying at the time. Of the dozens of academic positions I had applied to, this felt like the right one, so I tried harder. I wrote to Dr. Ketterson again to clarify why I was so interested in the job and why I would be a good fit, even though on paper I seemed completely wrong for it. I described why I wanted to work with birds instead of primates. I explained that I had years of fieldwork experience in challenging environments and could easily learn ornithological methods. I listed my laboratory expertise and elaborated on how beneficial it could be to her research group, and how easily I could learn to do hormone assays and why they were important for my research too. She wrote me back. I got the job.

Nutritional supplements may give you false or inaccurate results on medical laboratory tests.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. —Albert Einstein In previous chapters, we saw that the perceptual forms of psi are difficult to distinguish clearly in the laboratory. Telepathy in the lab, and in life, can be explained as a form of clairvoyance, and clairvoyance is difficult to localize precisely in time. Concepts like “retrocognition,” “real-time clairvoyance,” and “precognition” have arisen, blurring the usual concepts of perception and time. It seems that we must think of psi perception as a general ability to gain information from a distance, unbound by the usual limitations of both space and time.1 As long as we are interested in demonstrating the mere existence of perceptual psi, these conceptual distinctions do not matter. But when we try to understand how these effects are possible, the differences become critical. For example, it’s important when theorizing about psi to know if it’s actually possible to directly perceive someone’s thoughts. Likewise, it’s important to know if it’s possible to perceive objects at a distance in real time. Based on the experimental evidence, it is by no means clear that pure telepathy exists per se, nor is it certain that real-time clairvoyance exists. In stead, the vast majority of both anecdotal and empirical evidence for perceptual psi suggests that the evidence can all be accommodated by various forms of precognition. This may be surprising, given the temporal paradoxes presented by the notion of perception through time. But one simple way of thinking about virtually every form of perceptual psi is that we occasionally bump into our own future. That is, the only way that we personally know that something is psychic, as opposed to a pure fantasy, is because sometime in our future we get verification that our mental impressions were based on something that really did happen to us. This means that, in principle, the original psychic impression could have been a precognition from ourselves.

Through Time and Space The Evidence for Remote Viewing Stephan A. Schwartz Beginning in the late 1960s, and continuing down to the late 1990s, for three decades there was an explosion of interest in nonlocal perception, the ability of an individual to acquire information that should not be accessible because of shielding by space, time, or both. It centered on two distinct but related protocols: Remote viewing and Ganzfeld. Although there were a number of single studies done,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 three major laboratories, SRI (later SAIC, and later still LFR), the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR, later ICRL) lab, and Mobius emerged. The labs arose concurrently, led the way, and maintained continuous systematic research on this aspect of consciousness throughout those

Project Lincoln—or Lincoln Laboratory, as it was renamed in 1952—they sound a lot like veterans of the Manhattan Project, or the Radiation Lab, or even the Apollo moon program of the 1960s.

Project Mercury, the human cannonball approach, looked like a Larry Light-bulb scheme, and it gave off the funk of panic. Any pilot who went into it would no longer be a pilot. He would be a laboratory animal wired up from skull to rectum with medical sensors. The rocket pilots had fought this medical crap every foot of the way. Scott Crossfield had reluctantly allowed them to wire him for heartbeat and respiration in rocket flights but had refused to let them insert a rectal thermometer. The pilots who signed up to crawl into the Mercury capsule—the capsule, everybody noted, not the ship—would be called “astronauts.” But, in fact, they would be lab rabbits with wires up the tail and everywhere else.

EXPERIMENT 4. In our fourth experiment, we tested a “nonlocal” aspect of the consciousness collapse interpretation. This is a bit tricky to grasp at first, because it invokes the timeless nature of the quantum world. I’ll go through this slowly. The idea that the quantum wave function collapses due to observation implies that the collapse occurs only when observation occurs, and not when the data are generated.295 That is, unlike events in the everyday world, where actions occur in particular locations and unfold in ordinary clock time, events in the quantum domain do not occur in time as we normally experience it. This is what is meant by the spooky “nonlocal” nature of quantum mechanics—events are connected across the usual limitations of space and time. When an elementary quantum object is not being observed, it remains in what’s called an “indeterminate state.” In that unobserved condition, the object has no definite properties yet—no size, shape, location, polarization, spin, or any other property that we ascribe to ordinary real objects. The consciousness collapse idea further proposes that when, and only when, an object is consciously observed does it take on real properties. To repeat—because this concept may make your brain hurt the first time you encounter it—if you take measurements of a quantum system using an inanimate recording device, like a camera, then that system will remain in an indeterminate state until it is observed. This ridiculous-sounding idea has been tested in conventional physics labs and it has definitely been shown to exist. That type of study is called the delayed-choice experiment.154, 324 We tested this idea in the present context by using a time-reversed version of our double-slit experiment, somewhat like the studies that Daryl Bem conducted, as discussed earlier in the chapter on precognition. This test also provided a more rigorous way for us to test the effect of participants being located within a few meters of the optical system, because all the data in this study were generated and recorded with the apparatus located by itself inside the shielded chamber, and with no one else present in the laboratory.

Not being able to study the cream of the crop means the effects we see will probably be weak and sporadic. That means having to collect an enormous amount of data to gain confidence in the results. Fortunately there is also an advantage to studying ordinary people. If Joe Sixpack, our randomly picked “man off the street,” can show weak but positive results in the lab, then it indicates that the siddhis are part of a spectrum of abilities that are broadly distributed across the population. It is much easier to accept the reality of a claimed skill if it turns out to be a basic human potential rather than an extreme idiosyncrasy that only a handful of people in the world possess. I suspect that there are those among us who have high-functioning siddhis gained not through extensive meditation practice but through raw talent. Like Olympic athletes or Carnegie Hall musicians, these people are rare. Based on my experience in testing a wide range of participants in laboratory psi tests, I’d estimate that perhaps one in ten or a hundred thousand have exceptional skills comparable to the traditional siddhis.

The fundamental problem is this: Events that take place in the laboratory cannot be considered equivalent to the conditions under which traumatic memories are created. The terror and helplessness associated with PTSD simply can’t be induced de novo in such a setting. We can study the effects of existing traumas in the lab, as in our script-driven imaging studies of flashbacks, but the original imprint of trauma cannot be laid down there.

In 1999, a bunch of researchers published a study of about 1,600 adults examined in order to come up with equations to estimate kidney function. Just plug in the patient’s creatinine, age (because adults tend to lose muscle mass as we get older), and gender (because men tend to have more muscle mass than women), and voila!—an estimate of kidney function. Most laboratories can do this for us now. A rising creatinine level in the blood means the kidneys are not able to pee creatinine out as well as they used to, so the person’s estimated kidney function is lower. But wait—if the patient is Black, the study determined that you have to multiply by 1.2 to get a more accurate estimate. This finding was attributed to Blacks in the study having higher muscle mass than Whites and, therefore, higher amounts of creatinine in their bodies. Laboratories report the eGFR, and just below it, the eGFR if Black. Of course one of the problems with generalizations is that they aren’t always true. In medicine, in particular, they make us lazy and we often accept them without question—especially when they are in line with our underlying assumptions and beliefs. Like the belief that Black and African are inherently different from White and European at a DNA level, a belief that dates back to the days when American researchers were measuring Black-White differences in skull size to prove Black inferiority and justify slavery. But I wonder how often health-care providers make the mental adjustment that the “race adjustment” is really a proxy for muscle mass rather than just focusing on the race of the person in front of them when they are assessing lab results. I wonder if the person in front of them were a White male bodybuilder how many would tell him the race-adjusted estimate of kidney function, or a skinny Black woman the non-race-adjusted estimate. Then too I wonder how many health-care practitioners realize that equations derived from the original study of 1,600 people only included about 200 Blacks—and no American Samoans, no Hispanics, no Asians. These groups have very different body frames, but all are simply “not Black” in our equations. The implication, then, is that only Black people are different. This shortcut has the potential for a significant negative impact on Black patients who happen to not have a high muscle mass. Patients like Book of Eli. When the non-race-adjusted eGFR is 20 (when a person can be placed on the waiting list), the race-adjusted value is closer to 25. Just as the difference between eGFRs of 20 and 10 can be several years for many patients, so can the difference between 25 and 20. Years of accruing time on the kidney transplant waiting list when thirteen people on the waiting list die every day waiting for a kidney.

Functional Range: 1.8-3.0 mU/L Typical Laboratory Range: 0.5-5.5 mU/L

Free T4 is high with hyperthyroidism and low with hypothyroidism. It’s important to note that even a high TSH with normal T4 is enough to identify hypothyroidism. A rare pattern and one indicative of a hereditary thyroid resistance condition is high FT4. High FT4 can also be caused by taking heparin or by an acute illness that causes binding protein levels to suddenly fall. If an illness other than thyroid disease becomes severe or chronic, it may decrease FT4. Functional Range: 1.0-1.5 ng/ dL Typical Laboratory Range: 0.7-1.53 ng/dL

The production of rT3 typically takes place in cases of extreme stress, such as major trauma, surgery, or severe chronic stress. It appears the increased production of T3 is due to an inability to clear rT3, as well as from elevated levels of cortisol. Functional Range: 90-350 pg/ml Typical Laboratory Range: 90-350 pg/ml

Not a direct quote, but referenced in the author's note at the end - Sister Elizabeth Kenny, was instrumental in developing a new method of treating polio. Barbara Johnson, a laboratory technician who was paralyzed with polio after a workplace accident but went on the work with Sabin as his statistician. Isabel Morgan vaccine successfully induced immunity in monkeys and was the basis of Jonas Salk's entry into the vaccine race. We'd be talking about the Morgan vaccine if she hadn't refused to test the vaccine on children. Elsie Ward perfected the technique for growing the virus outside a living body. Her technique allowed Salk's lab to make enough of the virus to put in the vaccines for millions of children. Whistleblower Bernice Eddy reported that test monkeys who got the vaccine from Cutter laboratories were developing polio, thus alerting officials that Cutter would be releasing unsafe vaccines for use. -- Her concerns were ignored and caused 200 children to acquire Polio through the vaccine. Many of the children were paralyzed. Some died. Federal regulations of vaccines was tightened because of this - and her. Eleanor Abbott invented the game Candy Land to amuse patients after she herself was hospitalized for the disease.

website Kickstarter.com (“A New Way to Fund and Follow Creativity”), where inventors, entrepreneurs, and dreamers of every stripe could post their wild schemes and pet projects and ask for money to fund them. BioCurious announced an initial goal of $30,000. The partners were soon oversubscribed, almost overwhelmed, with 239 backers pledging $35,319. In the fall of 2010 Gentry and her partners were looking to lease 3,000 square feet of industrial space in Mountain View, but in the end settled for a 2,400 square feet in Sunnyvale, calling it “Your Bay Area hackerspace for biotech.” In December 2010, meanwhile, another DIY biohacker lab, Genspace, opened in Brooklyn, New York. The founders referred to it as “the world’s first permanent, biosafety level 1 community laboratory” (genspace.org). Many others soon followed, in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. With free synthetic biology kits, DIYbio, Livly lab, BioCurious, Genspace, and others, the synthetic biology genie was well and truly out of the bottle.

it is not uncommon for experts in DNA analysis to testify at a criminal trial that a DNA sample taken from a crime scene matches that taken from a suspect. How certain are such matches? When DNA evidence was first introduced, a number of experts testified that false positives are impossible in DNA testing. Today DNA experts regularly testify that the odds of a random person’s matching the crime sample are less than 1 in 1 million or 1 in 1 billion. With those odds one could hardly blame a juror for thinking, throw away the key. But there is another statistic that is often not presented to the jury, one having to do with the fact that labs make errors, for instance, in collecting or handling a sample, by accidentally mixing or swapping samples, or by misinterpreting or incorrectly reporting results. Each of these errors is rare but not nearly as rare as a random match. The Philadelphia City Crime Laboratory, for instance, admitted that it had swapped the reference sample of the defendant and the victim in a rape case, and a testing firm called Cellmark Diagnostics admitted a similar error.20 Unfortunately, the power of statistics relating to DNA presented in court is such that in Oklahoma a court sentenced a man named Timothy Durham to more than 3,100 years in prison even though eleven witnesses had placed him in another state at the time of the crime. It turned out that in the initial analysis the lab had failed to completely separate the DNA of the rapist and that of the victim in the fluid they tested, and the combination of the victim’s and the rapist’s DNA produced a positive result when compared with Durham’s. A later retest turned up the error, and Durham was released after spending nearly four years in prison.21 Estimates of the error rate due to human causes vary, but many experts put it at around 1 percent. However, since the error rate of many labs has never been measured, courts often do not allow testimony on this overall statistic. Even if courts did allow testimony regarding false positives, how would jurors assess it? Most jurors assume that given the two types of error—the 1 in 1 billion accidental match and the 1 in 100 lab-error match—the overall error rate must be somewhere in between, say 1 in 500 million, which is still for most jurors beyond a reasonable doubt. But employing the laws of probability, we find a much different answer. The way to think of it is this: Since both errors are very unlikely, we can ignore the possibility that there is both an accidental match and a lab error. Therefore, we seek the probability that one error or the other occurred. That is given by our sum rule: it is the probability of a lab error (1 in 100) + the probability of an accidental match (1 in 1 billion). Since the latter is 10 million times smaller than the former, to a very good approximation the chance of both errors is the same as the chance of the more probable error—that is, the chances are 1 in 100. Given both possible causes, therefore, we should ignore the fancy expert testimony about the odds of accidental matches and focus instead on the much higher laboratory error rate—the very data courts often do not allow attorneys to present! And so the oft-repeated claims of DNA infallibility are exaggerated.

We are a full-service digital marketing agency based in Sydney comprising of data-driven digital marketing specialists, Coders and Growth Hackers. Our laboratory is always at your disposal. At the core of schemes, we are Artists' and we make some best-looking websites, web / mobile apps and impactful online growth strategies. The secret ingredient to the SIMBAA's lab is fun ideas and entrepreneurial thinking - but it's secret so don't tell anyone.

He's really so adorable. The dog, I mean. Did you know he's a rescue beagle?" I'd remembered Frank and Sam had used the term the day I'd first encountered Bandit, but I'd just assumed it meant that he'd come from the pound. Rachel had set me straight. "They use them to experiment on. You know, in laboratories. Sam says they use beagles because they're so gentle and sweet-tempered they won't even bite you when you're hurting them. And after a few years when they 'retire' the dogs, some labs give them to rescue groups who try to find them homes. Sam says that Bandit didn't even know what grass was when he got him. It's his second rescue beagle. He had one before, a girl dog, but she ended up with cancer and he had to put her down. So he got Bandit." "Beagles," Sam said now, as he stood squarely on the scaffolding, "don't like to be alone. So she'll be doing me a favor." "What about the doggie day-care place?" "Nah. There's a Labradoodle there that's always picking on him. He'll be better hanging out with Rachel." I was not completely fooled. I knew he'd talked to Rachel for a while, because she'd told me that he had. "He's really nice," she'd said. "He listens." So I knew he knew that Rachel wasn't finding this an easy time, and I suspected Sam just figured she and Bandit were a lot alike in needing some companionship from somebody who understood and didn't push their boundaries. Whatever his true motivations, it was an inspired move.

What is an Indian?", asked Commissioner Thomas Morgan two years after the Wounded Knee massacre. And his answer, "blood and land". He was right, but not in a way he understood. If the U.S. army and government had spent more in the ruthless elimination of the tribes, root and branch, as Sherman hoped, then strangled off their resources as Congress wanted, the "Indian problem" would have been solved. But nothing is straightforward in American history, not even ruthlessness and the nation's better angels prevented total genocide. Their hearts were right but their methods were mad. To save the Indian, they reasoned, they must kill the Indian inside. Thus began decades of social engineering rivaling the darkest visions of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. The reservation was the laboratory where new and often contradictory policies were introduced and tested much like those classic social experiments where lab rats are shocked and rewarded but always randomly. Each era had its own philosophy. Assimilation, reeducation, christianization and termination of the tribes. Yet the purpose of each was similar. Strip the Indian of his "Indian-ness", then reshape him as an idealized american, stamped and milled as if in a machine. It is easy to see why the young rebels of AIM felt such loathing for the BIA and Washington. In the parlance of the counter-culture, they saw it as "the machine". How does one survive in such a world? The machine is overwhelming and unstoppable, larger than any one woman or man. Black Elk saw it early, though he never used such dystopian terms. Perhaps the only true defense is the most intimate, preservation of one's soul. Seen that way, his life is more than just another tale of Indian vs. white, it becomes instead a parable of modern man.

There is no time to discuss the fact that this horrible, horrible system is not working, or to assert that we are neither criminals or machines. There are only endless medication orders, given by exhausted people with nobody better than us to depend on.

The Great March of Return was both a lab and showroom. The most sophisticated new weapon used against the Palestinian protesters was the “Sea of Tears,” a drone that dropped tear gas canisters on a desired area. Despite Israeli claims of accuracy, a tent full of Palestinian women and children had tear gas dropped onto them, as did groups of reporters. Israeli police started using drones that dropped tear gas grenades on protestors in the West Bank in April 2021. One month later, Israel announced that a fleet of drones would be used to track riots and protests as well as areas damaged by rockets fired from Gaza. Israel announced in 2022 that it approved the use of armed drones for “targeted killings” in the West Bank. Reportedly tested over Gaza before the major protests began in 2018, a Chinese-made drone by Da Jiang Innovations was reconfigured by Israel’s Border Force, which was working with Israeli company Aeronautics to adapt the drone to on-the-ground service requirements. “Beyond the fact that it neutralizes all danger to our forces, it allows us to reach places that we had yet to reach,” Border Police Commander Kobi Shabtai told Israel’s Channel 2 news. The immediate effectiveness of the Sea of Tears led Maf’at, the Israeli Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure, to purchase hundreds of the drones after the first night of demonstrations in Gaza. Another innovation was the “skunk water” drone, a form of liquid emitted from a water cannon that left a foul smell on clothes and body for a long time. Israeli firm Aeronautics was behind this innovation, a technique that had been already used in the West Bank and Jerusalem to deter protestors. Reports appeared in early 2020 by anti-occupation activists in the West Bank that Israeli-controlled talking drones were flying overhead and sending out a “Go Home” message to Palestinian protestors. Israeli activists were told in Hebrew not to “stand with the enemy.