Jue's Blog (tag:research)

I’ll start with the ending: three Mondays ago, after 2 years of work in a lab and several recent months of panic and suffering quiet perseverance, I turned in my thesis. It arrived at the biochem office 51 minutes after the deadline.

This was after I wrote an abstract in 10 minutes (4:30pm), an entire chapter of results in 5 hours (11:00am), made two figures overnight (12:00am-9am) off of data collected from experiments 2 days before. If had gotten to the office 9 minutes later, the doors would have closed and locked away any hope I would have had of graduating with honors. Fortunately I made it in time.

For one liter of Bennett’s Agar, combine:
10g potato starch
2g casaaminoacids
1.8g yeast extract
2mL Czapek Mineral Mix

I’m at lab, making growth medium for bacteria so I can run some ultra-modern, computerized, high-throughput experiments. But I like to imagine that I’m actually at Hogwarts. And that I’m not putting in potato starch, but extract of toad’s wart instead. Yeah, that’s right. I’m not working on my thesis. I’m getting ready to poison your ass.

Three years ago, after going on a run with a friend, I said to him, “we are going to run the Boston marathon.” It was a moment of triumphant and wildly inaccurate self-appraisal. What I should have said, of course, was “we are going to squander many months of our youth playing video games and imbibing mind-altering substances.” A certain jogging of the spirit, if you will, but not of the legs. We’re more the cerebral type.

Last week, after so much physical apathy, it was time to turn a new leaf. The metaphorical kind of leaf, the kind that is good for your lungs. The kind that starts with a six mile run along the banks of the Charles.

It was pleasant. Hot, a little humid, but I’m sure Pheidippides probably didn’t have it much better himself. Like him, I was in a race against time. Would Sparta respond to his pleas for help, and save the civilized world as he knew it from destruction? Will I make it back in time for dinner, and save my pocketbook from having to buy yet another mediocre burrito from Boloco?

I did not make it back in time. Instead, I got heatstroke. Well, technically, I got what is known as “uncomfortably hot.” But boy was it uncomfortable. And hot.

Being this dehydrated, there was a good chance I could finish the run looking like Otzi the Iceman. Fortunately, my taut, moisturized complexion was saved by a foolhardy willingness to eat unidentified plants, and what looked like a stretch of pebbly goat shit on the sidewalk. Of course, one man’s goat shit tree is another, less near-sighted man’s mulberry bush, and knowing this, I made like a giraffe and extended my neck toward the heavens, tongue out. Then a shooting pain went through my back and I decided instead to reach out with my hand and pick some berries.

It was delicious.

The moral of this story, like the other stories I tell on this summer research journal, has nothing to do with science, or really anything. It is simple: don’t go running after eating half-prosciutto, half-kielbasa pizza. Unless there are berry trees.

This is week 3’s installment of my journal as a systems biology research intern, a week late and chock full of factual inaccuracies. You’ll be happy to know that last week I actually wrote about science, but not really.

[via Eppendorf]

There are two computers in the microscope room at my lab. One is for operating the microscope; the other is for chatting with friends.

Which makes me wonder why it is such a fancy, obviously expensive piece of equipment. Maybe it’s so I can open more gchat windows and tabs on Firefox. Cutting edge delinquency with the latest mathematical analysis software and algorithm libraries. Thank goodness for NSF funding.

If I were Tolstoy I still wouldn’t be able to do justice, with words, to the Sisyphean tedium of operating a microscope in a multipoint, time-lapse experiment. Move stage. Focus. Take picture. Click. Click. Click. Wait. Move stage. Repeat 16 times every 6-12 hours.

Then I discovered macros. If you’ve never worked with microscope software before, macros are a language for writing little programs to tell the scope what to do. If you’ve never programmed before, let me tell you, the feeling of power you get from writing macros is divine.

Not that I’ve put my newfound knowledge to any use. The power is theoretical, pure potentiality. That’s what makes it so powerful. I am the Creator! I can tell that scope to move to the right 5 micrometers and snap a photo in 5 different wavelengths. How powerful is that? Almost like throwing lightning, causing floods, or creating Man. If only that power and intention were also omnipotence. Because you see, in the real world, invariably the 5 micrometers are miscalculated, the shutter stays open too long, Man goes off the moment after creation, the ingrate that he is, and eats some fruit you told him not to touch, builds towers you really rather he not build, makes atom bombs and drops them on each other, and so on.

But do I give up? Did other Creators before me give up? Nein! If anything, that big screen filled with macro code is a perfect disguise for the 4 gchat windows directly under it. Alt-tab. Let there be (600nm fluorescent) light!

This is part two of my weekly summer research intern journal. I work in a systems biology lab at Harvard Medical School, where I try my best to not learn anything about science at all. Last week’s post is here.