A Change in Plans

Back in February, I wrote about our plan to move the LTEE from here at MSU to Jeff Barrick’s lab at UT-Austin later this year. 

Well, Jeff told me he’s had a change of heart. When he explained to his lab team that the lines required daily transfers that included weekends and holidays, everyone went totally berserk and threatened to resign then and there. And if that happened, Jeff would have to do all the transfers himself, 365 days a year. 

Jeff is a hard worker … or at least he used to be. But he’s a professor now. Like me, I’ll bet he doesn’t even know where the pipette tips and clean flasks are stored in his lab, much less how to make the culture medium from all those jars of chemicals with strange names. 

With that painful possibility in mind, Jeff called me up, and he said we’d have to keep the LTEE going here. I was kind of annoyed because I was in the middle of doing Wordle, and for some reason it wouldn’t accept “ecoli” as a guess. But despite all that, I said ok to Jeff.

So yesterday, when I told the people in my lab that we’d have to keep doing the transfers until I found another sucker lab to take over, everyone here went totally berserk and threatened to resign on the spot. To calm everyone down, I had to promise that today we’d stop the LTEE, empty out the freezers, and autoclave all of the samples.

But that’s no big deal, because we’ve already learned more than any other secular lab in the world about why evolution never does anything interesting. After all, the little buggers are still just bacteria, despite a possible glimpse of something slightly more interesting around this time last year.