The 99%

Get ready for my yearly overly sentimental post.

To start this out, I should make it clear that "99%" has nothing to do with Wall St. or economics or people. It has to do with a quote from my boss. At the beginning of the summer, she said, "In Bench Science, 99% of what we do ends in failure. We live for the 1%."  I heard it and I liked it, but I didn't take it seriously. After this summer, I know exactly what she was talking about.

This summer I got my own project to work on (yay!) whereas over the course of the year, I've been helping my grad student with her project. My project involved lots of trouble shooting, a terrible antibody, a not-so-helpful tech support team, and 5000 repeats of the same experiment, but it was absolutely worth every second. I can honestly say that there are few things in this world that make me as happy as getting nice, shiny, interpret-able data, whether or not it's what I had expected.

It has been a summer of forgetting my protein ladder and using it in every lane. It has been a summer of cursing out Western Blots, dancing in dark rooms, jubilantly repeating experiments hoping to get data that looks just like it did last week, and repeating them begrudgingly hoping that I never have to do them again. It's been a summer of happiness and frustration and mistakes, but most importantly, understanding. This is science. It's hard and frustrating and time consuming and mentally exhausting, but it's also the best thing in the world. This summer has been a lot of that 99% and I won't go so far to say that without the 99% I couldn't appreciate that 1%, but I will say that the 1% of success makes the 99% more than worth it and it's the 1% that makes the world what it is today.

I'm sitting in my room enjoying my 5 days of vacation before school starts. I'm supposed to be packing and getting ready to go to the store and go dorm shopping, but I decided to be lazy. Instead, I'm sitting on my bed going through old Facebook messages, Facebook stalking people I haven't seen in about a year, and thinking about how much things have changed since I've started school and started working in the lab.

It's officially been a year of my working in the lab and I can't say that it's been anything less than amazing. I'm a firm believer that some years are bigger than others and this past year has been amazing and fun and interesting and really really big. I got into a lab, I made friends, and I did science and I couldn't have asked for more.

We also had lab pictures recently. We're the hottest scientists in the south east.

Preview Pic.

Kimwipes are Great

For those of you that don't know, Kimwipes are "delicate task wipers" designed for lab use. Sure you can use them to clean your glasses, do too-lazy-to-take-out-paper math, or wipe away tears, but they're made for science. Cleaning up media messes and wiping off cell scrapers and wiping the lens of something that you probably don't want to scratch.

Today was the last day of one of my labbies. I've only been in the lab for a year, so it hasn't been as hard for me as it has been for the others, but I'm definitely going to miss him. Yeah he's going on to bigger and better things, but it really doesn't make it any easier to not see someone that you've seen almost every day for the past 345 days. My grad student has always told me that one of the greatest things about science is the fact that we get to meet all of these smart, charming, and amazingly unique people, and from what I've seen in my short career, that is ABSOLUTELY true. Over the past year, my labmates have served as examples of how I want to live my life; they've become a second family to me. They've been the friends I wish I could be, the parents I one day want to be, and they have the kind of deep and meaningful relationships with those around them that I can only hope for when I'm older. They're kind and smart and cool and funny and I honestly don't think I could have stumbled into a more amazing group of misfits.

Today my grad student told me that one of the worst parts of science is getting to spend time with and bond with all of these smart, charming, and amazingly unique people only to have them leave. We understand that every experience is just a stage in our careers and in our lives, but wow, it's sad. Since this is just a part of science, does that make it okay to use Kimwipes to wipe away the tears? Who cares? We'll do it anyways.

If you have 'Myco', 'Myces', or 'Mycena' in your scientific name, I HATE you.

We have recently ended the war on gels. We've undoubtedly won. I made 6 Western-gels the other day and not a single one leaked. Mission Accomplished (hopefully I won't regret saying this).

With the end of the war on gels, a new enemy has, again, reared its ugly mycelium. Of course, like any scientist that works with tissue culture, I hate having my cultures contaminated, but it stings slightly more when it's fungal for me just because we have history. My first experience with fungal contamination was a few years ago while culturing C. elegans. I'm not going to get into GREAT detail, but this fungus was a...um... jerk. Long story short it entered the nematodes through any available orifice and ate them from the inside out. It also messed up their eggs and prevented them from hatching. Needless to say, any experiments I had going on were no longer going on.

Experience number 2 was in my first real lab work as an intern. We did tumor and stem cell work and it was fun and used actual sterile technique. Did that help? It definitely helped select for a fungus that was an absolute nightmare. You could go through the lab with a black light at one point and you could see it growing on things. By the end of it everything had been autoclaved, the hallways leading to our labs smelled like hospital, and all experiments were forced to cease because of the wide spread contamination. It took a month to deal with it, but it was dealt with.

 < Not mine

Experience number 3 and the last experience was very very recent. Right after the lab outing, actually. I came back and 1 of my cultures was definitely filled with fungus and the others were sketchy. What did I do? I bleached the bitches and ethanoled the incubator. Problem solved.

And yes, I know you're not a fungus Mycobacterium, but come on, one of your species cause TB. And yes, I also plan to post about the lab outing soon... a little at a time.

Pokemon Master!

Do you see this? That is right! It's the badge from my second conference. I feel like I'm Ash Ketchum... Without the intense awesome battles or the really cool creatures to fight for me or the team of loyal and awesome friends and.... whatever. The point is... I went to another conference and this on was way more high profile and the talks were way more interesting than the last, which was expected. It was 3 days of intense talks and I learned more in those 3 days than I probably would've reading 50 papers on the various topics presented on. I don't really do cancer research and not much epigenetics, so this was a great learning experience for me.

 I also met a few people, including a man who worked for Genetech as a researcher and we chatted for a while. It was interesting and it pushed me a little bit more towards the idea of going into industry after Grad School. It's not like I'm in a rush though... I have a lot of time to decide.

 I also have to condense all of those talks into a mini-presentation for my lab mates. Woo hoo. It's weird that spell check still doesn't recognize the word epigenetics. Get with it, spell check.

Oh, since I've been lazy in posting and we're talking about it, I became a member of the AACR. Also, I took a picture of my breakfast for the first day of the conference because I'm cool and hipster and that's how I role.

Random spoiler for next post,"Things That Should Have Something in Them, but Don't".

You're welcome. 

Post-Game (Finals) and Start of Summer

So I did well on all of my finals (woo!). Another semester of all A's and the sleep deprivation was totally worth the feeling I got when I saw my grades at the end. Although my microbiology class was completely and utterly ridiculously hard, I really appreciate what I learned and having a super-difficult class and doing well is definitely more rewarding than a super easy one. Well, starting this coming semester, every last one of my classes will be math or science and I'll be stacking on the lab classes so in addition to the not-life that I already have, I'll have a ton of extra not-life to go around.

This summer I'm still working at the lab and I'm commuting the 30 minutes(no traffic) to the city every morning. To avoid the traffic debacle, I leave at around 6:20am because if I leave that early, it's a 30-minute drive. Otherwise it turns into around an hour long drive that sucks up my lovely gas. This summer I'll be working on my own project (woohoo again) and the first week was stressful just because it's a totally different dynamic working on my own. There were points where I walk away from one thing and then totally forget about it or realize I had more to do than I had thought and just driving me crazy. One morning, every alarm and its mother thought that it would be a great idea to harass me and beep and be annoying and just AHHHH!


I also got this amazing water bottle. The only problem I have with it is explained by the meme below.

I also feel as though it's important to mention that despite a few mistakes (like using ladder instead of loading dye in my samples), the war on rebellious gels is going well. I haven't had a leaky gel in well over 2 months and it's not because I'm not making gels. I'm totally making gels they're just the well behaved gels that all people who run westerns aspire to raise. I'm so proud to say that most of my gels fit into society and do their job well. Good job guys. We've won.

The post felt kind of wrong without a third picture so I'll throw this in here. This was from a time my grad student discovered the debit card-taking soda machine. It's also a great time to show-case the table that we now have outside the lab for our drinks and food and drugs. Not drugs. We don't do drugs.

To end this post, I have to say that things are going as well as they could be. Haven't set anything on fire (yet), doing good science, and learning (the usual).

It's That Time of the Semester Again

I'll give you 5.9 internets if you can guess why there are so many Mtn Dew bottles on my desk. If you need a  few hints, it's oft associated with conditions such as sleep deprivation, intense stress, and lots of head-desk interaction. If you guessed finals, then you're right!

You might be wondering why, if I'm so busy, am I sitting here writing a blog.  It's over several days and at this point, I have no idea what else I was going to write about. So I'm just going to post a shiny picture from the conference I just went to.

I also have Chinese food.

Who knew they had tofu chicken at random places? Not me.

I swear I'm in a "Final Destination Movie"

Today was one of those days where I almost died like 23 times... okay... maybe not 23. Like 3. FINE! If you're going to pressure me into it, I'll say like once. Geeze.

First thing that happened was during a routine titration. I had to kneel on a stool to see the top of the burette and I slipped a little bit, causing the beaker full of ethanol and my O. Acid to fall all over me and the floor, shattering my beaker in the process. Barring the fact that I was covered in an extremely flammable liquid and there was glass on the floor I was pretty fine. Later on, I burned myself on my hotplate! You might argue, "Ron, that's not almost dying!", but I say otherwise. Whose to say that I won't later die of... something related to that burn, hm? The final freak accident that almost killed me was when I later slipped on the not-quite-dry remains of my first mess. I could've easily hit my head to any number of dangerous things! If it weren't for my exceptional and cat-like reflexes, I might not have been here to type this! Also almost got hit by a car going like 40 miles per hour, but that's like whatever. I live in a city.

Now in the Final Destination movies, some freak accidents that the victims are to be victimized in are avoided through some miraculous miracle, usually a premonition. After avoiding this extremely deadly tragedy, they go about their lives and die in freak accidents just as unlikely as them surviving the initial intended disaster. I tried to narrow down the events that might have triggered my unfortunate circumstances and I have come down to 2 or 3 depending on how you count them. The first would be the 4 tests that I've had in the last 7 days, which I finished alive and intact earlier today. The second may be considered part of the first I guess. The second would be the should-be toxic amounts of caffeine that I consumed on Tuesday and Wednesday to study for my Thursday test. 3-5 hour energies, coffee, and a Mountain-dew in 15 hours. The third, or again, the second depending on how you count it would be this ridiculous escalator that I went down to go to the train station. There was a point where I felt as though I was going horizontal, it was that steep.


It's also pretty long. It's definitely scarier going down. I didn't get a picture going down the first tie because I didn't want the people infront of me thinking I was a crazy-creepy-stalker guy. And then I was too afraid to go back down again. Thinking about it... it was most definitely the escalator

Hot!

So after my 5:30am lab fun, I went over to the Undergraduate Research Conference and met some pretty cool people. Had some arts, some sciences, and some other random stuffs. Talked to some older more experienced peeps got some good advice and good ideas about what I want to do for my poster/presentation in October. Oh, I also got the summer position thing where I get paid to do summer science. Yay me!

So after the conference, we went to a Mexican restaurant that shall remain unnamed. The lady who served us was absolutely and quite unarguably crazy. She was also very mean with fun snide remarks and also yelling that our plates were hot when I was sliding mine closer. The plate was not even mildly hot. Irish pub is next on the lab-list. 

Also... apparently a crossed out penguin means don't freeze but refrigerate.

OctoFuzzie. Our fuzzy pad wielding overlord.

So there's this undergraduate research thing going on later today that I want to attend. As a result, I've been awake since about 3:30 and am in le lab at 5:30. The walk over here wasn't as sketch as I thought it might be. I barely saw anyone, in car or out and it was pretty peaceful. You can kind of smell Spring in the air and it's not 12 degrees outside so the walk was nice and relaxing.

This is OctoFuzzie, the newest member of the lab. OctoFuzzie has been in the lab for a total of 2 days and I think he likes his job so far. He's way better at holding the fuzzy pads we use for our westerns than the make-shift clothesline we had before. Speaking of westerns, I have become western god. I think. I haven't had a leaky gel in about 2 weeks (except now that I've said that I'll never have a non-leaky gel again) so I think I've finally got it down. OctoFuzzie seems to be a part of our goal to make the lab as tacky as possible. He's no where as cool as the tacky Festivus tree that we had up or the lights that they recently made us take down (fire safety peoples are mean(I don't mean that)), but he does his job like a true cephalopod.

While we are on the topic of decorations. Here's a nice picture of my lab bench pics that I have hung up.

The middle picture is definitely my favorite. (All comics from xkcd)

It pretty much sums up how I feel a lot of times in lab. Of course I enjoy the work, but I still have no idea what is going on a lot of times, which is okay because in science years, I'm like 4.

LOL GELS.

 I'm sorry for not posting in the last few weeks! I am going to make several posts a day for several days to make up for my terrible-ness.

Here is a pair of terrible gels to make you feel better. These are terrible gels made with TALENT.

The one on the right has a strange, super cool slope and the one on the left looks like beautiful sloping hills. I could totally be a gel artist. 

Today I went to a talk by a prof. from a local university. It was honestly one of the best talks that I've ever seen. He was humorous, intelligent, he explained the basics without going too far. Of course, with that being said, I haven't seen many talks. Afterwards, I had lunch with the speaker, a postdoc, and about 5 Grad students where he talked to us about... well... science. Any chance to get wisdom from someone who has already run the gauntlet is appreciated. It is also quite possible that we might to a collaboration with his lab, which would definitely be something I would possibly be interested, if not getting involved in, keeping close track of just because flies are way cool and epigenetics and PTM's are way cooler. A good day it was. 

I HATE gels

First week back at school has been great. Busy, but I like being busy. What I don't like ,however, are leaky gels. Literally 75% of the gels I have made since being back have leaked! It's not like there is any special technique to setting them up, so I'll assume that I need to make a sacrifice to the science gods in order to restore my luck. It's not even just making the gels! Everything gel-related has been going wrong.

1. Gels not separating from their glass plates correctly

2. Gels trying to be cute and fold or whatever they do

3. Gels ripping (thankfully at random corners) when I try to put them on filter paper

4. Filling leaky gels a little more in hopes that it'll compensate for the leak... and then it stops leaking

5. Gels not running completely correctly

So I've compiled a list of possible Sacrifices

Mice Don't have any of those. Also not allowed to do that.
Baby Trees?  Don't want to contribute to global warming
Gels  That would be counter productive
Lab mates? Like them too much. Also very illegal.
Roommates? Still very illegal.

I'll just blame it on the fact that it's been raining for the last 4 or 5 days and assume that since it's sunny now things will be better. If not, I'm sorry baby trees.

   <=== Gels before they become evil