Collaboration

I had played with genes in my time. Took them out, modified them, put them back in. Tried to find out how they did what they did. The catch? I had done it all in bacteria, yeast, a few worms. Stuff you could grow cheaply, quickly, easily. Not some big, ruminating, expensive brutes, that looked at you with pleading eyes, and had all those contorted reproductive systems to get around. There were issues to deal with, literature to read, stuff to learn. But, after doing some heavy time at the library, and sieving through all the online resources I could muster, I thought I had a better, simpler, way of doing the cowboys will. Wrote a few things down (not everything, you don’t want to be stupid), made lists of all chemicals and equipment needed, planned months worth of tests to the last detail, performed countless thought experiments in my mind. And they all turned out perfectly. I was just missing one last, small, thing.

Proof.

On the Lab Lit site, University of Coimbra Zoology professor João Ramalho-Santos has a new short story up, titled "Collaboration". True to the Lab Lit genre, it's more fiction that features scientists doing science than science fiction.

Tags: Lab Lit, genetic engineering