Cell Signaling Technology

Switching an Entire Company to Macs

By Barbara Gibson

Immunofluorescent detection of phospho-GSK-3b (green) and tubulin (red) in a rat hippocampal neuron, using Phospho-GSK-3b (Ser9) Antibody (yellow indicates overlay of red and green). (Image provided by Gyorgyi Szebenyi and Gerardo Morfini [from the laboratory of Scott Brady], Cell Biology Department, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Texas.)

“Switching to Macs company-wide has been good for us,” says Carlos Del Castillo, IT manager at Cell Signaling Technology (CST) in Beverly, Massachusetts.

“No one worries about the system anymore. They’re concentrating on their work, using the Mac as a tool rather than as a computer.”

Breaking Bottlenecks in Biotechnology

Del Castillo drove the effort to move 100 people throughout the company — including scientists, business staff and marketing — to the Mac platform from a terminal/server environment.

“Macs give our scientists all the tools they need for research and production — from Perl script development to tools that enable mass spectrometry, sequence and molecular structure analysis.”

One for All and All for Macs

Cell Signaling decided to move to the Mac throughout the company largely because of Mac OS X.

“We looked at Linux, but the desktop just wasn’t there,” Del Castillo says. “For instance, the clipboard in some Linux applications doesn’t talk to the system clipboard, so sometimes you can’t copy and paste between apps. End users would have to deal with those quirks.”

What’s more, Del Castillo says, “Printing in Linux was complicated, and we’d have had to tweak the console for users.

“I was using Mac OS X at home, and I realized it might make a great solution for us.”

“Macs give our scientists all the tools they need for research and production — from Perl script development to tools that enable mass spectrometry, sequence and molecular structure analysis. And they support us on the business end as well.”

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