Typical Day
Moe l'Ecular (it's a French name) wakes up at 8:30AM and, without fixing his bedhead, stumbles into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Waiting for it to brew, he grabs a slice of pizza out of the refrigerator. Hey, at least it has veggie toppings. So, really, he thinks, it has everything you need for breakfast: protein in the cheese, carbs in the crust, and all those veggies.
"Breakfast of champions," he mutters to himself. The red light on the coffeemaker turns off. It's ready. He pours himself a cup and gathers his papers from the bedside table where he left them last night. Then he changes into jeans and a casual-looking button-up, and off he goes.
He's in the lab by 10:00AM. Moe, who double-majored in microbiology and molecular genetics at the University of Cauliflower before getting his Ph.D. in genetics from Kale University, is now an assistant professor at the University of Cauliflower. But he sometimes forgets he has teaching responsibilities because he's so busy with the regenerative and stem cell research laboratory he runs there.
"Hey, Gene, how's it going?" Gene is Moe's post-doc. Because funding is so scarce, Moe can really only afford to hire one post-doc to help out with the research. As for the boring details of running a lab, well, Moe gets naïve undergrads to work as unpaid "research assistants," who don't realize that they'll mostly be making copies and filing them.
Gene nods politely and continues working. He's not exactly talkative.
Moe goes to his cluttered desk in the corner of the lab, lifting the huge pile of papers and books off his chair. He has three grants due this month and he hasn't started working on them yet. Moe has always been a procrastinator. It's a bad habit he thought he would have kicked by now, but clearly he hasn't.
He spends the next two hours writing a research grant, even though he doesn't have high hopes—there are simply too many researchers interested in stem cells and genetic diseases, and way too little funding to go around.
Around 12:30PM, just at the moment Moe is getting sick of writing, he realizes he has a meeting with another researcher in genetic diseases. Packing up his stuff, he says goodbye to Gene.
Gene nods politely, still in exactly the same spot in the lab.
Moe wonders if he's moved in the last three hours. But no matter. Moe has a meeting. A wonderful, glorious meeting with a fellow researcher—which, as everyone in scientific research knows, is code for a "coffee date with your friend."
An hour and a half later, Gene is back from Espress Yourself, the university coffeehouse closest to his lab, and ready to get back to work. He reads a journal article published by a friend of his in the field. It's pretty good stuff, if you're into dense academic treatises.
Suddenly, he notices the time.
"3:00PM—you've gotta be kidding me," he says. "Not again."
He fumbles for a stack of papers above his desk, knocking over another stack in the process. Not sure if they're mixed up, he grabs them both and stuffs them into his briefcase. He shuts down the laptop, stuffs that in the briefcase too, then makes a run for it. Twenty minutes later, he's standing at the front of the lecture hall.
"I'm sorry I'm five minutes late," he begins. "I'll go fast, but I trust no one has any objections to staying a couple minutes at the end of class."
He hears groans in the class. Oh, who cares. They're undergrads. He's a researcher. If they actually care about the material, they can come to his office hours. No one ever does anyway.
Twenty minutes after class has officially ended, Moe's finally done answering the last "clarifying question" from a student. He checks his watch: 5:30PM. Perfect. That gives him plenty of time to do some lab work.
Moe grabs a Snickers bar from the vending machine on his way back to the lab. "Gotta power through,"he thinks as he tears into the nougat-y caramel piece of chemically processed deliciousness. Brain food.
At 6:00PM, Moe dismisses his interns. It's not fair to keep them late, and besides, he likes being in the lab when it's quiet.
At 8:00PM, Gene offers another silent nod, packs up his things, and goes home. "Now we're talking," Moe thinks. Finally, he's alone with his cell cultures. He puts on some very quiet jazz music and continues to examine cell cultures and review results.
At 12:00AM, his cell phone alarm goes off. He began setting his alarm for midnight three years ago, when, as a doctoral student, he would get so absorbed in his work that he'd forget to go home. It'd be 2:00AM, 3:00AM, sometimes even 4:00AM, before he realized he was still at the lab. And once it got to be 4:00AM, well, there wasn't any point in going home.
Tonight, though, Moe packs up his stuff like a responsible adult. He gets back to what he always has to remind himself is his real home by 12:30AM. After eating another four slices of pizza—he forgot to have dinner again—he's asleep by a reasonable 2:00AM.