With a Little Help From My Friends

Ben Ferguson -- Over brunch the other day, one of my former classmates and I were lamenting the sheer amount of material one must know these days to be a physician. It’s often said that medical school is like trying to drink from a fire hose, that it is much more difficult in its volume than in its concepts. There is such an information overload with no end in sight, he said, that pretty soon we’ll surely have sub-sub-sub-specialties.

“Yeah, eventually there will be right lower lobe lung surgery and age 5-6 pediatric cardiology specialties.” Of course he was kidding, but then again, not really.

There is just too much for any one person to know in any one field. That’s where the reinforcements come into play. These days, it seems everyone outside of the most seasoned clinicians has the latest and greatest PDA with the latest and greatest pharmacology software that will instruct the physician on dosing and contraindications, and differential diagnosis software that will scour the bowels of rare pathologies to bring up otherwise unknown diseases (that is, unbeknownst to the practitioner, undoubtedly), which almost surely are eponymous as is medicine’s collective want.

Failing that, and for the more old-school among us, pockets are filled with soft cover pharmacopeiae and dosing recommendations and OB wheels and equations and formulas and pocket textbooks and pocket study guides and pocket reference sheets and pretty much everything else that was ever designed to fit in a white coat’s pocket. And it’s all necessary, at least for green students. No one could possibly know all of this information, so it’s crucial to have these little helpers around to make sure you don’t kill anybody. It seems we need to know relatively less and less about medicine with these things around to do an acceptable job toward that goal. We’ve become, to some extent, machines that do what the little books tell us to do.

And we have analogs in the lab, too. We have quick reference cards and protocols and manuals and recipes and methods and robots (I’m not kidding; my lab just purchased a pipetting robot!), but the most basic of them is the pipette box. The pipette box is a thing of beauty. For one thing, it contains pipettes, which carry out the most fundamental of lab activities: transferring liquid from one container to another, over and over, all day, every day. It becomes a reservoir when it’s empty, or a receptacle for veteran pipettes, or a holder of small tubes. But, it plays a much more important role than that: It also counts. It’s no fancy pocket machine; it’s a counting machine, an abacus. The pipette box-as-abacus is what keeps us all in line, faithfully keeps count for us while our minds wander to various locales in daydream land and our hands carry out brainless, endless liquid transfers that, some day, somehow, get transformed into scientific articles. They’re brilliant in their own simple way as historians of the lab, and you don’t even need to be able to count to be a competent scientist! This tends to bode well for people, say, like me who daydream often and count poorly. Never underestimate the pipette box!