Getting to know you
Even though they’re on the lowest rung of the laboratory ladder, and are often stuck with the most mundane, menial jobs, we’re seeing words like “thrilled” and “lovvvvvvve” in the students’ posts this week.
Monica Hamilton is handling mice, quite literally, in Anne West’s lab:
This first week has been dedicated to simply handling the mice so that when we pick them up and place them in a maze, they don’t go berzerk from the anxiety of being touched by those darn nitrile gloves. You might imagine that the mice are cute. Well, they are at first, but after the hundredth time that your hands are used as a bathroom, the cuteness starts to wear off.
Priya Khatri inadvertently damaged some of the merchandise in Nina Sherwood’s fruitfly lab:
Every lab has some sort of routine maintenance thing that is not fun, but just has to be done. For our lab, it is transferring those hundreds of vials of Drosophila into other hundreds of vials of fresh food. In my first week, I might have transferred about 500 vials (not bragging or anything). It took some time to get used to; especially since the first one was a fiasco. Have you ever seen a picture of a cute kid releasing a jar of butterflies, with a serene expression of his face? (My) still frame of my first vial would be me staring in terror at the fruit flies escaping to freedom (some bumping in my face, some meeting the wrath of my deadly hands).
June 13th, 2007 at 10:46 am
I remember my introduction to the model organism used in my lab when I entered graduate school at Harvard. All the graduate and undergraduate students were required to rear several generations of our favorite moth: caterpillars>pupae>adults>eggs, and to observe them closely. Many PhD theses arose from someone’s awareness of different growth rates, wing size, egg production, etc. And in genetics labs, it takes a trained eye to distinguish one mutant strain from another. The importance of insight gained from close attention to such similarities and differences was described well by Evelyn Fox Keller in her biography of Nobelist Barabara McClintock, “A Feeling for the Organism.”