Hot Zone Medusa

From the text:

He took his eyes away from the microscope and looked around the table until he found a wooden stick that had a human eyelash glued to it with a droplet of nail polish. It was a device for handling the slices.

The eyelash had come from one of the women in the lab - it was generally believed that she had superior eyelashes for this kind of work, not too thick and not too thin, tapered, ending in fine points. He poked the eyelash into the water droplet and stirred it, separating the slices from one another. With the tip of the eyelash, he then lifted a few damaged slices out of the water and wiped them on a piece of tissue paper to get rid of them.