Research laboratory

“ Finally the problems were unscrambled and the laboratory began to run smoothly again. The research projects were reestablished and the work started out anew. Frayed tempers were soothed and the scientists finally got around to trusting each others' results again. The Laboratorians were now carefully but tactfully watched by the junior chemists who, in turn, were spending more time in the laboratories and less in their offices. ”

“ The laboratory has been enlarged by the old workshop; some of the space has been filled up with seats as a theatre for those who attend the experiments of research; an arched opening is being made in the wall in front of the [Pg 259] table of the laboratory. This part of the establishment is now found to answer very completely the end of enabling the Professor of Chemistry and his assistants to prepare materials for the chemical lectures, and to carry on original inquiries upon new objects of science. ”

“ In 1875 the writer organized a "mechanical laboratory," with the purpose of attaining several very important objects: the prosecution of scientific research in the various departments of engineering work; the creation of an organization that should give students an opportunity to learn the methods of research most usefully employed in such investigations; the assistance of members of the profession, and business organizations in the attempt to solve such questions, involving scientific research, as are continually arising in the course of business ”

“ If we had in America a laboratory exclusively devoted to research, suitably manned and equipped, our country might carry off the glory of achieving this grand work. In default of such a laboratory, however, the labor might be accomplished through the cooperation of many individual workers, each one doing his small part, not aimlessly, but in unison with the others. One chemist might undertake to furnish certain of the elements in a perfectly pure condition ”

“ Those of us directly concerned in the administration of the biological laboratory here, are charged with the fulfillment of two duties: we have to make provision for the advancement of knowledge, and for its diffusion: we are to find accommodation and assistance for both investigators and students; while we must not suffer those engaged in research to be crowded out by beginners, neither must the beginners be overlooked in providing for those to whom they are one day to succeed. ”

“ In one laboratory special attention might be paid each year to a single class of not over-complicated substances; and the advanced students could for that class fill up some of the gaps in our knowledge. But this work, although of immense value to science, is not of the very highest order. The most important labors can scarcely be undertaken save in laboratories specially and liberally endowed for purely scientific research.
The objections which are frequently urged against the endowment of research arise from a misconception of what is really intended. ”

“ They are not research institutes at bottom, but originally a means to fix and illuminate through the senses facts otherwise meaningless. For the average student the laboratory is a review as well as a fixative of data which he is to carry with him and upon which he is to build his professional experience. ”

“ Record All Scientific Activities in Your Lab Notebook There are scientists who believe that lab notebook records should be limited to wet or dry lab experimental entries. However, the intellectual activity of a theoretical scientist is not limited to experiments to test hypotheses. Thinking about the possible directions of your research and theorizing about how a system works is often how scientific breakthroughs are made. ”

“ Leading research institutions, research and development divisions in companies, and universities have comprehensive lab notebook policies, which research laboratories should implement. In the absence of an institutional policy, your research group should have a policy to explain to all team members the process for daily record-keeping and maintaining laboratory records. ”

“ The largest laboratory on this floor is for general elementary work upon individual life processes. Smaller laboratory and research rooms for special and advanced students are numerous throughout the building. Everywhere the work tables are set near windows, and each is supplied independently with gas and water. The chemical laboratory, also on the upper floor, is admirably arranged. On the third floor the study of cryptogamic botany is pursued. ”

“ It might be feasible also to admit private investigators and post-graduate students to the advantages for research afforded by the laboratory, with the understanding that, in return for favors received, they should contribute a certain amount of labor toward the main purposes of the institution. Such volunteers, if I may call them so, could give, say, one-third of their time to this general work, and have the remaining two-thirds for their own investigations. Thus the laboratory might often aid young men of promise and ability, and derive real benefit from them in return. ”

“ The direction of the laboratory work of the large number of students (thirty by promotion) was alone a strain on a young man, assisted as he was only by one laboratory helper. The first years were, therefore, hard years of assiduous work, of benefit chiefly to the students trained and developed by the young laboratory director.
He himself profited by this enforced interruption of his experimental research by trying to complete his scientific studies and, in particular, his knowledge of mathematics. ”

“ The starting of the National Physical Laboratory for the purpose of testing and standardizing and for research on physical constants promises to be of great value. The simple standardizing of screws and nuts will be a great assistance to manufacturers. ”

“ They've rigged up a regular laboratory—taken over one of the rec halls—and they dabble in experiments of one kind or another. Useless, of course, with the limited equipment they have, but it seems to keep some of them happy. ”

“ To this end, the laboratory experimental work follows as closely as possible after the classroom exercises so that the essential unity of the two may be impressed upon the student’s mind. An effort is made to develop the student’s capacity for sustained careful observation and deduction, and to initiate good practice in the matter of recording and reporting upon scientific and engineering data. Great stress is placed upon the precision of the results obtained in the laboratory. ”

“ I found it impossible to secure the necessary privacy here, and, before opening my experiments, I selected a site for a new laboratory in an unfrequented spot among the mountains this side of Lake Tahoe. You will be the first man, with the exception of my two devoted assistants, to see my apparatus, and you shall share the sensation of the critical experiment. ”

“ There is, indeed, little to see that would greatly interest the casual inspector, for in its outward aspects one laboratory is much like another, a seeming hodgepodge of water-tanks, glass jars of specimens, and tables for microscopes. ”

“ Still I value highly this opportunity which has been given me of making known to this audience the aims and purpose of the National Laboratory.
The idea of a physical laboratory in which problems bearing at once on science and industry might be solved is comparatively new. ”

“ In such a statement there is not, however, intended the faintest suggestion that work in the physical laboratory is anything but useful and necessary, but rather to emphasize how widely the function of the physical laboratory differs from that of the chemical and biological laboratories. Physics is an exact science (though just what that means can be learned only in a physical laboratory) while biology is not so at all and chemistry is but to a limited degree. ”

“ The physics teacher, enthusiastic over his students and his work, builds machines and testing devices, which the boys and girls use in solving the problems which they bring from their homes. No less close to the life of the place is the chemical laboratory, which offers opportunity for the analysis of soil, the chemistry of fertilizers, experiments in testing food and milk, and a number of other matters pertaining to agriculture and domestic life. ”

“ The fundamental object in founding State laboratories should be to keep a staff of the most competent men wholly engaged in original research in pure science, and a secondary object might be to train assistants to become investigators. ”

“ A station for experimental biology must have not only the proper equipment for breeding and rearing organisms under natural conditions, but also for artificially changing and controlling the external factors of the environment. The physico-chemical laboratory (Fig. 10) provides the substances used as variable external factors and also to determine the physico-chemical properties of the biologically important colloids. ”

“ This is through real contact with animals, plants, rocks, chemical compounds and physical instruments, and a well-conducted scientific laboratory has the same value as out-of-doors experience, with the great addition that it can be made systematic and therefore effective for power. ”

“ The organization of technological laboratories, like the organization of construction shops to which they are auxiliary, is based on the breaking up of a problem which is before the laboratory for its solution. The chemists, physicists, machinists and draftsmen are isolated as they work out their assigned tasks without specific knowledge of what the general problem is and how it is being attacked. ”

“ It is this mutual dependence of biological studies which appears to me the justification of grouping together, as we do here, the study of such a number of vast subjects in a single laboratory. By that means each investigator will receive knowledge and assistance from the other; under such a system the desirable intercommunication of ideas is rendered most easy; and we are most likely to escape that narrow specialism which every laboratory in the long-run has a tendency to get into. ”

“ And just in proportion as the experiments are logically planned and carefully executed will the results be valuable, even though they be but negative. Just in proportion as the worker, by inclusion and exclusion, attains authentic results—results that will bear the test of repetition—does his reputation as a dependable working biologist become established.
The subjects attacked in the marine laboratory first and last are practically coextensive with the range of general biology, bacteriology excepted. ”

“ It has been my wish to state in general terms the aims of the laboratory, to make the advance of physical science more readily available for the needs of the nation and then to illustrate the way in which it is intended to attain those aims: I trust I may have shown that the National Physical Laboratory is an institution which may deservedly claim the cordial support of all who are interested in real progress. ”

“ Everywhere special buildings, well equipped with the latest and best apparatus, are springing up, where the students of chemistry, physics, biology (in its numerous sub-departments—bacteriology among them) and electricity have every facility for study and research. The introduction of laboratories for psychology is specially noteworthy. Pathological laboratories have become essential in schools of medicine. ”

“ The laboratory building is a fireproof structure of light gray brick and limestone, commanding a beautiful view of the East River and the country beyond. There are laboratories of pathology, bacteriology, chemistry, physiology, pharmacology, experimental medicine and experimental surgery, each of which is under the charge of a member or associate of the institute with a staff of assistants. ”

“ According to the directors, about seventy-five investigators have made use of the laboratory since its foundation and something like six hundred and fifty students of various grades have received instruction. Regular class instruction is given each summer by university professors from the departments of zoology, botany and physiology. Although the buildings are not formally open during the rest of the year, investigators are usually able by special arrangement to get the use of the laboratories at almost any time. ”

“ An experiment demands particularly favorable conditions in order that results may be reached both freely and securely. It has to work unhampered, with all the needed resources at command. Laboratories lie back of all the great business enterprises of today, back of every great factory, every railway and steamship system. Yet the laboratory is not a business enterprise; it does not aim to secure for itself the conditions of business life, nor does the commercial undertaking repeat the laboratory. ”

“ Hence, it comes about that the editor sends men to work with the microscope, in the chemical laboratory, in the pharmaceutical laboratory, in the physiological laboratory, in the anatomical room, in the hospital, in the dispensary, in the tomes of medical literature of every language and of every age. In short, he has these men at work in every field congenial to them, and such that they can reach it. ”

“ That which the pupil gets which is of most worth in his course in a physical laboratory is not a familiarity with the principles of the science, but a training in the methods of investigation in use among physicists, including a knowledge of the use and abuse of experiment and the necessary limits of our knowledge derived therefrom. The study which he ought to make of errors, instrumental and accidental, will be of great value in various fields. It is better for the laboratory to contain a few instruments of precision than a large number of inferior performance and accuracy. ”