Originally Posted by PandaBear
No, my wife was doing a similar job and they have to "wash" and "clean" lab equipment once in a while that weight that much. Bio lab jobs can be both high demand physically and intellectually.
I work in Chemistry, but it's similar.
The requirement IS is my job description(just checked and its "occasionally", not "frequently") and I do sometimes legitimately need to move some very heavy stuff. The LC-MS crossed the threshold where I actually needed some help to move it off a cart and onto a bench-I think it's around 200lbs, plus has a(fortunately separate) roughing pump that's ~100lbs.
The rough pump on my newer GC-MS is, IMO, undersized but none the less is what Agilent ships these days(at least before they developed the new oil-free pump) and probably weighs ~30lbs. I'm not running my older(early 1990s) GC-MS on its original roughing pump, but back then HP liked the Edwards E2M2 which weighs about 40lbs(I'm using a Varian pump with a slightly higher capacity that weighs a bit more). Hewlett Packard/Agilent MSDs(mass spectrometers) have a vacuum chamber that is probably not over 1 cubic foot and the only designed opening into the vacuum chamber takes a fused silica tube that you'd normally be flowing helium through at a rate no more than ~2mL/min. By contrast, the LC-MS(this one is a Finnigan) has a couple of cubic feet in the vacuum chamber, and the front of it is open to the atmosphere(occasionally with water and/or solvents spraying at it with a high flow rate of nitrogen) via a hole that's probably .75mm in diameter or so-so in other words it needs a big pump to keep the vacuum where it needs to be.