Science in the City

I’ve been wondering..
After Jonah was spit up by the whale, was he the same guy who went into the mouth of the leviathan?
After all these experiences, am I the same person who started them?

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As was the case last Summer, the close of the lab season has been a headlong dive into scrambling for results, getting painfully frank feedback on half-conceived powerpoint slides and revising research reports well past one’s bedtime.  I’m taking a break from such revisions now, just before five in the a.m. civilian time to dither [...]

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Between compiling and sifting data and re-running experiments statistically in need of re-doing…. and in the gaps between tending cells that have overgrown and those needing encouragement merely to survive, I’ve been attempting to add a new dimension to my sterol organization project underway.
Because there are known proteins that contribute to cell polarity, and because [...]

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Work has settled into a happy rhythm.  I arrive when the lab space is quiet, and move quickly through my checklist.  I assess the overnight cells and prepare appropriate media to keep the pace of their torrid dividing-growing-dividing stoked.  I review the overnight images, and begin the slow piecework of editing the best slides together [...]

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Apologies for the implied self-aggrandizement of this post’s title, but after a day like today, I couldn’t resist.
We left off last episode with an unsupervised camera shutter clicking away the waning hours of a late summer afternoon at the northern tip of Manhattan.  If there were a window on this 14th floor room, our sentinel [...]

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In my ongoing effort to squeeze the most work out of the shortest possible time (with a practical consideration for the fact that I don’t exactly live across the street from the lab) I’m here between errands on a Sunday, trying to get the ‘automator’ function on the epiflourescent microscope to do some of the [...]

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The week’s efforts have continued to prove productive, but also have felt more challenging than before. Part of it is due to the subtle shift from hands-on work to more of an actuarial exercise as we count and measure cells, and plot their rates of growth, all for some indications of what’s happening in [...]

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