Cleanliness and Workspaces

For a blog post slightly more personal due to the nature of cell culturing, cleanliness is something constantly on my mind while working.

Stem cell research is surprisingly fragile. The cells harvested must be kept in extremely clean environments or risk being contaminated in which case the cells become useless with foreign matter occupying the same place. Keeping your workplace clean is of utmost importance.

The main fear is that contamination can make all your efforts go to waste. One mistake, and a whole batch of cells can go to waste which can mean days of effort or even weeks. There isn't any overcompensating, one day of extreme cleanliness can't fend off a sloppy moment. The worst part of it all is how invisible contamination is.

Keeping the workplace clean involves a heavy use of 70% ethanol (diluted with distilled water) and a hood cleaned by UV light when off, wiped down before and after experimenting, and protected by a blower to keep foreign particles away. However, that alone isn't good enough. Contamination is all around us, there is no such thing as a perfectly sterile environment, so care has to be applied in each step. Opening the cell line to the world is asking for foreign matter to take over. The hardest part is not being able to know where you messed up. Every time you bring something into the hood, you run the risk of contaminating your work. The most important part is to keep it all isolated; if you mess up once, make sure your mistake doesn't spill over. There have been instances where something contaminated spills over to everything such as the media (fluid food for the cells) becoming tainted.

However despite all these difficulties, risks and uncertainty not only in cleanliness but many other aspects, cell culturing works. The proof is in the pudding, despite all the possible risks, the science moves along with all these protective measures in place. While waiting for cells in the incubator, the thought amazed me in terms of how science progressed. Something as thorough as cell culturing was impossible back years ago and our progression in science is simply amazing. Though cleanliness might not yield as many deep reflections into science as other topics do for me, I'd like to acknowledge how far science has come despite how easy it is to take everything for granted.