ANON POST: Modern day clinical lab equipment?

[kutsuwamushi]

My main character is a doctoral researcher at a very well-funded private clinical lab (I don't have a medical specialization for her yet, in part because of the question I have, but it would be something biochemical based) in a contemporary setting. I'm having the hardest time figuring out what kind of equipment would be present (cold rooms? TEM

Comments

[rian219]

Partly it depends on what type of research the lab is doing, but every lab has fridges, freezers (normal -20C freezers as well as -80C freezers), centrifuges, glass bottles for buffer storage, plastic pipettes, scales, a fume hood or two, and maybe an autoclave and a liquid nitrogen storage tank. They also might have a space set aside for tissue culture and/or radioactive work. There would also probably be at least one microscope, but generally just normal ones, not electron microscopes or anything like that.

In terms of what you could use to kill someone with, well that depends on what type of death you want them to have. There are a lot of corrosive liquids in a lab, generally. If you give me a bit more detail I can probably help you out - I'm a molecular biologist who worked in medical research for 10 years, so I know labs. :)

[tylik]

While I agree on the whole, it *really* depends on the lab - totally yes when I was doing yeast genetics (and totally no when I was doing protein dynamics, but that's a bit of a cheat as we were simulation only, so we had computers... and more computers) but nowadays I'm doing neurobio and we're far more into the dissecting scopes and amplifiers... and legos and modeling clay.

[sethg_prime]

This sounds like my children’s dream job. :-)

[tylik]

One of my great joys is bringing in bright creative students who have this idea that they won't enjoy research because it's all about methodical tedious work dictated by Very Serious Men in white coats*... and explaining that no, the whole point of research is that you're doing things that have never been done before, so you're constantly making up ways of doing new things and then building hacked together prototype equipment to do them. And then I show them Important Scientific Devices made out of styrofoam, popsicle sticks and rubber bands.

They catch fire, and next thing I know they're showing up early in the morning and babbling about this idea they have for a less invasive procedure for implanting in vivo electrodes.

It is the best thing ever.

* This seems to be particularly true of female students. It always amazes me when someone says that while they do really well in science and engineering classes, they couldn't go into those fields because they're "not creative".

[anonymous_bosh]

When I was working as an assistant in the biochem labs at Michigan State U. we were trying to figure out particular cell pathways (passage of water through cytochrome c,) so there were quite a lot of chemicals for shutting down specific cell pathways. The ones that stopped oxygen and water getting into tissue cells probably wouldn't do much to a full-sized human being, but the ones that messed with sodium reuptake in neurons would do a number on someone, and various fluorides and acids in a blocked fume hood will look like an accident and could potentially do awful things to an entire lab

[lyonesse]

a "clinical" lab would be one that treats patients. is this what you want? this is usually not quite cutting-edge r&d, as the way the fda works, there's a long way to go between say "making a drug or device" and "putting something on a patient". the people in chemistry or tissue labs who develop medicines, say, tend not to have a lot of sick people hanging about.

i'm in clinical research at mclean, which i (possibly provincially) think is a fairly famous research hospital. the most exciting piece of equipment in my personal arsenal is a nasal nebulizer for drug administration -- i think it's nifty, and could have rapid murderous potential with the right substances! -- but it costs $3 and doesn't look like much. the hospital also has some fancy/scary apparatus like electroshock therapy equipment, but (a) that's not as scary as the old-fashioned versions and (b) it takes a largish team to operate, so murder would be....complicated :)

[tylik]

There was a rather famous incident a few years back involving a lab love triangle and someone being poisoned with polyacrylamide (often found in gels used for different kinds of protein, DNA and RNA separation).

[tylik]

Ooo... if you wanted something dramatic, you might be able to do something involving ferous items and an NMR machine...

[justhuman]

I'll match you're Ooo... I have friends that are MRI engineers. They talk about things like fireman can't enter the MRI room because their breathing tanks will get pulled up against the big magnets if they're on. They will erase magnetic strips

NCIS (crime drama) once used an MRI to pull a bullet out of a corpse. If one were to reverse the process - say send someone in to check the MRI, turn on the magnet to full strength and then toss a bunch of small iron based items int the room...

[cheriola]

Yeah, PAA and Ethidiumbromide (also used in DNA/RNA electrophoresis gels to make the DNA/RNA light up unter UV light) are pretty much the only substances the genetics lab I currently study at enforces a strict gloves-and-seperate-table rule, because even trace amounts are toxic. (Though of course you don't drop just from traces - the rule exists more to keep people from absorbing a little each day until it's too much. Ethidiumbromide for example is also a prophylactic against sleeping sickness in cattle, and PAA is created in small amounts while deep-frying potato products

[sethg_prime]

About ten years ago I was working for what is now the Broad Institute, on the Human Genome Project. (Then they finished sequencing the human genome and I was laid off. So much for job security in academia. Hey, if you’re looking for a motive....) They had an automated freezer, made by RTS, that had (if I remember the layout correctly) racks of little trays for DNA samples, and then a robot arm that could pull out trays and redistribute samples from one to another.

In the chamber where the robot arm was operating, there was certainly enough room to fit a tied-up person, but I don’t know what temperature that chamber itself was kept at.