Available for pre-order

Making the Modern Laboratory

Did you know that the modern micropipette was invented by a German postdoc so frustrated with mouth pipetting that he ditched his lab for two days until he could return with a prototype? Or that an 18th-century scientist sewed tiny taffeta pants for male frogs to determine whether or not semen was essential for fertilization? Or that an Italian physician spent 30 years weighing himself in a specially designed chair before and after eating, sleeping, and excreting to figure out exactly what accounted for the discrepancies he noticed?

These stories and more, from how a machine using salvaged meat-slicing blades chopped up 6,000 glowing jellyfish per day and led to the discovery of GFP to how grabbing the wrong bottle while studying rooster sperm led to modern cryopreservation, appear in our third book, Making the Modern Laboratory, now available for pre-order. Over 504 pages, 36 authors explain the origins of our most dependable and insightful research tools, making it a fine gift for both the science-curious and the working scientist.

Pre-order

Table of contents

01 Foreword — The Editors
02 Pipettes — Merrick Pierson Smela
03 Scientific Glassware — Spencer Wright
04 Eppendorf Tubes — Evan DeTurk
05 Petri Dish — Corrado Nai
06 Agar — Corrado Nai
07 Parafilm — Niko McCarty and Merrick Pierson Smela
08 Buffers — Luke Mitchelson
09 Vortex Mixer — Ella Watkins-Dulaney
10 Lab Notebooks — Ulkar Aghayeva
11 Growth Media — Mahlaqua Noor
12 Multiwell Plates — Sachin Rawat
13 Lab Coats — Donna Vatnick
14 Centrifuge — Roberta McLain
15 Incubators — Andreas Metousis
16 Deionized Water — Or Doni
17 Autoclave — Andreas Metousis
18 Plasmids — Ella Watkins-Dulaney
19 Electroporator — Saad Bhamla
20 Electrophoresis — Evan DeTurk
21 DNA Dyes — Alfred C. Chin
22 Cell Staining — Sotirios Karathanasis
23 Restriction Enzymes — Karol Buda
24 PCR & Taq Polymerase — Kevin Blake
25 DNA Sequencing — Evan DeTurk
26 Green Fluorescent Protein — Smrithi Sunil
27 Cryopreservation — Gerrit van Rensburg
28 Scales & Balances — Niko McCarty
29 Light Microscope — Roberta McLain
30 Electron Microscope — Smrithi Sunil
31 OD Meter — Amelie Andreas
32 Spectrophotometers & Plate Readers — Ella Watkins-Dulaney
33 NanoDrop Spectrophotometer — Matthew Bryce Taylor
34 pH Meter — Kevin Blake
35 Flow Cytometer — Andrew J. Konecny
36 Mass Spectrometry — Andreas Metousis
37 Liquid Chromatography — Nicolas Tilmans
38 Mouse — Alex Telford
39 E. coli — Roberta McLain
40 Yeast — Matthew Bryce Taylor
41 HeLa Cells — Roberta McLain
42 CHO Cells — Niko McCarty
43 Organoids — Xander Balwit
44 Zebrafish — Owen Meadows
45 Nematode — Logan E. Savidge
46 Arabidopsis — Xander Balwit
47 Frog — Matt Lubin
48 Fruit Fly — Lucas Mergan
49 Automated Liquid Handling — Alicia J. Kaestli and David Lang
50 Acoustic Liquid Handling — Alex Federation
51 Microfluidics — Patrick Almhjell
52 Protein Structure Prediction — Nehal Udyavar
53 Bioinformatics Software — Ella Watkins-Dulaney
54 On the Future Laboratory — The Editors

Loading 3D preview…