[OWW-Discuss] What previously underrecognized sport or pastime should be included in the Olympic Games?

[Bill F]

Up close and personal: Alan Charning, UK PostDoc. World renowned pipette
pro. His presence on any team is enough to titrate fear in the hearts of his
opponents. Merely having him at the lab bench has propelled the austere labs
of Cambridge into a force to be reckoned with in the global pro-am wetlab
circuit.

When not pushing copious quantities of fluids through ridiculously thin
tubes, Alan likes to relax in his training lab in the Outer Hebrides. Where
sheep once trod, now Alan's legendary training regimen is conducted with a
host of experts flown in from the four corners of the globe. Swimming 2
miles every day, pumping through massive volumes of treacle syrup to
increase training friction, performing hundreds of arm rep lifts per day,
and consuming the highlights of the world's literature cell biology output
well into the night makes for little time for his wife, Brit, and their son,
Watson, and daughter, Sabine.

As he prepares for his date with destiny this summer in Beijing, Alan
understand the  kind of expectations physicists, chemists, and biologists
have heaped upon him. The bust of Cavendish that sits on his desk and the
picture of Fleming on the wall remind him of the titans who preceded him.
Little did they know that one day, endorsement deals with Van Heusen,
Dockers, and VWR Scientific would one day be the prizes of their
intellectual progeny.

Some called it frivolous when Charning halted his cancer research career
peers felt would eventually lead to a Nobel prize to instead perfect his
legendary pipetting skills. His gold medal performance in the 3 liter medley
in Oslo in 2005, 3 medals in the Helsinki Invitational in 2006, and,
finally, the world record in dispensing over 3000 separate samples in a time
of 5:02:03954 last year, shattering Professor Jan Gulbricks of the
Netherlands time by a massive 5 hundeths of a second, made his appearance on
this years UK team a slam-dunk.

Wen asked what drives him onward, Alan adjusted his thick glasses, fumbled a
bit with the glass tube in his hand, and cleared his throat. Tears welled in
his eyes. "My personal hero was Jesse Owens. In my own way, I'm doing my
part to let the world know that Lab Science can be as rewarding as any other
Olympic sport. We can create life on a competitive playing field and send it
crawling off when we're done. The spoils don't go to the victors but to the
storm drains that surround the venues we compete in. We're changing the
world. I'm honored to be a part of it."


On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 11:20 AM, John Cumbers <johncumbers at gmail.com>
wrote:

> *What previously underrecognized sport or pastime should be included in
> the Olympic Games?*
>
> The contestants are given a bag of spinach and asked to isolate the DNA,
> purify the ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase, and separate the rRNA from
> the mRNA. This would be a timed trial with certain as-yet-undetermined
> constraints, but leaning towards the low-tech.
> from: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v422/n6932/full/422567a.html
>
> Are you thinking what I'm thinking?
>
> --
> John Cumbers, Graduate Student
> Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry
> Biology and Medicine, Brown University, Box G-W
> Providence, Rhode Island, 02912, USA
> Tel USA: +1 401 523 8190, Fax: +1 401 863-2166, UK to USA: 0207 617 7824
>
> Delivery address: Brown University (EEB) Biomed Stock Room
> 34 OLIVE ST, Providence, RI 02912
>
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