Your Say
Authors: Michael Nguyen-Truong, Courtney Doherty
The New York Times recently revealed that many lab technicians are suffering repetitive-use injuries from working for many hours with tubes and pipettes. These reports serve as a clear example of how such routine work in the lab can lead to bodily injuries. We’re both student researchers who work together in a cardiovascular biomechanics lab and we along with many other scientists have encountered similar risks in our own wet lab experiments. For example, pipetting puts us researchers at high risk for carpal tunnel syndrome: the countless repetitive motions of pushing a plunger down with the thumb to withdraw or dispense liquid can lead to soreness in the hands, wrists, and/or arms. For us specifically, we each have thus dropped the pipette or pressed the plunger down incorrectly (as there are two stops) during operation, which has led to measurement error and an interruption in the cadence of the experiment. However, trai