Essential Science: Crick Exhibition Highlights Craft & Graft

A free exhibition, opening on 1 March 2019 until 21 December 2019, takes visitors behind the scenes at The Crick in London to meet the technicians, engineers and specialists working around the clock to facilitate life-changing research.

These technical teams prepare, process, make, mend, analyse and innovate. From fixing faults in complex cutting-edge technology to feeding fruit flies and operating robots, they are essential to keep the labs running and science happening.

The exhibition shines a spotlight on five technical teams including those who prepare biological samples such as fruit flies or cancer cells, for scientists to magnify using powerful microscopes. It takes years of training and hands-on experience to use the Crick’s cutting-edge microscopes with absolute precision and accurately interpret the results. Ultra-thin samples 1,000 times finer than a human hair must be gently arranged on the surface of a water droplet. They’re so delicate that the team have hand-crafted an astonishingly low-tech tool to manoeuvre these samples: an eyelash glued to a cocktail stick.

Visitors are also able to become ‘citizen scientists’ by participating in the Zooniverse’Etch-a-Cell machine learning project. A simple task of tracing around the edge of a magnified cell nucleus will help train computers to improve analysis of microscopy images.

Other technical teams include technicians who feed and breed over 15,000 families of fruit flies. They are also trained to perform incredibly precise tasks including hand-injecting DNA into fly embryos;

The ‘librarians of life-forms’ responsible for nurturing billions of cells in thousands of flasks, plates and vials;

The people who meticulously clean the Crick’s essential glassware to allow re-use and prevent any contamination;

The mechanical and electronic engineers who race against time to fix, adapt or invent vital equipment for use in the labs.

The exhibition is part of the Crick’s wider commitment to support technical staff working in research and highlight their vital work. In 2017 the Crick signed the Technician Commitment, a sector-wide initiative led by the Science Council and the Gatsby Foundation aiming to address the career challenges faced by technical staff working in research.

Paul Nurse, Director of the Crick, says: “I began my scientific life as a 17 year old laboratory technician, so I really understand what they contribute to research. Engineers, technicians and other research specialists make up a significant part of our workforce and without them the science we do here would be impossible. That is why we signed the Technician Commitment to recognise the important role that our technical staff play.”

Emily Scott-Dearing, curator of the new exhibition, says: “In the Crick’s gleaming laboratories more than 1,000 scientists are thinking, experimenting and collaborating. What’s less well known is that they depend on the support of an army of technicians, engineers and specialists – from school-leavers learning on the job to highly trained experts. These individuals rarely play the leading roles but without this ensemble cast there’d be no science here at all.”