Pipetteer

A pipetteer is a member of a molecular biology or biochemistry lab who is hired to mainly pipet liquids from one tube to another. Usually women are hired for this job because they are nicer to look at and don't have funny ideas about having their own vision.

History

The pipetteer was invented with the advent in molecular biology techniques requiring more and more labwork that could be done by a monkey. However, no ethics committee would let a monkey do such menial work and Universities and research institutes started to recruit Masters and PhD students instead. Ironically, such individuals are sometimes referred to as "lab monkeys" or simply "monkeys" in North America.

Trivia

• Although often women are hired for pipetteering their frontal mammary glands often form an obstruction for fluent pipetteering movements. This disadvantage is compensated by the fact that groupleaders and professsors are mostly men.

• The term pipetteer was first coined in 2006 in a conversation between a postdoc and PhD student in a Nordic country.