Defence Against The Dark Arts - enhancing your skills in molecular biology

The New England Biolabs Molecular Biology Summer Workshop, is held annually at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. It involves a two week intensive crash course in molecular biological techniques, including gene cloning, bioinformatics, PCR and RT-PCR and many others.

I attended this course shortly after starting my first postdoc in 2004 and would highly recommend it to both beginners in molecular biology and those with a more intermediate knowledge of the subject who might nevertheless be seeking to broaden their skill set. Attendants range from pharmaceutical sales reps with limited experience in biology all the way up to professors in various disciplines looking to diversify the techniques used in their own laboratories.

The course is very well designed, consisting of daily hands-on practical experiments paired with extensive lectures on the topics related to the experiments performed. This close association between theory and practical application serves to reinforce the material and significantly enhances knowledge retention, where it might otherwise evaporate from one's memory within days of the workshop's completion (a common problem with intensive learning courses). Despite being designed such that even newcomers to the field of biology can understand them, the lectures are surprisingly thorough and it certainly pays to take full advantage of the coffee breaks to keep the attention span well-caffeinated.

In addition to being a very well run course, the workshop also happens to be held in an area of outstanding natural beauty. Unfortunately, they work the attendees pretty hard during the two week (lectures and lab from 8am to 10pm most nights), so it's important to make the most of the one full day of "vacation" set aside during the course. Myself and a group of others used this time to cross the border into Vermont and climb mount Monadnock. Not exactly K2/, but a refreshing and picturesque jaunt nonetheless. There are also two evenings set aside for intramural volley ball and softball. Competition between the lab groups is encouraged and can be quite fierce, sometimes culminating in outright sabotage. We arrived in our lab after lunch break on one occasion to find that we had been the victims of a TP'ing!


The 2004 workshop staff waiting to take to the field in the interlab softball tournament


Workshop attendees taking advantage of the one solitary vacation day by climbing Mount Monadnock, Vermont.