Wet Labs Shouldn’t Be Boring (for young scientists)

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The Wet Lab Filter

When I was a young warthog, I spent a few summers working in a wet lab. I had to complete the immigrant kid canon. Wet labs are basically places where they do experiments that involve liquids/chemicals/biological matter.

I have a lot of respect for the people that work in wet labs - it requires a lot of patience, there’s very little glamor in it, and the work they do is the foundation for scientific progress.

Now that I’ve given my respects, fuckkkkk is it boring. Especially if you’re 16 and you’ve discovered…the broader internet…around this time too. I also had very little context for what I was doing. I didn’t understand where in the world these experiments fit in, the scientific literature around it was so dense and hard to parse, and the work just felt monotonous. Plus the people that worked at the lab were focused on getting their work done and going home because they had actual responsibilities in life.

It’s probably because I was a resume padding youth who literally did not care about the quality of my work. But the reality is that this is the first introduction to medicine, healthcare, science, etc. that many young adults have. And I can say with some honesty that it made the future of the field seem bleak and boring. It was definitely a contributing factor to why I didn’t pursue it more seriously – also because I got castrated by AP biology.

My hunch is a lot of people fit in the above bucket, so tell me if that was your story.

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Tech cultures vs. Wet Lab cultures

One thing that tech companies have figured out is how to make the environment fun for people who are younger. They do a few specific things:

• They’re incredibly social, partially as a function also of getting a bunch of younger people in a room together. A big part of the work itself is social - reviewing people’s work, meetings to get things done, brainstorming sessions, etc. 
• The work has fast feedback loops. You can run experiments yourself pretty quickly and there’s a lot of clout in hacking things together vs. going through the traditional process. It’s also grounded in real-world impact, you’re constantly seeing how customers are responding to your product and you get to see your work in action.
• The space itself is fun. Its colorful, open-office floor plans make it feel inviting for discussions (...too inviting honestly, I secretly think cold remedy manufacturers made open-offices popular).
• “The Social Network” movie basically oneshotted everyone in college and made them interested in _{making money} using tech to make the world better. We need Aaron Sorkin to make an equally groundbreaking movie about a young biologist (with an absolute bop of a soundtrack again). 
• There is some form of recognition and compensation for grinding, regardless of your age or seniority. Whether it’s showing your project at town halls, to getting promoted, to seeing a bigger place for you at the company as it grows. 

As a result of this, tech tends to also keep people within the ecosystem even if an individual company is not the right fit for them.

I can only speak to academic research and college wet labs, but the majority of people I know who worked in wet labs would not call it “fun” even if it was important. IMO it’s important we try to find ways to make it fun for a few reasons. 

• The obvious one is that it will actually keep people interested in pursuing harder sciences. Which I also think will bring a larger diversity of perspectives/personality types into the sciences.  
• I think a lot of the best ideas come when people are casually conversing, throwing joke ideas out there, and then a light bulb moment clicks. Especially younger people who might have weirder/more naive ideas that might be crazy enough to work. 
• I think this will also lower the barrier to people starting biology based companies if they feel more agency in the lab

So what can we do to make more fun wet labs? I’m further removed from this nowadays, so it’s possible these things are already happening. A few that come to mind:

[I’m going to HEAVY caveat this that I haven’t worked in a wet lab in 15+ years and never worked in a biotech/pharma wet lab. R/labrats has a lot of people that enjoy the culture of wet labs so it’s maybe it’s just me. I would love to hear more perspectives or if I’m totally off base, but this post is meant to spur some ideas and have a discussion.]

Separate experiment design and execution (robot labs?)

Wet lab experiments typically have two parts: tasks that need to be done in the wet lab itself (e.g. dealing with the chemicals, reagents, specimens) and the tasks that don’t need to be done in the wet lab (thinking about experiment design, analyzing results, etc.)

These are very distinct environments. The wet lab has a lot of restrictions on what you can do in it for safety reasons, and the tasks you typically need to do in the wet lab are more repetitive and require lower cognitive load. The non-wet lab tasks can be done in any kind of office environment.

When you talk to researchers, some really enjoy the wet lab aspect because it’s therapeutic and lets you put your headphones in and get in a zone. Others find the wet lab environment itself to be isolating. Younger people tend to be put in the wet lab part, so their experience is the less social and more “uptight” part of running experiments.

I think we’re slowly getting to the point where you can split up wet lab and non wet lab environments. This already happens when labs outsource parts of the experiments to Contract Research Organizations (CROs). But can we take it further?

Cloud Labs like Elemental or Strateos try to take this to the next level and handle lots of different parts of the experiment, with the eventual promise of running a full experiment end-to-end and get the results back. In theory this should reduce the friction of experimentation and “just trying things”, but there are lots of practical realities that make this tough to execute.

CROs and cloud labs are mostly built for commercial use cases currently - hopefully we’re approaching a world where the cost goes down enough that students and hobbyists can also run their own experiments remotely. Today, you can essentially run a tech company with just a laptop - everything else is outsourced to 3rd party tools and MICROSERVICES, open-source software, etc. Lowering that barrier to entry makes it possible for anyone to participate and start something. Robotics or Cloud Labs might get us there.

Another benefit of cloud labs is that the experiments run on them are inherently much more reproducible since you’re executing code/instructions to robots. This would also make it easy for newer scientists to run the same experiments or make slight tweaks themselves. This significantly lowers the friction for newer scientists to get started by building and remixing existing experiments.

Plus maybe a company that builds natively to cloud/robotic labs would have a very different culture? It might look more like a startup, or generally focus more on what collaboration between team mates looks like. Though idk people that work at labs which are highly automated say it’s pretty much the same as working any regular corporate job.

It would be interesting if students and younger people could run their own experiments from anywhere using outsourced labs. IMO it would make them feel more ownership over the lab work and they might try out more “out there” experiments or start their own companies. 

More “do-it-yourself” labs

When I was in middle school, I joined the Lego robotics club. This would begin my long journey of virginity. 

We would play around with Lego Mindstorms, which were very basic robots you could build and program to do stuff. It was super fun - I built things with friends, learned some very basic programming, and would have the robot do things like beat up other robots because I hadn’t learned the term “repressed” yet. The DIY nature of it made it more fun, permissionless (sorta), and we could build what we wanted. 

It would be fun to bring more DIY to bio. What if young intrepid scientists wanted to run some experiments themselves without needing to go through a principal investigator, university, etc.?

There’s some examples of this, but I think could be more

• BioBox is a monthly subscription that has new experiments for kids to run at home. 
• TriloBio seems to have a modular lab robot you can mix-and-match for your own experiments with software that lets you program it yourself. In fact the founder talks about starting the company because it was hard to get started as a young scientist.
• OpenFlexure is a 3D-printable microscope that you can make adjustments to and swap parts out.
• Here’s a paper on building a DIY Raman spectrometer which they say they used to analyze algae, chili, and beer. Average undergrad dorm room.
• OpenMTA is (was?) trying to create a flexible agreement to allow people to request materials from labs and universities for their own experiments.
• Odin has a DIY genetic engineering kit you can mess around with to make bacteria glow, or modify the color of plant leaves.

Doing lab-like stuff outside of a literal lab space can make labs more accessible by bringing it to where students already are, and make the process of learning much more fine-tuned to your skills level.

Science Spaces and Events

IMO space design and events are really critical parts of creating fun, especially for younger scientists. Space design sets the rules on what kinds of interactions you can expect between people, and events create rules and time-pressure to get things done (plus a reason to collaborate).

Creating more social spaces for young scientists is a big part of making the field attractive. Some ideas:

• Where are the biohacker houses? There’s so many places in SF where ten 22 year old software engineers live together, crash out publicly, and eventually work at Meta when things don’t work out. But is there an equivalent for labs and biology founders? I’ve seen Light and Matter as one for neurotech, but are there others?
• Maybe we need more bio hackathons? There’s lots of AI x Bio hackathons like Nucleate, Biohack NY, happening now which feel promising.
• What about making science fairs more social, fun, and accessible to regular people outside of the lab. I used to go to Secret Science Club which brought PhD’s to talk about their research at a bar. Apple has incredible demo days dedicated to showing off consumers what they’ve built. Why don’t med device, pharma, and academic labs have similar days with the razzle dazzle to make consumers excited? Why is it only some random presentation at ASCO with an abstract you can never find online?

New forms of social recognition for the lab

One big reason younger people work in labs is to get some form of social recognition or proof point for med school or higher ed. Or their parents just told them they have to do it because they had a friend that ran a lab that would essentially provide teenage daycare.

Instead of just fiending to get your name on a paper, maybe we need new forms of social recognition for people in wet labs:

1. A Crunchies style award for work still happening in labs vs. just the results (e.g. most interesting experiment design, weirdest hypothesis). Or maybe it’s a Product Hunt for wet lab projects to potentially explore that has upvoting and and comments.
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2. Bounties and competitions for scientists.  Let’s have more competitions that say “I’ll give you $100K if you can answer X with an experiment”. Young people want to make money, it’s a fast feedback loop, and they might try esoteric ways to get to the answer with less guardrails.
   ‍
   Regeneron has been doing a Science Talent Search for a long time, and there’s the BioGENEius award which really wants you to recognize their pun. Align has a protein engineering competition with In Silico and In Vitro phases. iGem has lots of synthetic biology competitions. I wish these existed or I was more aware of these when I was younger.
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3. Twitch streaming science. I know it sounds crazy, but there are a lot of Youtubers like UnnecessaryInventions, NileRed, and SimoneGiertz who have built massive followings building inventions or doing chemistry experiments. What if people live streamed what they were doing in the lab - which is a pretty ideal activity for that format since there’s so much downtime between parts of the experiment. Building your own social following is another form of building reputation. On top of that, it can elevate science to the stage of being cool to your friends, which does really matter when you’re younger. 

4. Open-source communities. One thing tech has done well is use Github, open-source contributions, etc. as a way for people to show what they’re working on and build reputation within small subgroups. Protocols.io is probably the closest thing I’ve seen to this, focusing on protocols (for experiments, bioinformatics pipelines, etc. ). They even have mini-badges for contributions, but I think you can expand it even more.

Inherently these kinds of social proof reward the process as much as the outcome, which I think is good for younger scientists that don’t want to wait decades for recognition. Plus it might address issues of needing the experiment results to have a “splash” to get respect. 

Conclusion and parting thoughts

I haven’t been in a wet lab in a long time so all of this might be out of date. I continue to be upset with myself for not exploring some of these paths in life more seriously - writing posts like this is a therapeutic way for me to justify my timeline of choices. And also because I hope this will eventually reach some “extracurricular obsessed for the wrong reasons” kid to pursue some of these things more seriously.

I want medicine, healthcare, and the sciences to see the same explosion of progress, but a part of it feels constrained because we don’t have enough talent excited about these problems. I also think another part of it is that existing wet labs are oriented around goals that are too specific in academia or too commercial in industry. I think lowering the barriers to entry and making it more fun naturally leads to wider horizons of exploration.

There are two big points not addressed here that I don’t have answers to

Cost - All of the above sounds great except it requires money. There are lots of fixed infrastructure costs to start a lab, materials costs for running assays, etc. Who is paying for that? It’s probably something to be bundled into universities, but there’s an academia prestige trap those labs fall into. Maybe a pharma consortium? If costs can come down for hobby scientists the same way cloud costs came down for developers, a lot of the above seems more doable.

The wet lab culture is intentional - There’s also an argument to be made that a lot of this culture is intentional and a byproduct of the fact that this kind of science is slow, imprecise, and expensive. Maybe it works as intended, and making it more like tech startups is actually a BAD thing because it introduces marketing fluff, focusing on the wrong metrics of success, attracting mercenary talent, etc. I can also buy that in a lot of ways too.

But either way I think this topic is worth the conversation, even if it’s not feasible or off base/ If there are interesting experiments around fun labs, I’d love to hear about them. 

Thinkboi out,

Nikhil aka. “Water is the essence of wet labs, and wet labs are the essence of beauty”

Thanks to Morgan Cheatham and Owl Posting for looking at drafts

Twitter: ​@nikillinit​

IG: ​@outofpockethealth​

Other posts: ​outofpocket.health/posts​

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