" The organization of lab work was, and still is, entirely feudal. A “lab” was not only a place or a room or series of rooms, it was the fiefdom of a particular scientist. To “go into” a lab as a grad student was to apprentice yourself to this scientist, with the idea that you would, after several years of patient toil, ascend to a similar rank yourself, at which point you would be able to offload the manual labor to people more junior than yourself. "

― Barbara Ehrenreich , Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything