The colour of the lab

When the world is such a colourful place, Russ Swan asks why is the lab so grey?

When you think about it, a lot of traditional lab work involves one tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum – the bit with wavelengths between about 380 and 740nm, which we call the visible range. Yes, we use radio frequencies and X-rays and microwaves, but on a routine basis it is this thin sliver of the continuum that occupies most of our time.

From red to violet, the colours of the visible wavelengths provide us with much of the information we collect on a routine basis. Two of our most powerful and versatile analytical techniques rely on the ability of the human eyeball to distinguish colour and to recognise and measure how different colours respond under specific conditions. Indeed, so great is our reliance on colour that these techniques – spectroscopy and chromatography – even incorporate it into their names.

An outsider might think, then, that the typical laboratory would be a fairly colourful place. Ha! The reality is of course that the typical lab has neutral coloured walls and furniture, with a range of benches groaning under the mass of an array of analytical instruments each painted in one of a variety of shades of dull.

Lab equipment manufacturers have adopted a version of the Henry Ford approach to their products: you can have any colour you like, as long as it’s boring. Walk around any lab you have access to, or patrol the halls of a trade fair, and you can be certain that the vast majority of kit on display is the colour of putty, stone, or taupe. If you’re lucky, you might spot one that’s magnolia.

The comparison to cars is quite interesting, I think. Sometime around the late 1990s, the people that decide these things worked out that because we were approaching the new and futuristic 21st century, the only vehicle colour that was appropriate was spaceship silver. You may have noticed that, for the last dozen or more years, the great majority of cars sold have been variations of silver or grey, often given fanciful names in a pathetically misguided attempt to conceal their inner soullessness. Champagne is grey with hint of beige, while graphite is grey with a hint of dark grey.

More recently the car makers have rediscovered their colour palette and, rather like Apple computers, have made a virtue out of being colourful. Do you remember the stir created by the first iMacs? Suddenly, computers and monitors did not have to be putty-coloured – they could be red, or green, or blue. Regardless of the performance or cost of the machines, you’ve got to acknowledge that these were the prettiest PCs available. I have no doubt that at least part of their success was down to the fact that they looked funky.

Are we in any danger of seeing a new colour revolution in the laboratory? Will some manufacturer step forward to emulate the iMac with the first iMicroscope, or iCentrifuge?

I’m afraid it doesn’t seem very likely. Judging by the latest round of products announced at this year’s densely-packed exhibition circuit, the paint manufacturers can safely stash their brighter pigments for another season or two. It’s pretty much wall-to-wall grey out there.

To be fair, there are some manufacturers who really seem to enjoy branding their products in a corporate colour. Metrohm’s turquoise comes to mind. There are also some categories of lab equipment, mainly those like gel electrophoresis kit that are predominantly made of plastic, that may be brightly coloured.

But what corporate colour do you associate with Nikon, or Olympus, and Leica? The answer has to be grey, bland, and dull, although not necessarily in that order. The irony is that these firms do have a corporate colour, and have teams of lawyers that would pounce on any competitor whose instruments were too similar a shade of neutral. Passing-off, they call it.

There can be no technical reason for this. If instrument makers were concerned about stray reflections or anything like that, they would make their instruments matt black. The only explanation is that they are afraid that corporate buyers will shy away from colourful instruments, because accountants are by their nature grey and bland personalities.

Personally, I’d love to see a bit more colour in the lab – but I feel a bit like Richard of York (who, you will recall, gave battle in vain) in calling for this. We may, as humans, only use a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum to perceive the world with our visual senses, but the instrument makers seem determined to focus on an even tinier portion of the visible range: the bit that starts and ends at boring.