With apologies to Clement Clarke Moore ’Twas the night ’fore the conference and all through the inn All the PIs were up with their laptops and pens, Making graphs and new slides for their talks the next day, In hopes that they’d have something brilliant to say. At the social, the party was raising good cheer; All us grads were up drinking cheap wine and bad beer, Fondly dreaming of prizes that were to be won, With talks practiced and ready and PowerPoints done, When down from the lobby arose such a clatter, I put down my drink to see…
The Science Creative Quarterly
By chrislong
William Christopher Long was born in Maryland, grew up in Botswana, and graduate from high school in Kenya. He received a BS in biology from Wheaton College (IL) in 2000. Currently he spends most of his time playing in the mud, hoping that if he gets wet and dirty enough, the College of William and Mary will give him a PhD in Marine Biology. He is married to a beautiful woman with multiple degrees in English (who can magically correct sentences containing equations she doesn’t understand), and is the proud father of a voracious daughter (cheeses of the world beware) and a gestating fetus.
THE NIGHT BEFORE AN ORGANIC CHEMISTRY EXAM
Last night I had a dream in which I very nearly died; All round me raged a gruesome hoard of mad nucleotides. The sugars and the bases put the phosphates into flight, And SN2 reactions were occurring left and right. Then BF4 came sweeping in with hydride ions grim. From then on, all carbonyl groups had chances very slim. The poor hydroxys all around me begged, alas, in vain, As all their sigma bonds with carbon friends were cut in twain. When lithium di-isopropyl amide entered in, It brutally removed all of the alpha hydrogens And left the alpha carbons…