Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
through a service door—there are no identifying signs on the
outside of the building and no foyer, just a series of corridors
and doors marked with biosafety level warning signs, “BL1,”
“BL2,” or “BL2
.” The fl oors are rubber tiled, and white-
coated lab workers push around large carts containing empty
beakers or unidentifi able shrink-wrapped supplies. First we
encounter a carefully ordered lab space where supplies are ar-
ranged neatly on racks against the wall, the space reserved for
various machines is marked out with colored tape on the fl oor,
and workers move about the room in a prescribed and repeti-
tive pattern. Observing more closely, we see that the objects of
attention are small rectangular plastic “plates.” One worker ex-
tracts them from a machine and places them in a neat stack on a
nearby bench; another worker retrieves them and uses a pipette
to add a reagent to each, placing the completed plates in another
stack; after some time, a third worker attends to this stack and
places the plates on a robotic machine; the plates emerge from
the robot in yet another stack and are whisked away by another
worker into another room. We follow into a large space fi lled
with dozens of identical machines about the size of a refrigera-
tor. It is almost devoid of people, but a few workers periodically
check the computer monitors attached to the machines, mak-
ing notes on clipboards they carry with them. At certain times,
when a machine has fi nished its “run,” workers extract the plas-
tic plates from the machine and carry them away; soon another
worker will emerge to replenish the machine with new plates.
+
Scene 4—Board room
: In this scene, we travel to Washington,
DC, to the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda,
Maryland. We proceed into a drab concrete building and as-
cend to the eleventh fl oor. Here, in a cramped conference room,
about twenty people are gathered, all dressed in business suits.
They include the director and grants offi cers from the NIH,
heads of biology institutes, and senior academic biologists. One
of the academic scientists begins the meeting with a PowerPoint
presentation giving details of his research on the biology of the
sea slug. This presentation is followed by another on the recent
discoveries concerning human intestinal bacteria. The aim of the
meeting is to decide which plant or animal genomes to sequence
next and to allocate the money to get it done. The academic
biologists are here to advocate for their particular organisms
