Travel three floors up. Walk through the kitchen space and turn the corner. Signs like “authorized personnel only” and “WARNING” become more frequent. Swipe through the first door that ordinary plebeians can’t access. Turn the corner and open another door. To the left are desks where PhD students sweat and labor. Turn the corner again and there they are: the biomedical engineering labs. After crossing through a small corridor where liquid nitrogen screams at its users, the rat has arrived in its professor’s lab. Take a moment to sniff around. The air simply oozes mysterious chemicals and practically crackles with scientific potential. Bright white lights illuminate row after row of lab desks. Beakers, test tubes and pipets are the crackers and cheese of a lab rat.
The rat takes several days to learn its way around the lab. It follows the guidance of those more knowledgeable and experienced. Always asking questions, wanting to explore more, the rat is faced with a puzzle to which it daily fills in the pieces. Procedures go from an archaic language to plain English. Soon, the rat is entrusted with a key. Barriers are taken away. Responsibility is given. The rat is learning fast. Tedious yet necessary tasks are doled out. New equipment and experiments make each day an adventure.
The lab is a place where the rat, although the youngest and least experienced, is made to feel welcome and at home. Bonds are formed. Cheese is shared. Other, older and wiser rats guide the young one when it loses its way. During the long periods of microthread hydration and the painfully slow process of calibrating the pH meter, time barely limps along. But when the threads are ready to be stretched or have to be placed in gels, time races.
At the end of a long day, the rat is tired and hungry. Hungry for food, yes, but also for the next tidbit of knowledge, the next skill and the next piece of the puzzle. So it exits the lab, turns the corner, walks past the desks, opens two sets of doors and walks past the kitchen space. Down the elevator it goes and out the door into the fresh air. The rat is separated from the lab, but it will return again. Sometimes the cheese is just too good to ignore.
Note: No rats were harmed in the writing of this piece.
