Pipette Your Way To Romance!
A pipette is a glass tube, like a giant eyedropper, for accurately dispensing small amounts of liquid, controlled by a rubber bulb or even a finger over the end. (Pasteur, during development of the rabies vaccine, would pipette saliva from the jaws of rabid dogs by mouth suction, while his assistants held the dog down and pried its jaws open. Talk about bravery in the name of science!) An Eppendorf pipette is a more sophisticated tool for dispensing tiny amounts, fractions of a drop, at the push of a button. However, modern biological research often demands dispensing hundreds, even thousands, of samples, which really can wear your thumb out. (I’ve done this, although not enough to wear my thumb out.)
Needless to say, this dreary repetitive task was ripe for automation, and Eppendorf stepped up and delivered.
Now, many biologists are women, and Eppendorf obviously is aware of this, as shown in their advertising video, which features the slow-motion beach romances available to researchers who are freed from the women’s work of pipetting.
I swear on Pasteur’s grave this is a representative frame from the ad. They are singing about “cellular cultures”.
I could only watch the thing for about 30 seconds before collapsing in shrieking laughter, so I never did get to see the epMotion in action.
I remember, long ago, a Mad Magazine piece on “If the U.S. Government Boys Bought Like Housewives”. Many examples featured big ticket science items promising to do things like “reduce cyclotron clog”, written and illustrated like washing machine ads. I don’t think they knew how close to the truth they were.
But this…this is far, far beyond anything Mad ever dreamed of.
Tags: epMotion, Eppendorf, pharyngula