So where to start....
I direct a scientific core facility (Proteomics Core specifically) and I have been for what seems like a long time....Well more than a decade now... I've actually been associated with Core facilities in one form or another since 1995 or so....
It's a rather unique profession and certainly a non-traditional one when compared to the traditional
post-doc --> assistant professor ---> associate professor ---> professor track
that most Ph D. scientists take or at least think they might take when they start grad school (at least they did in 1995...maybe not so much any more).
So how did I end up here. Well like most people that work in core facilities it was part accident and part because I found early in my career that I really loved being in a core facility.
It started sort of like this. In grad school I was put on a project to study two proteins that are in the Sindbis virus membrane
Anyway, I had no idea how to do that or what to do...My PI mentioned I should talk to the people in the core facility across campus that had this new thing called a MALDI mass spectrometer (this was circa 1995 BTW).
So I walk into the core and see this giant beast of a machine with a huge laser and a joystick and I say to myself, wow this is the coolest thing I've ever seen! And I can learn how to use it? Really?
The Vestec is so old now I can't even find a picture of it any more. It was actually a precursor to the Voyager (see the Joystick over there --> ) But not nearly as refined or even functional. Plus it didn't have those white panels on the machine so you could see the flight tube and all the electronics. Mass specs look so much cooler without those stupid panels...but I digress.
The samples had to be put into this beast on small pins and you could not really aim the laser so much as you had to rotate the pins to get a good crystal under your laser beam. The data actually had to be recorded in part on an oscilloscope, although it did have a windows data system of some sort. The details are a bit fuzzy ... it was a long time ago.... At the time it was truly revolutionary (at least to me) and I loved using every second of it...and still do.
See the Vestec was in a core facility because these machines are usually very expensive and only a few labs could really afford to have their own.
Think of a core facility as a shared resource where other scientists can use the expertise in the core and have access to the equipment without them having to buy the equipment (500k-1M+) or train their own grad student or post doc in the fine arts of using such a machine or in planning the proper experiment to take advantage of it
So that's initially how I started down the long track of doing science in a core facility . Next time I'll talk about the ABRF and how they helped me get through grad school.
