So long, summer...

One full week back in the thesis lab…. and only five or so more years to go. :-\ Last week I finished up the two animal studies at the NIH by sacrificing all the remaining animals and harvesting organs, learned how to replace the one final part of the HPLC system that was clogged (I now feel like I could build one from scratch after breaking and thus replacing each and every part), said my goodbyes... and returned back 'home' to my lab. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the majority of my personal lab equipment (pipettes, conical tube racks, forceps, scissors, timer, all the solutions I use, etc) were not looted and stolen in my absence as I thought they would be since they often seem to walk off even when I am in the lab 80 hours/week. The only things missing were my membrane marking pens (easy to replace) and, strangely enough, my lab coat. I’m left with the option of a lab coat two sizes too big or one that fits from the waist up but is quite a squeeze around the hips, since it is cut straight down for a curve-free man. Right after I joined the lab, the PI decided to stop getting everyone their own name embroidered lab coats and just stick with generic coats with the name of the lab, so I have no way of knowing who walked off with mine. I suppose, for the meantime, slightly too small is better than much too large. Unfortunately, since my return I have also rediscovered my easily annoyed attitude and generally grumpy moods, from which I managed to escape this summer. I hope (although am doubtful) that this is just a coincidence, or else it is going to be an exceptionally difficult fiveish remaining years.

Some exciting research has happened in the lab during my time at NIH, and I’m excited to see how I can fit back in. It’s time for me to start thinking about putting together a thesis project and establishing a thesis committee (scary!!) but I have a general idea of what I want to do, and it will allow me to tie in some of my interest in drug discovery and pharmacology. The lab is mostly a biochemistry-based lab so this will be stepping outside of the normal research techniques, but my PI also seems to be excited at expanding into some pharmacology and is more than willing to help me pursue my own interests. A new PI just joined the university this year that runs a medicinal chemistry lab, so I think I will be working with him frequently which will be a great opportunity. Of course, I can’t really start pursuing my own project until after I pass the comp exams (in June) so in the meantime I will be working on little pieces of the projects of others in my lab so that I can be a middle author on several papers… including an animal study I should be running next month (good thing I was so well trained at the NIH!).

Thanks to those who commented on my new template. I think I am going to leave the general layout as it is but continue to play around with the content in the sidebar, like the recently added “Currently Reading” section (which technically should probably just include the latest issues of Oncogene and Cancer Research). Among my goals for the semester, such as not working more than 3 11+ hour days per week, is to actually do some non-science related reading (along with blogging a bit more frequently!).

Changes!

Check out the newly made template -- it's not final yet, but after an afternoon of cursing at blogger tags, it is at least in functional, working order. I'm not really thrilled with it (at least the header) and want to tweak some things, so feel free to criticize/comment/offer suggestions for what I can do to make this better. The only thing I'm not particularly up to doing is re-drawing the illustration of me, because really, I shouldn't spend all day in the lab tomorrow playing in Photoshop for blogging purposes (after all, I do need to save some time during the day to review my fantasy football draft and decide who to start... and, um, dose the mice and set up some HPLC runs). Other than that, nothing is set in stone.
So... suggest away!

The Importance of Proper Euthanasia Techniques

I know, I know – I said I had all these interesting tales to tell, and then fell off the radar again. I promise, this will pick back up shortly. I’ve been busy trying to make some changes to the layout and also toyed around with the idea of getting rid of this altogether and just getting my own domain name and starting up my own webpage. I think that will require too much time, though, and not something that I need to be working on when classes are starting right around the corner.

I have tried playing around with a new layout but haven’t been happy with anything yet. I think I finally have an idea that might work but now I’m having difficulties with some of the blogger tags. Once I get this situated and in order, maybe I’ll have the motivation to actually use this a bit more!

In the meantime, I can’t believe that summer is wrapping up. I love love love what I have been doing at NIH/NCI and really have no desire whatsoever to return to my thesis lab. I’m supposed to be going back within the next 2 weeks, and I feel like my thesis mentor will have to drag me out of the NIH, kicking and screaming and holding on to the HPLC machine for dear life. It’s not that I hate my thesis lab or anything; just that this summer has opened my eyes to research that can actually be interesting (truthfully, all the cloning and Western blotting I have done over the past year in my thesis lab bores me to tears).

I’ve had some amazing opportunities here that I will never get at my university, namely, the opportunity to scrub in on primate transplant surgery. It was completely unexpected and not at all affiliated with my lab group (in fact, not even with the National Cancer Institute), but after I finished up my mouse skills training class, the veterinarian asked if I had an interest in scrubbing in to macaque monkey transplant surgery. Needless to say, it was fascinating.

I do have one entertaining story to share, because you should at least get a laugh out of my near-death situation. During the week, the person who has been training me (in both the pharmacokinetic laboratory aspect and the animal studies) was out sick, leaving me to dose the mice on my own. Everything was going smoothly until I reach the last cage of mice, which was labeled as having 5 animals (because of how we have divided things up, there are different numbers in each cage). I had oral gavaged four of the mice, and couldn't find the fifth in the cage. My first thought was that while I was busy treating, one made a run for it and climbed out of the cage and was free to roam around the room, which induced a mini panic-attack, because how do I explain that I lost a mouse? Eventually I discovered that the fifth mouse had died overnight, and his fellow cagemates had buried him in the corner under all the bedding. Not the end of the world – that’s why you include extra animals in a study, right? So I pulled out the deceased mouse, stuck him in one of the euthanasia bags, and walked down the hall to put him in the carcass freezer in the procedure room. Imagine my incredible surprise (and resulting near heart attack) when I opened the freezer room, and two rats jumped out at me. That’s right. Two LIVE RATS jumped out of the CARCASS FREEZER. There was one other person in the procedure room, a big manly-looking man, who caught this out of the corner of his eye and started screaming like a girl. It’s not that I mind rodents – I handle them every day – but the last thing you expect to find in a freezer full of animal carcasses is a pair of live rats that chewed their way out of their euthanasia bags. We then had the distinct pleasure of chasing these rats around the procedure room for 20 minutes to catch them, and properly euthanize them. The moral of this story is that when euthanizing rats with CO2, please please be sure to cervical dislocate afterwards to make sure the animals are really dead, because you never know what poor little PhD student is going to be startled half to death because you tried to cut some corners. I think that I may have developed a lifelong fear of freezers as a result.

I'm Still Alive!

Phew, it's sure has been a while, hasn't it? My lack of posting hasn't been a result of a lack of science-y things of worth, in fact, it's been quite the opposite. I've had so much going on that there just aren't enough hours in the day. Lots of things to say, but instead of spelling it all out in a novel, I'll try to break things up and do a few postings over the next several days. Basically, over the past month and a half, I've had the opportunity to help train two high school students, worked insane hours attempting to wrap-up a part of a project before leaving for the summer, spent a few days at home and at the Jersey shore, started my pharmacology training at NIH (love love love it so far!), used my touch of death to break lots of expensive equipment at NIH, gave my first big research powerpoint presentation to the Department of Oncology back at school, and started my first animal experiment (which I said I would never do). Plus, I'm finding a little more time for myself and actually getting to see some of my friends, and it's amazing how much happier (and more productive!) I am not working 12 hours/day, 7 days/week. I guess I really did just need a little break.
My hours at NIH are a little crazy (as in, I am out of bed before the sun rises in the middle of July in the northern hemisphere) and I haven't quite adjusted to getting to bed at 10pm to get 7 hours of sleep, but I don't have much work to bring home and I never have to come in on weekends, so of course I think the schedule is fantastic. I do a few things for my thesis lab at home/on the weekends, but my PI seems to be a bit "out of sight, out of mind" and since he doesn't physically see me in the lab everyday, he forgets that I could be coming in on the weekends, so he hasn't been giving me any big projects. I don't think there's much that I really could be doing anyways, since most things require several days of bench work, and I can't let things sit for 5 days before working on them again.
At the moment, I am contemplating strangling myself with the faulty leaking HPLC peek tubing, but provided that I don't, tune in the next few days for some stories about my life chained to the bench.

Missing: My Life. Reward if Found!

Contrary to popular belief, I haven’t actually been locked in the -80 freezer, swallowed by the giant centrifuge, or actually died over the past month and a half (it just feels like it). It’s just that I’ve been forced to take a brief hiatus from my life… I expect that we will be reunited in roughly 5-ish years. It’s not that I am unwilling to work hard (I certainly am) or long hours (I clearly do)… just that the experience thus far has proven to be a bit more intense than I was originally anticipating. Two months ago, I couldn’t wait for the end of classes – I repeatedly heard myself tell everyone around me how much better things would be when I was done with class, how I was sure I would be putting in very long days during the week and mornings on the weekends, but I would be sure to have time to actually see them on weekend evenings. And my statement was partially correct – I am indeed much, much happier now that I no longer repeatedly bash my head into the cell or developmental biology books, attempting to learn multiple signaling pathways and HOX gene development. The one detail which slipped my mind, however, was that actually being in class and having exams were the one key factor that (somewhat) limited my hours in lab. Now that classes are over – no more excuses for why I am not in lab ALL THE TIME.

I’m not at all unhappy, surprisingly. Sometimes I worry that I will look back and regret the countless invitations to do things with friends which I have had to turn down, all the Friday nights I was trapped in lab until after 9pm, the realization that literally all I do is do benchwork in the lab, read papers at home in the evenings, and manage a few hours of sleep. But I like my lab, and even though 90% of my projects are failing miserably at the moment, I am content with the research and excited for new projects which will be waiting for me upon my return from my pharmacology training at NIH. I really like the people in the lab – we all get along very well and it’s generally a young lab so most people are only a few years older than me. While we are all diligent enough to make sure our experiments are completed in a timely fashion, it’s also the kind of lab where individuals will conjugate around the sink while washing western blots and chat and we all do seem to get along together very well. I will admit to being a tad disgruntled by the fact that I am the only graduate student my year stuck working these dreadful hours – the other students seem to stroll in at 10am and leave by 4pm, Monday-Friday only. I’m usually here between 7:30 and 8:00am on weekdays, never get out before 6:30 (there are times I am stuck here until well after 9), and weekends are just an extension of my weekdays – I’ve never put in less than 8 full hours on any given Saturday or Sunday. I don’t mean to complain, but it just gets frustrating hearing other graduate students discuss their relaxing weekends at home, when I’m putting in 9 hours in the lab on Saturday and 10 hours on Sunday. But… it’s only another five or so years of this, right? And maybe at some point during the next five years things will start to work, at least enough that I can maybe take one day off per week, or at least only work half-days on the weekends, which would be fine.

Considering it has been a month and a half, I feel like there should be something of interest going on in my life but really – there isn’t. In that month and a half I have taken off exactly three days from the lab, over Memorial Day weekend, to go visit my grandfather in the hospital. The lab finally moved down the hallway into our new space, which is at least three times the size of our old lab, and it is amazing how we seemed to have already filled the space to capacity. I finally have my OWN BENCH and my OWN DESK and I feel like a real graduate student with a home in the lab (and quite the home it is, considering I spent significantly more time here than I do in my own apartment – perhaps I should consider asking if I can move in permanently to save on the cost of rent). In two weeks, I’m heading off to the National Cancer Center for some molecular pharmacology training so I’m sure there will be a few new, fun stories to share… but don’t worry, I’m still expected to come into my thesis lab on the weekend to keep on working, so there is still a good chance that I will have some humorous encounter with the dangerous laboratory equipment here – provided I can even find it now that it has been moved into the new lab.