Time at the bar please…

A little question for you to kick off this month’s Science Lite. What is your favourite bit of lab equipment? Your pipette perhaps; its finely calibrated plunger feeling just so in your hand as you stab yet another carefully aliquoted solution? Or the swanky new microscopy system humming imperceptibly over in the corner, promising seductively to suck every last morsel of information from the most secretive of samples? Both laboratory heroes, no question, but they are all a little…well, predictable. However, an altogether more unique answer to that question can be found in the depths of the psychology department of the London South Bank University. Their answer would go something like: “Why, it’s that fruit machine over there. The one next to the bar.” For they have switched lab stools for bar stools and painstakingly turned one of their laboratories into a fully functional pub. It comes complete with beer pumps, lighting, music, pre-recorded background chatter and, perhaps more worryingly for potential clientele, hidden microphones and cameras. If you are anything like us on the Science Lite desk (…and for your sake, and that of your employer, we hope you are not) the sensation you may well be feeling now is a potent mix of dread and nausea. The mere thought that alcoholic consumption and secret recording devices could be co-located is a complete anathema to us. And so what of the purpose of this bizarre mix of Orwellian nightmare and alcoholic utopia? The 'pub research facility’, say LSBU, will allow investigators to study the motivations behind why people drink in the ways they do by providing a laboratory setting for alcohol-related research. Head of Psychology Dr Tony Moss explains: "What we are trying to do is simulate, with a greater level of control, the environment in which people typically find themselves drinking.” And with health problems caused by excessive drinking costing the NHS around £3 billion a year, the project will certainly have some high profile eyes gazing in its direction. Policy makers, the drinks industry and academics alike will be very interested in the findings coming out of this pseudo-pub. Yet, it all seems like a lot of effort to go to just to examine a spot of boozing. If you are interested in ‘the environment in which people typically find themselves drinking’, then wouldn’t it be easier just nip down to Weatherspoon’s on a Friday night? "It is not the sort of research you can easily conduct in a real pub,” says Moss. “There are too many other influences and a lack of experimental control.” Ahh, yes – we read you loud and clear Dr Moss. Many’s the time the Science Lite desk has lost ‘experimental control’ in a public house. And so to most important aspect of this £20,000 conversion…the establishment’s name. No doubt they have chosen a fiendishly clever pun hinting at the scientific intent behind this particular watering hole. No, disappointingly they have named it after the room it occupies. So let’s raise a glass or two to advancing scientific knowledge down the old J-407 ­­– last one caught on camera drunkenly insulting their boss is a sissy!