Student Research at Duke

The atrium of the LSRC was filled with a loud, happy noise this morning as PIs, lab techs and students milled about and talked science with our intrepid scientist/bloggers. Great looking posters, polished talking points, Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes — these people had their games ON!

The posters mark the official end of the eight-week summer fellowship program generously supported at Duke by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, but every one of the students I talked with said they were planning to stay on in their lab and continue the current research. Frankly, in eight weeks, there wasn’t much they could do to actually finish what they set out to do, so a lot of them seem inspired to follow their story to a logical end. As discussed previously below, some of them found the experience cemented their goals, others are looking at a slightly different tack as a result of their experience. None of them said “I hate science! I’m quitting!”
Kudos and thanks again to program director, Mary Nijhout, associate dean of Trinity College for encouraging young scientific talent throughout the year, and for encouraging this summer’s participants to blog about their experience.

Thanks for reading; I have a feeling we’ll be back next summer… (KLB)

It was welcome news to Julie Stevenson that her mentor was never really interested in Medical School or becoming a doctor. Julie isn’t either, but sometimes she feels like the odd woman out for just wanting to pursue a PhD. “I was fascinated and sort of relieved,” she says.

We’ve got company! The Duke University pre-college summer program, also sponsored by our friends at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has launched its own blog. These are 15 area high school students having their first experiences in the lab at Duke, telling us what it’s like. Check it out!

Andrew Lyu is having a great time doing science in Fan Wang’s cell biology lab, where they’re interested in how sensory information is gathered and interpreted by the brain. In addition to some molecular biology experiments that are “coming back with decent results,” he’s been examining leftover turtle heads from a neighboring lab to look at their sensory organs up close. The thing is, he’s even dreaming about science.

Each of the HHMI summer fellows is asked to interview a working scientist, usually their principal investigator, as part of the experience. Julie Sogani spent a few minutes with her PI, cancer biologist Gerard Blobe and shared the experience with us. Read it here

Lulit Price stepped out of the Tom Ortel lab yesterday to shadow two research nurses as they visited patients and gathered data for clinical trials.

So, what exactly do they do? They are the backbone of clinical research- they work in an office setting but also frequent the Duke North Hospital and Duke South clinics to see about potential subjects for current hematological studies. Donned in a white lab coat that I borrowed from Sheree, we headed off to 9th floor, oncology. Their department is primarily concerned with cancers of the blood like lymphomas and leukemia. She and I checked up on the platelet counts of three different patients to see if they were still eligible for PLADO, a nation-wide study that is looking for a more cost-effective way to transfuse platelets. Meanwhile, Robin was working on an observational study on Heparin-Induced Thrombocytopenia that follows cardiac bypass patients. The anticoagulant heparin has the disadvantage of increased clotting in certain patients. Part of her job includes giving these patients the spiel of the study and asking them to sign a consent form to donate their blood. She did this task with reservation, saying that it was difficult approaching people in the ICU who were often in a lot of pain; “I feel like a salesperson”, she told me.

Fei Lian writes (hilariously):

So today in lab I made my first mistake: forgetting to centrifuge the bacteria before suspending them in lysis buffer. Oh no’s. Supposedly, the right way to mini-prep is to first centrifuge the tubes, then dump out the supernatant, then add in lysis buffer, and then resuspend. I just added in lysis…one step ahead of my game.

Well, that took down my samples, so I’m gonna have to redo them all over again. But on a good note, our E coli friends were ready to be French Pressed today. In case you don’t know, a French Press is this high pressure thing that weighs about 20 lbs which squishes the cells until all the organelles and cell membranes explode and pop out. Sweet. And now…they’re in the high-speed (24,000rpm) centrifuge ready to be spun down. And I’m adding elution buffer to clean those tubes.

Lab is fun, seriously.

Before Rebecca Liu can study kinesins, these amazing little walking molecules that drag things around the cell, she has to learn a ton of stuff about them. Her mentor, Sharyn A. Endow in cell biology, has been assigning readings to get Rebecca up to speed and then they discuss what she’s learned. The Endow lab studies the machinery of the cell that moves things around, such as pulling the chromosomes back before the cell splits.

The motor molecule Kinesin makes an appearance just before the half-way point of this fantastic movie done by Harvard with support from our friends at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. (See the film) Kinesin is the weird barbell thing walking along a beam towards you, towing a huge load. Isn’t it cool?

It takes some imagination to see the strange, rubbery world of the cell at this scale (and the music’s usually not included) but that’s what Rebecca and the Endow lab are trying to do!

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).

Samantha Pearlman has her eyes peeled for the authentic scientist — not the goofy Christopher Lloyd character — but a real scientist. She hopes to figure them out this summer, and will tell us in her blog:

There are a lot of misconceptions about science and about people who devote their lives to science. While I’ve always loved the crazy mad scientist character with the ubiquitous white lab coat, I’m not so sure which stereotypes are actually true and which are fictional (Do researchers have social lives or are they confined to lab-intramural softball leagues? Does anyone actually use that dingy shower in the women’s restroom on the third floor of BioSci?), but I’m planning to find out this summer. And, hopefully, this blog will be a way for the outside world to see what really happens in a lab.

So, stay tuned for riveting updates from the lab. I’ll let you know when I find my first mad scientist.

We can’t wait to find out what you’ve learned, Samantha!