Anyone who has pursued a biomedical graduate degree can attest to how ad hoc the "training" can be. It's not as if someone leads the newcomer down a list of twenty important laboratory techniques that every biochemist should know. More often, one's technical repertoire is determined by whatever experiments need doing in the next couple of months. Many people will have experienced a laboratory setting as part of an undergraduate course, but the degree of difficulty is much higher when the reagents are unmade and the experimental design is up to the student.

Enter At the Bench: A Laboratory Navigator, a new guidebook by Kathy Barker, a former assistant professor in the laboratory of the cellular physiology and immunology department at Rockefeller University. As the author explains in her preface:

The primary audience for this manual is the initiate to the lab bench, one who has had the intellectual but not the practical background to do experiments. This includes physicians, research nurses, technicians, and graduate students. The newcomer has probably gained lab experience in college courses or even in rotations, but has not had responsibility for the setup and interpretation of his or her own experiments.

What At the Bench offers this hypothetical initiate is a remarkably thorough introduction to the practical aspects of working in a modern biomedical research lab. Like most reference books it is not meant to be read cover to cover. In particular, the first section ("Getting Oriented") may not make terribly interesting reading for anyone but the beginner. This section summarizes the basics: organizing one's bench, ordering supplies, keeping a notebook, designing an experiment, familiarizing oneself with the locations of commonly used chemicals and pieces of equipment, determining lab policies on computer and telephone use, and "what to do if you hear an alarm," to name a few. Barker also devotes a significant amount of this introductory material to the importance of getting along with one's coworkers in crowded lab bays, where the use of hazards like radioactive phosphorus may be routine. Suffice it to say that your health and safety is in their hands, just as theirs is in yours.

For any and all readers, the series of numbered illustrations that depict pieces of equipment in the context of standard lab settings may be the most useful aspect of the first section. For example, a figure depicts a tissue culture area, with the outlines of a biosafety cabinet, a laminar flow hood, a carbon dioxide incubator, gas cylinders, a liquid nitrogen tank, and other items commonly associated with cell culture. Each illustration is labeled with a number corresponding to a legend that describes the typical form and function of each piece of equipment. Although these illustrations appear throughout the book, the first section contains twelve thorough "lab tours" that should be mandatory reading for any newcomer.

The second section, "Plotting a Course," is the most philosophical portion of the book. It deals with experimental design, the use of appropriate controls, statistical analyses of data, proper recording of data, preparing for presentations in both seminar and journal club format, relations with one's colleagues in the lab, and tips for writing manuscripts and grant proposals. In this author's view, Barker's most insightful comments in this section address "When Experiments Don't Work." A run of bad luck at the bench will be familiar to anyone who has ever picked up a pipette, and Barker has some thoughtful advice for dealing with it. At the very least, a graduate student in the tenth week of a string of inconclusive or failed experiments will be comforted to know that he or she can't be the only one in this predicament, since the subject of experimental failure takes up space in a laboratory manual.

Barker even offers two short paragraphs on what she calls the "waiting for the bus in the rain" problem. What should an experimenter do if he or she has been waiting on a bus (an experiment) for a long time with nothing to show for it? Should he or she move on to another bus (project) and risk missing out on the good result that might have come with a little more patience? Barker can't offer much more than common sense here, but again, the inclusion of this material in a practical lab manual should reassure the worried graduate student that his or her concerns are valid, and something the principal investigator should address.

That said, the meat of the book comes in the third section, entitled "Navigating." It contains the pages that are bound to be well thumbed. Herein, Barker deals with the details of making and storing buffers and other reagents, employing sterile technique, culturing cells, and working with DNA, RNA, proteins, and radioactivity. The book concludes with chapters on the theory and practice of centrifugation, electrophoresis, and light microscopy.

Obviously, she doesn't cover these subjects in the kind of detail found in more advanced volumes, but from the point of view of the beginner, she is admirably thorough. This author also suspects that photocopies of many of the tables dispersed throughout the "Navigating" section will be found taped to the desks of even the most experienced bench workers, since they provide such facts as the following: "Q: What's the half-life of streptomycin in cell culture? A: Four days." Overall, the protocols are clear, extensive, and backed up by the sort of useful tips often omitted from standard lab protocols because they are deemed obvious or irrelevant. For instance, Barker mentions that "Yes, you can reuse gels. Some investigators have been known to keep a pet gel for checking reactions, running the current samples out of the gel before reloading."

A few laboratory manuals are generally recognized as indispensable these days. Molecular Cloning by Sambrook et al., Antibodies by Harlow and Lane, and Manipulating the Mouse Embryo by Hogan et al. Incidentally, each of these is published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, a company that is building a tradition of quality guidebooks for life scientists. Is At the Bench in that class? That can only be answered when the manual is in the hands of working scientists. Given the thoughtfulness and hard work that so clearly went into the book, this author suspects it will find a permanent place in many labs. CSHL Press must be confident as well. Although the aforementioned manuals are held together by a traditional spiral binding, At the Bench sports an attractive hard cover, sturdy enough to withstand frequent use.