Five Common Frustrations in the Lab

You work in a lab. Everyday. Maybe you’re in a medical lab, testing specimens on a daily basis. Or a modern research lab, perhaps even a teaching lab. Aside from frustrations such as experiments that fail, results that cannot be reproduced or unexplainable data, there are other frustrations that can occur when you find yourself in the position of not just working in, but managing a lab.

• Managing Inventory in General. Regardless of the scientific discipline of your lab, labs in general often have a difficult time organizing inventory and keeping it current. How does your lab keep track of new orders in relation to existing inventory? An Excel spreadsheet? Or maybe an inter-lab software program?
• Communal Buffers and Solutions. Often, to save money, labs will make their own stock of agar plates, cell culture media and other consumables. Lack of communication in the lab can create shortages in stock, lack of clear guidelines about who is responsible for making more, as well as problems with expiration dates and quality control testing of stock to ensure viability.
• Depleted Supplies and Special Orders. It is frustrating to not have command over how many materials your lab has in stock and when it is time to reorder. Sometimes, the first a manager hears of a need for a particular reagent is when it was needed yesterday! Again, lab communication is an integral part of maintaining a constant supply of reagents and specimens, particularly if a sample was obtained through collaboration or a special order.
• Life Cycles and Expiration Dates. An especially big concern for life science labs, where almost all daily reagents, buffers and enzymes must be up to date in order to produce optimal results. Ideally, it would be great to be able to pair up expiration dates with general inventory management, so that locating a specimen or reagent would also tell you that it is current. Knowing that an expiration date is imminent for a necessary component, you could easily reorder it in time. Tracking life cycles of lab chemicals and other reagents also includes waste and disposal, which can be cumbersome as well as dangerous if they are allowed to become expired and unused.
• Non-Adherence to Lab Databases. Logically, all of the frustrations described above can be done away with by implementing a lab wide management system. However, it can be difficult to enforce a uniform participation, because, after all, we are just humans. A large number of those humans who happen to be researchers feel that their labs are not being efficiently managed. If your lab runs on precious grant money, no one wants to see it frittered away due to an inefficient system or have to deal with angry scientists, frustrated grad students or postdocs who cannot get experiments done or papers published in a timely manner.