This was in my Facebook news feed this morning, from I Fucking Love Science. I don’t get it (science isn’t my strong suit).
If you can’t see it, it’s a drawing of microcentrifuge tube, cap open, about 1/8 full of liquid of some kind. The caption says “Touch this microcentrifuge tube.”
What’s the joke here?
The joke occurs when you touch it (or click it, if you’re not on the phone). Facebook then shows you the bottom of the image.
Place your mouse on the picture. Another picture pops up, saying “you degraded the sample”.
The type of tube shown is used to prep samples for proteinograms: anybody touching the tube with their ungloved finger will be introducing his own proteins into the sample.
Oh.
It’s a knee-slapper, all right.
I can’t understand why more scientists don’t find success as comedians.
I haven’t seen this example (and can’t get to it from here), but I’m guessing the joke is that you’re expecting to click on something and it changes when you only mouse over it, and you chortle, knowing that it really is that easy to degrade the sample IRL?
Sort of like the Interrupting Cow joke, only not as funny.
And there’s a reason we never saw George Carlin attempting partition chromatography.
mmm
Hold on. I have to get back on the chair I fell off of laughing at this…
:rolleyes:
moooooo!!!
The “degraded” image is of DNA, extracted and run on agarose gel, stained with ethidium bromide, fluorescing under ultraviolet light.
These tubes are also used for DNA samples, and the lower image is of DNA stained with ethidium bromide on an agarose gel. The DNA samples on that gel might indeed be degraded - depending on what the samples were supposed to be like in the first place. The agarose gel separates the samples loaded into the wells at the top by size, with smaller fragments migrating further down the gel. So we see “smears” of smaller fragments with a wide distribution of sizes. But sheared genomic DNA would look like this anyway, depending what fragment size was targeted in the shearing process. However, if the sample was supposed to be a specific PCR-amplified fragment, which should look like a single well-defined band (see the link below), this gel would indeed indicate degradation.
Unfortunately, the joke is wrong. You can’t degrade a DNA sample like this by touching it (unless you have something unusual on your fingers). You can contaminate it by touching it, leading to spurious subsequent amplification by PCR, but that isn’t what the gel shows.
I think is the science version of “pull my finger.”
Geez, you guys sure know how to kill a room.
Regards,
Shodan
If you’re going to make nerdy jokes, you’d better have impeccable nerd credentials, or the true nerds will fall on you like a pack of… well, I don’t know.
Don’t forget to tip your lab assistant.
Regards,
Shodan
PS - take my DNA - please!