I love the book, "Lab Girl," by Hope Jahren, Ph.D. botanist. An excerpt:

"As a rule, Bill (Jahren's longtime lab partner) didn't share the students' stories with me, but he did make sure to pass on the best of the best, like the undergraduate lab assistant who wanted research experience on her resume' to beef up her application to veterinary school. Ultimately, she wanted to work with endangered animals that had been rescued from captivity and help repatriate them to their native surroundings. She left us for the summer to accept a coveted internship at the Miami zoo, only to find that most of what zookeepers actually do amounts to pretty routine hygiene maintenance, and that the only thing worse than an animal that doesn't appreciate this is one who does.

"Placed on the lowest rung of the ladder, she was sent to work in the primate enclosure. Her job was to apply anti-inflammatory cream to monkey genitalia, which was in need of daily soothing due to their constant and indiscriminate use. Once the monkeys had recognized her as their new vehicle of relief, they began mobbing her when she entered the room. Bill and I could hardly absorb this story when she told it to us, it was just too wonderful, but it got even better. It turns out that is is a hard-hearted monkey indeed that remains unmoved during a good slathering of bacitracin, and most monkeys proved considerably more responsive to her reluctant manipulations.

"The zoo fitted her with a protective plastic shell meant to discourage her charges from clutching on to her and wildly humping her frame, but it wasn't 100 percent effective. On the upside, her many animal behavior classes had provided her with the intuition necessary to condition these monkeys to the concept of the glory hole; the downside was that seeing them lined up and "standing at attention" through a chain-link fence first thing in the morning was enough to make her rethink a career in veterinary medicine altogether. She returned to our lab after the internship, having decided that maybe botany wasn't so boring after all."