My days in graduate school are numbered, and I'm not looking forward to the heartbreak of leaving my second family: my amazing lab group.

It's both a blessing and a curse that labs change people and flavours over the years. It's great to have new faces arrive with fresh perspectives and, especially in our lab, new recipes. Good skills at bench biochemistry often go hand-in-hand with good skills in the kitchen, and I've eaten some of the best food of my life in this lab.

It's hard to live in a dynamic workplace, though, when the family so often loses members as they move on. Sure, there will always be e-mails or phone calls, but the days of spontaneously running out for coffee, blasting gangster rap at 1 a.m. or playing a clever practical joke are over.

Now it is my turn to go and, although I won't miss the more tedious aspects of daily benchwork, I will miss the people who made the failures less painful and the successes more exciting. These people have been my cheerleading squad through thick and thin, in both my personal and professional life. Thanks for putting up with my neuroses, my dirty jokes and my pilfering of pens from your benches. The road to a PhD was long and a lot more fun with my second family.