There is a baby in my lab

[Ruken]

@asterion

Oh man, I just saw a state-of-the-art CombiFlash borrowed from a different department that someone in my lab is using for a week or so. This thing has a touch screen, ramping, automated fraction collection, UV detector, and I think it makes espresso. I would have loved to have had one of those in grad school instead of the old CombiFlash we had which was basically a long tube with an articulated neck. You had to collect every fraction by hand, add solvent and approximate a gradient by hand, spot fractions on a TLC to check for products, and be prepared to sit there for a couple hours. It was still better than having to pack a column with flash-grade silica and applying pressure.

We had a free demo brand-new state-of-the-art CombiFlash for a few months. Everyone hated it. It was cool to be able to set something up and leave to work on something else, but a good human can get better separation. Many of our products are not UV-active (some maybe at 210 nm, but often so is the solvent), so the fraction-cutter was useless and you still had to TLC everything. Plus it was recommended that we dry-load all samples, which sucks. Many labs swear by these things, so maybe we just didn’t get used to it, but we ended up sending it back (and not just to piss off the annoying sales guy.)

I grumble about columns, but they’re not so bad so long as I don’t try to Euro-column it. 10-12 cm of silica is fine for most everything, but for some reason our European postdocs like to run meter-long gravity columns. Blech. If it’s taking >20 min to elute, something is wrong.

@blondebear

Is your lab baby a fab baby?

Indeed. Not too fat, mind you, but very close to the optimum level of plumpness.

[The_Devil_s_Grandmother]

@Rysto

The Psych department at the local university runs a daycare. :eek:

You say that like it’s a *bad *thing.

[elfkin477]

@Derleth

Does ‘operant conditioning’ ring any bells?

If it does, should we be worried about baby drool?

[asterion]

@blondebear

Is your lab baby a fab baby?

I think the real question was if your lab baby was wearing the appropriate PPE. And if so, why aren’t there any pictures?

[sinjin]

@Derleth

Does ‘operant conditioning’ ring any bells?

Win, win. You get day care and training at the same time. Sit. Bzzzzzt. Sit. Bzzzzt. Sit. “Very good have a cookie”

[Annie]

@sinjin

Win, win. You get day care and training at the same time. Sit. Bzzzzzt. Sit. Bzzzzt. Sit. “Very good have a cookie”

Problem is, you try that to teach potty use, the bzzzt just makes them wet their pants. Or, sit them on the pot, bzzt, they lose bladder control, then after a few hundred bzzzzzts you can just play bug-zapper audio and they run to the toilet!
Brain damage to test subjects was not statistically significant

[Ruken]

@asterion

I think the real question was if your lab baby was wearing the appropriate PPE. And if so, why aren’t there any pictures?

Our lab safety officer always makes sure we’re decked out in proper PPE.

Right now I’m wearing:

[ul]
[li]goggles[/li][li]closed-toed shoes[/li][li]a smile[/li][/ul]

[Carl_Corey]

For god’s sake man, put on some pants at least.

[Solfy]

@Ruken

I grumble about columns, but they’re not so bad so long as I don’t try to Euro-column it. 10-12 cm of silica is fine for most everything, but for some reason our European postdocs like to run meter-long gravity columns. Blech. If it’s taking >20 min to elute, something is wrong.

We’ve got one that is roughly 5’ tall and 1-2’ in diameter. It holds 50kg of silica gel.
Fortunately I’m not the one that has to dig out the silica when we’re done with it.

[Ruken]

@Solfy

We’ve got one that is roughly 5’ tall and 1-2’ in diameter. It holds 50kg of silica gel.
Fortunately I’m not the one that has to dig out the silica when we’re done with it.

I probably won’t be using one of those for my typical 0.5 - 1.0 mmol rxns.

[UncleRojelio]

I clicked this thread thinking ‘baby in my lab’ == ‘bun in my oven’.

[Solfy]

@Ruken

I probably won’t be using one of those for my typical 0.5 - 1.0 mmol rxns.

Awww! How cute! There are baby reactions in your lab, too!

[Markxxx]

You could throw it in the lake and see if it swims

[WarmNPrickly]

@Ruken

We had a free demo brand-new state-of-the-art CombiFlash for a few months. Everyone hated it. It was cool to be able to set something up and leave to work on something else, but a good human can get better separation. Many of our products are not UV-active (some maybe at 210 nm, but often so is the solvent), so the fraction-cutter was useless and you still had to TLC everything. Plus it was recommended that we dry-load all samples, which sucks. Many labs swear by these things, so maybe we just didn’t get used to it, but we ended up sending it back (and not just to piss off the annoying sales guy.)

I grumble about columns, but they’re not so bad so long as I don’t try to Euro-column it. 10-12 cm of silica is fine for most everything, but for some reason our European postdocs like to run meter-long gravity columns. Blech. If it’s taking >20 min to elute, something is wrong.

Indeed. Not too fat, mind you, but very close to the optimum level of plumpness.

To me, the idea of walking away while a machine pumps six months of work into test tubes is just wacky. We had one of those things in our lab. It hooked up to one of those disk columns that spin. The guys using it would come back the next day and be pissed that their compound was all over the benchtop, they didn’t get good separation, or the solvent went dry while their compound was still on the silica.

I never had the option. For most of my compounds, if they were on the silica for more than ten minutes, they were garbage. Luckily, most of them were quite colorfull. The hell if I was going to walk away while a machine did it. I might have had use for something like that when I was working with long glycol chains.

[Solfy]

The guys in “real” R&D upstairs (I’m in process development) love their CombiFlash. They tend to column everything, and when they need slightly larger quantities for testing it really comes in handy. We’ve thought about getting one for our group, mainly for isolating impurities for identification, but can’t really justify it.