Laboratory Technician Quotes

A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.

I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician, he is also a child place before natural phenomenon, which impress him like a fairy tale.

I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.'-Marie Curie

David Park is a physicist and philosopher at Williams College in Massachusetts with a lifelong interest in a time which he too thinks doesn't pass. For Park, the passage of time is not so much an illusion as a myth, "because it involves no deception of the senses.... One cannot perform any experiment to tell unambiguously whether time passes or not." This is certainly a telling argument. After all, what reality can be attached to a phenomenon that can never be demonstrated experimentally? In fact, it is not even clear how to think about demonstrating the flow of time experimentally. As the apparatus, laboratory, experimenter, technicians, humanity generally and the universe as a whole are apparently caught up in the same inescapable flow, how can any bit of the universe be "stopped in time" in order to register the flow going on in the rest of it? It is analogous to claiming that the whole universe is moving through space at the same speed—or, to make the analogy closer, that space is moving through space. How can such a claim ever be tested?

Active scholars are uniquely attracted by a high-quality graduate school of arts and sciences. Faculty members consider the teaching and training of new generations of graduate students as their highest calling. They believe that working with graduate students maintains and develops their professional skills more effectively than any other activity. It may be the main reason for the great attraction of academic jobs. Laboratory scientists have told me that the opportunity to work with graduate students keeps them in the university. For them, other options would center on research in commercial laboratories, but there the principal investigator would be assisted by technicians, and that is considered a far less creative interaction.

But there was a lacuna in Nehru’s concept of science: he saw it exclusively in terms of laboratory science, not field science; physics and molecular biology, not ecology, botany, or agronomy. He understood that India’s farmers were poor in part because they were unproductive—they harvested much less grain per acre than farmers elsewhere in the world. But unlike Borlaug, Nehru and his ministers believed that the poor harvests were due not to lack of technology—artificial fertilizer, irrigated water, and high-yield seeds—but to social factors like inefficient management, misallocation of land, lack of education, rigid application of the caste system, and financial speculation (large property owners were supposedly hoarding their wheat and rice until they could get better prices). This was not crazy: more than one out of five families in rural India owned no land at all, and about two out of five owned less than 2.5 acres, not enough land to feed themselves. Meanwhile, a tiny proportion of absentee landowners controlled huge swathes of terrain. The solution to rural poverty, Nehru therefore believed, was less new technology than new policies: give land from big landowners to ordinary farmers, free the latter from the burdens of caste, and then gather the liberated smallholders into more-efficient, technician-advised cooperatives. This set of ideas had the side benefit of fitting nicely into Nehru’s industrial policy: enacting them would cost next to nothing, reserving more money for building factories.

In September 1999, the Department of Justice succeeded in denaturalizing 63 participants in Nazi acts of persecution; and in removing 52 such individuals from this country. This appears to be but a small portion of those who actually were brought here by our own government. A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said "that between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and similar programs. It has been estimated that at least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent of all the imported specialists were former Nazi Party members." A number of these scientists were recruited to work for the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments were conducted during the Cold War. Among them were flash-blindness studies in connection with atomic weapons tests and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted in Houston. The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included many related to aviation research. Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine," had a long career at the SAM, including the recruitment of other Paperclip scientists in Germany. On September 24, 1995 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that as head of Nazi Germany's Air Force Institute for Aviation Medicine, Strughold particpated in a 1942 conference that discussed "experiments" on human beings. The experiments included subjecting Dachau concentration camp inmates to torture and death. The Edgewood Arsenal of the Army's Chemical Corps as well as other military research sites recruited these scientists with backgrounds in aeromedicine, radiobiology, and opthamology. Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland ended up conducting experiments on more than seven thousand American soldiers. Using Auschwitz experiments as a guide, they conducted the same type of poison gas experiments that had been done in the secret I.G. Farben laboratories.

Joseph shook his head. How could such a thing happen? It made him think of William Blake’s poem where a worm finds its way into a bed of luminous, red roses—O world thou art sick. He tried to divert himself by focusing on the drive. People were lining up to get tested. He watched them offer their arms to the technician; the dark-red fluid flowing from syringes into glass vials; the vials placed into plastic crates; the crates stacked one on top of another. The blood would be screened in a laboratory for the specific genetic markers on white blood cells and then compared to Emily’s. Hopefully, a match would be found.

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.

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

appariteur /apaʀitœʀ/ nm 1. (gardien) ≈porter (GB), college staff member who handles mail and reception duties; (surveillant d'examen) invigilator (GB), proctor (US) 2. (de laboratoire) laboratory technician

During his life, Brunetti had often heard people begin sentences with, ‘If it weren’t for him . . .’ and he could not hear the words without substituting Sergio’s name. When Brunetti, always the acknowledged scholar of the family, was eighteen, it was decided that there was not enough money to allow him to go to university and delay the time when he could begin to contribute to the family’s income. He yearned to study the way some of his friends yearned for women, but he assented to this family decision and began to look for work. It was Sergio, newly engaged and newly employed in a medical laboratory as a technician, who agreed to contribute more to the family if it would mean that his younger brother would be allowed to study. Even then, Brunetti knew that it was the law he wanted to study, less its current application than its history and the reasons why it developed the way it had. Because there was no faculty of law at Ca Foscari, it meant that Brunetti would have to study at Padova, the cost of his commuting adding to the responsibility Sergio agreed to assume. Sergio’s marriage was delayed for three years, during which time Brunetti quickly rose to the top of his class and began to earn some money by tutoring students younger than himself. Had he not studied, Brunetti would not have met Paola in the university library, and he would not have become a policeman. He sometimes wondered if he would have become the same man, if the things inside of him that he considered vital would have developed in the same way, had he, perhaps, become an insurance salesman or a city bureaucrat. Knowing idle speculation when he saw it, Brunetti reached for the phone and pulled it towards him.

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.

In September 1999, the Department of Justice succeeded in denaturalizing 63 participants in Nazi acts of persecution; and in removing 52 such individuals from this country. This appears to be but a small portion of those who actually were brought here by our own government. A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said "that between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and similar programs. It has been estimated that at least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent of all the imported specialists were former Nazi Party members." A number of these scientist were recruited to work for the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments were conducted during the Cold War. Among them were flash-blindness studies in connection with atomic weapons tests and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted in Houston. The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included many related to aviation research. Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine," had a long career at the SAM, including the recruitment of other Paperclip scientists in Germany. On September 24, 1995 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that as head of Nazi Germany's Air Force Institute for Aviation Medicine, Strughold particpated in a 1942 conference that discussed "experiments" on human beings. The experiments included subjecting Dachau concentration camp inmates to torture and death. The Edgewood Arsenal of the Army's Chemical Corps as well as other military research sites recruited these scientists with backgrounds in aeromedicine, radiobiology, and opthamology. Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland ended up conducting experiments on more than seven thousand American soldiers. Using Auschwitz experiments as a guide, they conducted the same type of poison gas experiments that had been done in the secret I.G. Farben laboratories.

However, the spooky boys of the super secret Technical Laboratory failed to impress me. I possessed a vast library on the various facades of technical intelligence. I was amused to see the rudimentary wireless sets (some manufactured by the IB technicians at mount joy), clandestine cameras, miniature radio transmitters and a few bugging tools flaunted by the so-called experts as the main tools of technical intelligence. These gadgets were shown to us like the magicians pulling out an occasional rabbit from their hats. I don’t think anyone emerged out of the classrooms much wiser about the application of electronic gadgets for generating intelligence