Face

I have a face!

I mean, I had a face before, of course, but now that face is here where you can see it and not just me when I look in the mirror or when another person who is really there uses their eyes to see the light reflecting off of it (yep, I'm shiny) and thusly sees my face. You see, when their eyes see my face in real life, the light hits molecules inside their eyes that are also inside cells. And light is both a wave and a particle, so not only does it carry energy but it also can exert a force. Enough force from enough light quanta push on the molecules in the eye cells and make then change shape on a molecular hinge that acts like a switch. Like a light switch. But not. More like a pump because that switch makes little holes on the outsides of the eye cells open up and let charged particles enter. Enough charged particles get inside the cell that it accumulates a charge relative to the outside of the cell that is called the action potential. At a certain magnitude of action potential the eye cell fires off an electrical signal to the neuron that connects it to the brain that interprets the signal as seeing the light that is reflecting from my shiny face. If my face were not shiny at all it would be invisible.

And now you can see my face because I posted a picture.

Nerd

Those who know me in person harbor no doubts as to me being a complete and total nerd. Although my nerdiness stops short of D&D, I do play things like Laser Chess and Zombies. However, once in a while, I do something that I later notice as being particularly nerdy or indicative of my nerdiness. I was composing a hip-hop/dance anthem on my computer and built it all up to a very intense drum and bass breakdown. The nerdiness struck when it occurred to me to insert an accordian-driven breakdown into the other breakdown and I thought it sounds awesome. I'm leaving it in there.

Security

I think I'm going to begin wearing the maximum amount of PPE we have on the weekends and late nights in the lab to keep security from barging in and demanding to see my ID. PPE = personal protective equipment. I suspect that opening the door to the lab and seeing me working in the biosafety cabinet with a gas mask-style respirator, chemical splash goggles, 3 pairs of different gloves, and one of our big blue plastic suits would deter them from bothering me. Maybe I could use the head lamp with magnifying eyepieces, too.

Of course, now I'm going to have to put all of this on and get someone to take a picture of me in it.

Cecum II

It should be noted that, upon reflection, I have seen a bigger cecum than the one noted before, but it was in a mouse infected with cholera, and as such was mostly liquid anyway.

Cecum

It's like the murine equivalent of an appendix, only with a digestive function and not just as a reservoir for normal gut flora. The jejunum feeds it and the ileum drains it, but it's pretty much a big J-shaped sack that holds digesting food. I do not know what it's contents would look like in a wild mouse with a heterogeneous diet, but in lab animals with a homogeneous diet it is uniformly brown (think pre-poop).

I bring up the cecum because I dissected out possibly the biggest cecum I have ever seen the other day. It was from a Germ-free Swiss Webster mouse, about 18 months of age, who was suffering bloat from a downstream gut twist. Ceca tend to bloat anyway in germ-free mice, and the gut twist may have backed up materials as well (although it pooped on me anyway when I picked it up), but the mouse still had retained ~3g of cecal contents (mouse weighed maybe 25g). That's incredible!

If I had the same relative mass of undigested food in me, that'd be about 9kg!

(I have a morbid tendency to calculate things upward from mice to my own mass. For example, the LD50 of Stx-2 (Shiga-like-toxin-2, produced in very virulent O157:H7 E coli strains) in mice is about 1.3E-5g/kg [if I am remembering the paper on it correctly]. Which means that the LD50 for me would be only about 3mg!).

Cartoon

Guild

Just got out of the lab. Spent 3 hours in the flow hood plating serial dilutions of bacteria. Tedium. Tedium in which I must remain very accurate and precise with my measurements, which had to be done a couple hundred times (the same measurements).

Sometimes I look back to the craft guilds of the 17th century prior to the Industrial Revolution. They regulated all the craftsmen and their products and what was allowable and who could sell where and what and how and for how much. But they also trained young people as apprentices, then when they became competent let them be journeymen, and finally, after their masterpiece was complete, they were masters of their trade. In some ways, becoming a research scientist recapitulates that progression.

I very recently graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Cell and Molecular Biology. As an undergraduate, I worked in labs, and on my own project, kind of like an apprentice. I learned the practical basics that they can't teach in lecture halls, such as pipetting, cell culture, operating cantankerous equipment. Now I've graduated and am working in a lab as a technician. This is like the journeyman stage. Later, when graduate school happens, it will be as if the guild has granted me permission to continue to advance my craft as a journeyman. And in graduate school, I will have to research and defend a thesis, the academic equivalent to a masterpiece.

The only problem with this is that I feel like I should have my own tools. A good set of micropipettes, maybe a pH meter, a couple sheafs of protocols. Unfortunately, micropipettes are a lot more expensive than hammers.

Office Enterprise 2007

It can really suck sometimes.

I made this really cool Powerpoint presentation that I was going to post on here. It was all about enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) and the genetics of Shiga toxin expression (which are really cool!). But Office Enterprise 2007 isn't nice enough to allow me to do so. I tried converting it to an .html file, but then Office wouldn't let me access the actual code, only look at it through my default browser. Now, yes, I could have gone and coded it all by hand, but that would have taken up much more time that I was willing to spare for this (it's finals season for me!). So you all (maybe there's one of you, but we're going to pretend that you're plural, just like we're pretending like we're plural) will just have to imagine how cool the genetics of Shiga toxin in pathogenic strains of E. coli are.

It's probably better that way anyway.

Brain Extractions

Surprisingly sticky.

I managed to decapitate the mouse well enough (it was already dead at this point, decapitation was not the primary means of euthanasia [that occurred sometime between putting it to forever sleep and exsanguinating it by means of cardiac puncture]), but skinning its head was quite difficult. Mainly because it was very slippery. You have to sort of peel the skin back (like an orange) until you can see the eyes and then fold it into a handle for yourself to cut through bones. Next you cut across the bone between the eyes, then through the ears to the back of the skull. Then it pretty much pops open once you split the skull down the middle.

But the mouse brain itself? Pale and smooth. A bit larger than I had expected for such a small mammal. Also very dense, it didn't squish very easily (I wasn't trying to squish it into paste [and I didn't], but seeing how much give it had, just gently pinching it a little).

But I don't know. It was sort of profound. There I was, sitting in the lab with another creature's brain in the palm of my hand. As if there was some kind of phylogenetic resonance recapitulating my evolution of my own brain from one similar to that in my hand. Like saying hello to a baby. I would even have to admit that it was kind of cute, so grayish pink, almost like a newborn mouse pup (but less wrinkly). I sat there and looked at it, thinking to myself: "So this is what propelled the little creatures in their cage to climb over each other and twitch their whiskers in alarm each time we manipulated their cage." It was cool.

Perhaps I'll post some sketches of the procedure if I ever remember to draw them.



Disclaimer:
Although it may appear otherwise, I am not a sick fuck. I respect the animals that we use in science and always feel regret when I am required to euthanize them. But in seeing how they are put together and how all of the organs and systems are connected to one another: that is undeniably cool. And while it is important to remember that laboratory mice are living things that must be treated as such, it is also important that we as scientists be able to speak of them frankly and with all the delighted curiosity that (hopefully) brought us to science in the first place.

Vampires

Gotta start remembering that I have one of these blog things. I got some new software (Propellerhead Reason) and I've been neglecting everything else just to play with it.

Although maybe it would be cool for me to speculate to the molecular biology of vampires, that's not what I'm doing. Instead, this is a short commentary on the morbid-ness of scientists. For example, one of the lab techs told me at lunch that now we were taking brain samples for histology and that it was gross. My immediate response was "Cool! How do we do that?", which led to an explanation of splitting the scalp open, rolling it down off the head, and then cracking the skull and peeling it like an orange. I must learn how to do this myself.

Or, as another example, I just sent an email to the germ-free animal manager asking if we had any uninfected mice that needed culling. Not because I want to go over and slaughter hapless mice, but because I could make good use of their serum for my project and I might as well get it anyway if they're slated to die.

Just saying.