Another day of learning

As you all probably know, I'm happiest on a project when I'm learning something new.  Today I spent time learning about a new thing:  Laboratory Services.  This is where they send the blood and samples, and they run the tests and grow the cultures and press the slides and look through the microscopes.  But here's what I didn't know:

It is a magic land of robots.

Practically every test involves spinning something, or raising or lowering the temperature, or adding a precise amount of some agent, and then spinning it again, and then adding another re-agent.  Over and over.  And they have built very interesting machines that do all of this for us.  The human measures the sample into a tube and places it into a machine.  The machine moves the tube around, spins it, then a needle attached to the end of a robot arm squirts something in there, and then the tube moves some more...  And the human watches a screen and notes the numbers that are shown.

I don't know how much fun the actual people are having, but I bet would be LESS fun to be doing all of the repetitive tasks that the machines are doing.  And I was hypnotized watching these machines.  I was on a simple introductory tour and kept finding myself lagging behind the group because I had become transfixed by yet another robot.  I was imagining manic xylophone music, too.

On the tour was a visit to the blood bank:  They had a retina scanner for entry (I did try, and the prim british voice said "pull back, come forward, forward, back a little, back a little, ACCESS DENIED").  They had "plasma shakers" - things that looked like glass doored refrigerators, but that had racks and racks of milky plasma in bags, and the racks moved back and forth constantly, shaking the plasma so it wouldn't gel or something.  The red blood, that just sat in fridges.  But plasma is ALWAYS ON THE MOVE.

I put on a disposable lab coat and went through the virology lab:  I saw a clean room where a man was inspecting samples that had been deep frozen and had a thick layer of frost over the labels.  I was hopeful that no alien spores were in there... though to be fair, if they were spores, that would be the mycobiology lab, not virology.  I passed several robots that were not moving and dark, with sleek glass enclosures and giant monitors next to them indicating that their DECONTAMINATION CYCLE had 3 hours remaining of the 8 required.  8 hours to clean a robot at high heat.

I had to take a call and missed the genetic testing, stem cell, and pathology lab walkthroughs, but I'll have another chance next week.

The system I'll be helping them pick is not robotic, nor does it shake anything.  It's the computer system that sits behind it all, tracking the orders for who gets what test, keeps track of who belongs to what sample, and what their results are, and then forwards that info along to their medical record.  The organization behind the robots.

And so it was a fun day.