LA lab life

Touring the Getty Conservation Labs this morning made me REALLY envious.  Not only do they have fantastic equipment (for example, wide-ranging inorganic and organic analysis tools such as FTIR, Raman and XRD - many field-portable as well as lab based), but they also have tremendous projects to work on.  Such as:

• applying scientific techniques to identify the plastics in Disney cartoon artwork
• using pigment identification methods to understand the work of 15th century artists and to visualise what the colours would originally have looked like
• putting antique furniture into X ray machines to spot hidden damage
• detecting hidden paintings lurking behind a Rembrandt masterpiece (see: http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=787 and my artwork of the day today)

Do science and you could end up working here helping to understand, illuminate and conserve art and architecture of all kinds all around the world.  Got to be a good option...