Question: Don't you find your job a bit gross?

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 7 Nov 2014:

Every now and then, yes, it’s the grossest thing. I spent most of my Thursday last week trying to catalogue about 15 boxes full of frozen samples of human faeces before they thawed out and started to stink. I was not fast enough, and I smelled bad for about an hour after 🙁

But most of the time it’s not that bad. I’m only interested in the bacteria that live in poop, so once I’ve extracted their DNA from a sample, I can put the poop back in the freezer and never look at it again unless something goes wrong working on the DNA. And working on the DNA doesn’t smell of anything, except maybe a little whiff of ethanol when you’re cleaning up after. When dealing with dangerous chemicals or materials that could cause disease like poop samples, we work in fume hoods that constantly suck air away from the workbench, so we don’t inhale deadly acid. This works equally well for things that just smell bad 🙂