Pharma’s Cutting Edge

If you’re like me you’ve spent some time during your career sitting at a lab bench.  I have mixed feelings about lab work.  When things were going well–experiments were running as planned, results were coming in–I loved it.  When things weren’t going so well–needlessly slaughtering a bunch of rats (wrong breed don’t ya know), endless attempts at expressing a recombinant protein–it was as awful as any job I’ve done. 

So, I don’t have a strong sense of nostalgia about the lab, but I still find the pursuit of knowledge through scientific experiments fascinating, if not necessarily an enjoyable read in Methods sections of traditional journals, online or otherwise.  Which is why I was happy to discover JoVE: Journal of Visualized Experiments.  This online, freely provided experimental methods journal co-founded by Moshe Pritsker and Nikita Bernstein in 2006 is a great way for armchair scientists like me to stay connected to the lab without getting our hands dirty and our clothes smelly.

The site provides videos of scientists conducting experiments (thankfully in accelerated time) with written experimental protocols linked to each.  User-friendly features include advanced search features and browsable indexes by category and issue (i.e. date).   Some of the “video articles” are accompanied by “video interviews” of the scientists in charge of the lab, enhancing the value of the material.  And registered users may comment on the videos, blog style.

Currently, the experimental methods fall into 5 categories in the life sciences (neuroscience, developmental biology, cellular biology, microbiology, and plant biology), but the site doesn’t seem to discriminate against submissions of video articles in any of the life sciences. 

If you work in a lab, especially in industry, which is not currently represented, why not submit a video and do yourself and the cause of science both a favor?  If you look back on your days in the lab fondly or otherwise, this site provides an excellent forum for reconnecting with the hands-on work you once did and probably took for granted.  If you’ve never spent much time in a life science lab but have a curioisity about such things, I can assure you that you will find JOVE as satisfying as a Discovery Channel or NOVA TV special, which is to say very satisfying.