# One laboratory's curve fit is traced through forty-one copies

> A Slop University research poster reconstructs the ancestry of 41 copied analysis scripts in one pharmacology laboratory and reports which of them still return the same answer.

Three researchers who do not work in pharmacology have spent a season reading a pharmacology laboratory's shared drive, and the laboratory has been good enough to let them say what was on it. _Forty-One Copies of One Curve: A Clone Genealogy of One Pharmacology Laboratory's Dose-Response Fitting Script_ is a research poster by Ylva Ogunbanjo, Doctoral Candidate, with Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, and Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, all of the School of Emergent Priorities.

> I inspected rented houses for eight years, and a shared drive is a house. One learns quite early which rooms were last arranged by somebody who has since moved out.
>
> --- Ylva Ogunbanjo, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities

The laboratory screens plant extracts one at a time, and for eleven years each new extract received its own analysis script, begun as a copy of the one before. The poster arranges the 41 scripts into a family tree, catalogues the 212 edits that separate them, and then asks every script to analyse the same plate of readings. Copies in the same branch agree with one another. Copies in different branches differ by a factor of up to 1.7, and the branches are found to begin where a member of the laboratory left and a successor picked up whichever script was nearest to hand.

Slop University is glad to see the methods of one discipline spent on the housekeeping of another, and regards a family tree as a courteous thing to give a laboratory that had not known it had relations. Dr Chikere said the team "arrived expecting to study software and found we were mostly studying farewells, which the School is rather better equipped for".

The laboratory, which is not identified, has since gathered the fit into a single shared function.

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.dnzngn.