daliciacomics

[daliciacomics]

Joyeux mois de mai à tous mes amis scientifiques français!

[daliciacomics]

Happy International Women's day! Today, let's remember what this day is truly about. 

[daliciacomics]

Turns out that substituting certain words by #phage makes things super hilarious! Can you think of more puns?

[daliciacomics]

I have not been able to enjoy my cereal in the morning since 2015. Does anybody else relate to this?

[daliciacomics]

[daliciacomics]

We currently have a phage contamination in our lab. I have been trying to humanise the phages as a compassion/coping mechanism...

... not working ...

[daliciacomics]

We got a new stool at the lab today. It came with open-for-interpretation safety pictograms.

[daliciacomics]

I sometimes think that my office space looks very different from that of my colleagues... 

(JK. I don’t have motivational quotes. I do have a lot of comics everywhere. I will one day draw my actual space!)

[daliciacomics]

LAB COLLEAGUES ARCHETYPES - N° 5 The bench that is no longer.

If you thought the chaotic stereotype was as bad as a bench can get… you won’t be pleasently surprised by #5.

Historians say that indeed there was once a bench underneath all that stuff. Nobody has been able to prove the existance of the bench, and it therefore remains as one of the burning questions of modern science.

Fun fact: this person gets work done on this bench. Fact.

[daliciacomics]

LAB COLLEAGUES ARCHETYPES - Nº4 The Bioinformatician

I don’t believe that there still are many biology labs without one of these specimen.

They spend their days staring at black and green screens. They write lines of code as automatically as we load samples on a gel. 

We listen to their work on lab meetings and understand close to nothing. They attempt to explain us what they do using very simple, non-mathematical language. We attempt to explain our work back, drawing a lot of schemes.

They put our life into a bizarre perspective. On the one hand, they reassure us for our choice of career path (thank 18-year-old-me for having followed biology!). On the other hand, they don’t have to screen 1350 PCRs for tomorrow... 

They do have to deal with errors in their code. But I bet their errors don’t materialise as smearing on an otherwise beautifully laid gel. 

[daliciacomics]

LAB COLLEAGUES ARCHETYPES - Nº3 The Leonardo da Vinci

Many scientists go into science because they like the thrill of the discovery and the constant mindset of creativity. In no other archetype is this as obvious than on the Leonardo da Vinci.

This person always surprises you with knowledge about the bizarrest of things. “What do you mean you’re not an expert on Pristimantis mnionaetes?” “Did you honestly not know anything about the life of Inaba Masanobu? (*)

But this is not the only way in which the creativity shows. Sculptures in the bench, creative adaptation of lab material.... one thing is for sure, they are the perfect teammate for any pub quiz! 

* Topics chosen by hitting random article on Wikipedia :P 

[daliciacomics]

LAB EQUIPMENT 101 - #1 The lab’s Fridge

On the *rare* occasions that my non-scientist friends come visit me at the lab, they are always amazed by the lab equipment. “How much does this cost?”, “What does this do?”, “Wooow, it looks like an episode of CSI!!!”.

Yet, nothing seems to amaze people more than the presence of everyday’s equipment in the lab. The biggest star is, of course, the fridge.

The hope of opening the fridge to nice smelling food when your stomach’s rumbling might not be satisfied though...

[daliciacomics]

LAB COLLEAGUES ARCHETYPES - Nº2 The master of chaos

We have all had a colleague like this. We look at their bench and wonder in awe how they are able to find anything in it. Used petri dishes are mixed with fresh ones. Tubes find a home laying on the bench, instead of in a rack.

And yet, they somehow make it work. They always know exactly where each and every tube is, and their experiments work always at the first shot. 

Their rate of failed experiments is so low that you begin to wonder whether the chaos is actually beneficial. 

They live in chaos. They thrive in chaos. They are the master of chaos.

[daliciacomics]

LAB COLLEAGUES ARCHETYPES - Nº1 The control freak

Everybody working in a lab knows that scientists are often… peculiar people. Some of us are so peculiar that we have stopped being normal people and turned into type characters, archetypes*.

After having worked in a few different labs, I soon began to notice that several of these archetypes seem to be universally distributed in all the labs in this planet.

The first of these archetypes is the super organised person, the one whose bench we all envy, and the one we all pretend to be on the day the security inspection comes to our lab. If you identify as said person, enjoy feeling superior to all your colleagues, because you ARE.

* Note: use of first person in the sentence should be regarded as an attempt to incude the author in said group of bizarre people in a second attempt to not insult any of said archetypes. Author is doing this out of political correctness. Author claims to be a perfectly average human being.

[daliciacomics]

Hello!!

Hello! Bonjour!

My name is Alicia. I am a microbiologist, currently doing my PhD in Paris, LA FRANCE!

I currently spend my days pipetting ridiculously small volumes of liquids from tiny tubes into tinier tubes, which is what the daily life of a scientist feels like (at least that of a molecular biologist).

Science is one of my biggest passions, but so is art. For the past year I have found a creative outlet in drawing comics about my life in the lab (so if you reader are a colleague of mine, DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. *end of disclaimer*).

Here you will find different scribbles that are decent enough to see the light of day. May they give you as much joy reading them as they have given me drawing.

A