Don't cell me short

I had always been receiving the proverbial short end of the stick during my Biology practicals, being stuck with a lazy half-wit of half-wits (as half-witted as C—students can get – a surprisingly low threshold) for a lab partner (a concept quite foreign to those raised on the fodder of the self-seeking nature of practical exams) causing me to have to take awfully abbreviated lunch breaks and to do all the pipetting myself until I ran out of tunes to hum whilst injecting solutions into gravestone rows upon rows of tubes. My lab partner, on the other hand, would merrily tinker on his hand phone sending sweet nothings to some person that I could not see but I could be sure was not at this moment heaping bacteria onto an agar plate where they could continue their mindless infestation of every feasible avenue of life, like a cheese sandwich or the lining of my stomach. (Naturally the continued emphasis on aseptic precautions drove me to a brief period of paranoia visualing slimy bacteria oozing on door knobs, toilet seats and the like, similar to some sort of psychiatric illness)

Perplexed as I was as to how one could be surrounded by so much industry but not feel the slightest germ of an urge of an iota of an itch to think about starting to do some work, I always put it down as some odd sort of Western thought (and as some people say, a tradition) and went about my own business. Querulous as this is, it was only one of the odd things that I encountered for almost two terms of Biology practicals, which no doubt were designed for us to marvel at the complexities of life and expect us to believe that all that somehow arose through chance (but of course I remain tricked).

Funny lecturers with curious accents, lab technicians who stare longingly at shaking mixers (though I admit I must have had my fair share of time wasted following its hypnotic movements) aside, we'd all been endowed with the authority and endorsement to decide the fate of billions of individuals. Whether they would perish under the swift and deadly hand of ampicillin or the stealthy scythe of chloramphenicol for bacteria, or what charming offspring they would bear following the union with a lovely partner for fungi. Very much like the game "The Sims", we had the power to make or break the futures of all these organisms, though rather unpleasant and rather invisible, still counted as "living things" (now that I think about it, my leaving the dishes on the floor makes me feel rather like those poor neglected Sims of the neighbourhood who soon die amongst their piles of trash and dead azaleas).

Invested with such sway over a dominion of individuals in the realms of test tubes and Petri dishes, the sense of control that one (feels one) has is somewhat akin to that if one had the ability to call up an army of millions at the wipe of a nose, which of course drew me somewhat to soldier on with the often tedious and repetitive motions of the practicals, beginning with squishing amoebas under cover slips and gradually sliding down the slippery slope to wiping out an entire civilisation of E. Coli with a flick of the wrist. You never think of pendulum bobs or sodium hydroxide solutions in the same way.

This is yet another meaningless chant about some esoteric scientific subject, where the fact I can go on for so long is already something that warrants an expensive and ultimately fruitless scientific study. Much like there is no gain in sending a bunch of yeasts to their deaths, there is something oddly satisfying about this.