‘I’ll do weird things’: What it’s like to work the night shift in a science lab
The reasons for doing science in the dead of night are usually practical. But that doesn't mean it's easy on researchers who pull the graveyard shift.
Science waits for no one, and it certainly doesn’t sleep. And neither do the people who have to stay up all night to monitor, administer, and analyze various materials in the quest to better understand the human body.
The reasons for doing science in the dead of night are usually practical. Some studies simply are best done at night. Sleep research is an obvious example, requiring nocturnal monitoring of human subjects. And then there are the studies that require constant monitoring or frequent intervention that can’t stop simply because the sun has gone down. Availability of scarce or expensive
