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How to keep tabs on the tools in your lab
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Pipettes are among the items that frequently go ‘missing’ in a laboratory. Adapted from Getty
When Greg Bannard started her master’s degree in chemistry at the University of Calgary, Canada, she didn’t have an arsenal of tools available to her, so it became incredibly frustrating when equipment went missing. And, being the sort of scientist who’s picky about the kind of spatula that she uses, it could be extremely annoying when her favourite ones disappeared. After several instances of vanishing kit, she could no longer endure running around trying to find tools that had been misplaced.
This inspired her to create a portable pouch that fitted into her pocket of her laboratory coat. “It’s mostly things that I ended up finding myself reaching for,” says Bannard, who now works as an industrial designer, but still keeps the pouch as a keepsake of her time in research.
At the time, Bannard worked in a dye lab, studying the functionality of perylene diimide dyes for the active layers of solar cells. She packed a whole lot into the pouch: a diamond glass cutter, a carbide glass cutter, an ear curette used for working with tiny amounts of powdered dye, a test-tube holder, a pencil, a spatula, little scissors, a felt marker and an “army” of tweezers. “It was a busy lab and people needed to get their own work done,” she says. “The best way that I could get my work done was knowing where everything was.”
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Beyond Bannard’s frustration, missing equipment can disrupt crucial scientific research. Scientists often need particular tools to keep delicate experiments on track. Momoko Takahashi, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, knows this too well. She recalls panicking when she could not find a syringe during a time-sensitive procedure involving mouse neurons. “There’s an entire domino effect that starts if one particular moment fails,” she says. “If [the experiment] is not successful, I just wasted a bunch of animals’ lives and that makes me feel really guilty.”
Everyday acts of borrowing, accidental theft, mislabelling and sample moving can turn shared laboratories into crime scenes. The social-media platform Reddit is awash with scientists asking how to guard against ‘disappearing’ items and seeking solutions to track down their missing solutions. Nature spoke directly to researchers about how they protect their work, equipment and sanity without becoming the lab secret police. After all, much ‘stealing’ is done by accident or at least not with malicious intent.
Put systems in place. Scientists who spoke to Nature recounted that all kinds of equipment can disappear from the lab, from small items such as pens and pipettes, to larger and more expensive equipment such as centrifuges and computers. Many interviewees emphasized the importance of having systems in place, such as inventory lists, sign-out sheets and shared equipment guidelines, so that it’s much harder for things to vanish without a trace.
Takahashi highlights the importance of centralizing organization by having official, or unofficial, lab managers and having documentation to keep track of equipment. “A lab is a small business and it should be run like a small business,” she says, noting that she has fallen into a “pseudo lab-manager” position in every lab she’s been in. “Having organizational management implemented right off the bat is crucial to making sure that everything runs smoothly.”