it's like I'm an adult!

Today was my first day in the lab. 9-5:30 today. Dude, I am an adult. What! It was one part dull, one part exciting and many parts awesome. The lab uses mice to study a lot of cool biology things that I don't feel like explaining that relate to diabetes. Essentially, there is a mutation that causes the mice to not become obese on a high fat diet and the lab is looking into why some adipose tissue grows a lot (causing obesity) and some doesn't when the tissue is structurally identical.

I started the day by getting lost and ending up on the wrong side of the building. There is a dude on that side with almost the same name as the professor I am working for, so those people were pretty confused. But I made it over successfully with the help of a nice lady. The professor I'm working for is really sweet. He spoke to me for about 90 minutes about what the lab does and then gave me a book to read. I read most of the day and met some other people who work in the lab. They were all pretty nice and predictably asked me how NYC is. I did some more internet research, which mostly consisted of me looking up terminology on wikipedia.

At the end of the day I went up to the mice room. That was pretty much the highlight of the day. I got to wear a lab coat. Fancy stuff.

First we stopped off at the autoclave room, where everything looked to be 50 or 60 years old. The autoclave machine has been used so many times that you can't turn the knob to the mark for the function you want. You have to turn it past it. They mostly judge where to turn to based off of the sound the machine makes. ... yeah.

The mouse room is really dirty from mites and diseases, so the security level is F, which is really bad. We had to put on booties, disposable lab coats, gloves and sleeves. The undergrads I was observing had to feed and weigh the mice. They told me about the projects going on and I looked at a bunch of adorable mice. Sadly, one of the pregnant mothers in the vitamin A deficiency experiment had a miscarriage and we had to euthanize her. It was morbidly cool because we saw the fetus in her bedding. There was only one so the woman I was observing hypothesized that she had eaten the other ones.

I am looking forward to tomorrow because it will supposedly involve cell cultures.

Best,

Sara