Celebrating the 100th Cartoon with a Few Words from the Promega Cartoonist

Heading into 2020, we realized that our Cartoon Lab was reaching a milestone: the 100th cartoon! We asked the “official” Promega Cartoonist Ed Himelblau to list his Top Five Cartoons and what inspired them. See what he has chosen in his own words:

This was the first of my cartoons that Promega published and it’s still one of my favorites. The file on my computer is dated February, 1999. I have been an undergraduate in a lab. I’ve mentored undergraduates in lab. Today I have lots of undergraduates working in my plant genetics lab at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. For the record, I enjoy having undergraduates in the lab and I never make them dress like robots. In this cartoon, I particularly like the centrifuge and stir plate on the right. I’ve always tried to put something in each cartoon (a tube rack, an enzyme shipping box, a desiccator) that make molecular biologists say, “I know that!”

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Coffee and Science–A Cartoon Perspective

Although never actually on the lab bench,  coffee makers have had a prominent place in every laboratory I have worked in. It is because of my laboratory coffee experiences that I am able to drink coffee at any temperature and at any time of the day. The credit for my preference for really strong coffee (with cream, I confess)  goes to two Russian labmates who insisted on making the coffee every morning and went through two bags of beans a week (we had a very wide awake lab).

Cartoon depicting a coffee machine next to a next-generation sequencer.

In all the labs, keeping track of whose turn it was to buy the coffee supplies was just as important as keeping track of whose turn it was to defrost the freezers. I am sorry to say we never thought of a log book because that might have saved me some frantic early morning trips to the store.

Does your lab have coffee rules or traditions? I’d love to hear what they are.

Friday Cartoon Fun: Take My Samples, Please!

Instruments can make our lives easier in the lab. Place your samples inside an instrument and let it do all the work—isolating nucleic acids or reading and analyzing a multiwell plate—while you walk away to read a new research paper or prepare for the next step in your experiment. However, with the array of machines now available to scientists worldwide, some confusion may result in the laboratory. Has this ever happened to you?

eh_March2016
Copyright Ed Himelblau

Friday Cartoon Fun: Is It Drawn or Is It Real?

I always enjoy Ed Himelblau’s cartoons, but one that makes me chuckle every time I see it is the following:

Copyright Ed Himelblau.

I am sure our readers that enjoy coffee can empathize.

Recently, our Swiss branch had fun with a number of the cartoons from our Cartoon Lab archive and recreated the cartoon in real life:
Real-life recreation of Ed Himelblau's cartoon.
What do you think?

Chuckle, It Is Friday

It is Friday. Maybe you have had a great week, a bad week, or maybe it was just average. No matter what kind of a week you have had, on Friday everyone should have something to chuckle about to end the week. Below are a few cartoons from our Cartoon Lab. I hope that you find one that tickles your funny bone.

Terminology is Important

Ed Himelblau: Giant Squid Axon

 Bigger is Not Always Better

Ed Himelblau: Macropipette

Timing Matters

Ed Himelblau: Mitosis Started