If there is anything that I learned today, it’s that patience is a virtue that doesn’t always come naturally.
What I observed today was the beginnings of an experiment that would last until about 9 o’clock tonight. I came in later in the morning, after Jonathan had spent a painstaking hour and a half sterilizing the substrate upon which the polymer “ink” would be applied. When I arrived, I was just in time to watch him remove the little chips from the final step of sterilization- a shower of UV rays.
After that, he moved to the other room of the small lab in order to insert the pieces of cleaned substrate into a vacuum-sealed hood to coat them with the polymer itself. The hoods themselves look somewhat imposing. There is an extensive series of serious-looking screens and giant valves and dials in order to purge air and contaminants from inside. But, although again time-consuming, the process isn’t that complicated.
We waited for about twenty minutes to purge the desired hood of oxygen and contaminants and then Jonathan inserted his carefully wrapped eight samples, where he coated each one in either a binary or ternary polymer solution he had made last night. Unfortunately, I could not transfer the video to my computer, but the process is not necessary to see.
Then, the waiting began. It was going to be an hour and forty-eight minutes until the samples were ready for the final step of the process. At that point, my day would be over and I would go home, while Jonathan stayed until late tonight to finish it and do even more. I’ve really discovered today that lab work can be immensely time-consuming: a fact that I had not really considered up until this point.