Extras · 1 of 4

A typical day

Come in, check whatever was incubating overnight, and read the plan. Most of the morning goes to running a procedure: weighing, pipetting, loading samples, waiting, recording. Afternoons bring instrument runs, cleaning, ordering reagents and writing up what happened. Some days an experiment fails at step nine of eleven and you start again tomorrow. You work standing at a bench, in a coat and gloves, usually alongside two or three other people doing the same thing.