A full cupboard
27 May 2026
With the exam period underway and no students in the lab for a couple of weeks, I took the opportunity to wind things down and restock before the quiet set in. The media cupboard is now full. I find this genuinely satisfying in a way that is probably difficult to explain to anyone outside of a research lab – and possibly to some people inside one.
© RudolphLAB, 2026
How it used to work
Earlier in my career, as a researcher in Nottingham, media were not something I thought about very much. There was a central facility, always stocked, and when other reagents ran low the solution was straightforward: tell a technician, or write it on the whiteboard if it was an evening or a weekend, and the item would be ordered the next working day. Simple, reliable and largely invisible to the people actually doing the experiments.
Even so, things occasionally ran out. Lab members forgot, got distracted, assumed someone else had noticed. This happened in a well-resourced system with dedicated professional support, and I mention it not to criticise anyone but because it is worth being honest: the problem is not unique to any particular lab or any particular generation of researchers. Restocking is easy to overlook when you are focused on an experiment.
A different calculation
In my lab, we do not have a central media facility. Media has to be made from scratch, which adds a layer of effort that did not exist in my Nottingham days. Given this, I have always operated on a simple principle: slightly overstocked is always preferable to slightly understocked. You have to make the media anyway – the only question is when. Before an experiment is considerably more convenient than during one.
What I have encountered instead, more than once, is a different approach: a careful assessment of whether the remaining stock is sufficient for the next experiment, followed by the conclusion that it probably is, followed by the discovery that, at least sometimes, it was not quite. I understand the logic, in the abstract. I do not share it. And I have, I should admit, forgotten to order things myself on occasion – so I am not claiming immunity from the general human tendency to underestimate how quickly supplies disappear.
The part that actually matters
Here is where personal preference becomes something more than that. A research lab is a shared space. The media in the cupboard, the buffers on the shelf, the reagents in the fridge – these are not for one person's experiments. When stock runs low and is not replaced, the person who discovers the gap may not be the person who created it. I have walked into the lab, more than one, intending to run an experiment and found that I could not, because there was nothing to run it with. That is frustrating in a way that a full cupboard, quietly maintained, entirely prevents.
Different people have different instincts about this, and I have no particular interest in insisting that everyone share mine. But in a shared lab, restocking is not purely a matter of personal style. It is a matter of courtesy to the other people working in the same space. When your approach to stock levels affects someone else's ability to do their work, it ceases to be a preference and becomes a lab policy. Which is why we have one.
A final observation
It will not have escaped the notice of anyone familiar with how university research labs are currently resourced that the person doing all of this – preparing media, tracking stock levels, ordering reagents – is the same person who is also expected to design experiments, supervise students, write grants and teach. This used to be the work of dedicated technical staff. In some institutions it still is.
I mention this not as a complaint but as a quiet observation that the cupboard being full has a cost, and that cost is not nothing. The cost rises or falls depending on who is dealing with the issue. It seems a PI working in part as a technician is a cost the university is entirely comfortable with.
Still. It does look rather good.
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