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Science. It's funny.

WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE

The Sciences are very jargon oriented and this can cause problems when
over-excited scientists carry on conversations in the real world... you
know, the one without the pipettes and shakers and chemical bottles. The
following are three true stories.

Politically Corrects

Two young scientists, a student and a post-doc, had left the lab after
another succesfull day. As they rode the local transit on their way home,
they began a rather animated discussion about the day's results and more
specifically about the success that one had with her gel retardation or
mobility shift assays. On and on they went about the "retards" doing this
and the "retards" doing that when a woman across the aisle from them
finally turned in disgust and said: "The word is mentally handicapped and
it's not very nice to call them retards." The two scientist were shocked
by this sudden outburst and the woman got off of the train before the two
could correct her on the subject to which they were referring.

The Cutting Edge

In a protein lab, it is common for people to set up their proteins as a
fusion with other domains which are easily purified through their affinity
to ligands attached to resin beads. One of the most common of these
domains is the glutathione S-transferase protein or GST. Typically, there
is a small linker region between the protein of interest and the fusion
parner and this amino acid sequence contains recognition sequences for
proteases. After months in the lab, having limited success with her
proteolysis reactions, a young female grad student finally had her patience
and perseverence pay off when she destained yet another gel and saw that
her protein had indeed been cut by the protease. In her joy, the young
woman ran out into the hallway, proclaiming proudly to all:
"I've got cleavage. I've got cleavage. Come over here. Look at my
cleavage."

A Graphic Plot

In another lab, on another day, yet another young, female graduate student
was working on a poster for presentation at an upcoming meeting. She had
been using fluorescence to study the binding of a protein to its ligand and
had spent quite a bit of time getting just the right distribution of data
points for her graph. After several days in front of the fluorimeter and
hours in front of the computer, plotting her data, she sat back in
satisfaction at her accomplishments.
Seeing one of the guys from her lab passing in the hallway, she called out
to him in a loud voice, "Hey come look at my figure. Are these outstanding
curves or what?" They were nice curves and she had a really nice figure.

(From Aliquotes Volume V Number xiii August/97 (rogerb#NoSpam.microsoft.com)