"DWARF SET ON FIRE AS MAD MONDAY CELEBRATIONS ESCALATE"
Brilliant, right?
I should have known that, given its hilarious first moments (increased by the fact that I had to explain to Ivana (a) why I was peeing myself laughing and (b) what a dwarf is), today was going to be a good day.
I arrived in the lab at 8am and was called into Lindy's office at 9. Despite the woe I felt as she loaded my USB with around 300 papers to look over when it comes to writing my literature review next month (help!), my mood was significantly lifted as she gave me my first assignment. An honours student, Marcus, has assigned himself way too much to do for his project, so there are some loose ends that need tying up. This week I'll be doing some image analysis on retinal cells that have been treated with infrared light, which Lindy suspects increases the activity of certain chemicals that cells use to repair themselves after damage. It mostly consists of measuring some aspects of the images (of which there are 300+) and analysing this information statistically on Excel. It might not be the most exciting work, but I'm just happy not to be twiddling my thumbs and looking awkward! There's also a chance that my work could be put into a paper and published, so that's pretty cool.
In between cracking on with this, we were inducted into the histology, cell culture and surgery labs. This was all a bit same-same and very health and safety orientated, but I guess it has to be done. However, I was lucky enough to sit in on the experiments that my work is leading up to with Lindy and Carole in the surgery lab. Animal rights activists, look away now! Basically, they're finding that the retinal cells don't respond very well, whereas spinal cord slices behave similarly when isolated to how the situation is in the body. To study this, Carole gave 8 rat pups (one-day-old - I hate rats but they were pretty cute!) a lethal dose of anaesthetic, then chopped their heads off and removed the top part of their spines under a microscope. I know, grim, especially when one's little body was still twitching when she decapitated it, but I thought it was pretty interesting. Lindy then put the bits of spine on a tiny guillotine called a tissue chopper, which cut them into tiny, gooey strings. It was as she was separating these tiny parts in a petri dish full of nutrients that she told I'd better pay attention, as I'd be doing this soon. After she was done, she let me have a go at cutting some spares up and separating them using forceps under the microscope. It makes your hands look "like Gigantor" as she put it and it was so hard to keep a steady hand, but amongst the debris I managed to salvage a few for culture, which she said wasn't so bad for a first try.
Lindy left and Carole showed me some adult rats, which were still under anaesthetic after an operation to dissect their optic nerves. This was news to me, as I'd seen them lying on the side and thought there were dead! We put them in a cage and they started to come to and sniff around, at which point I remembered that I hated rats. I didn't realise that people in my field were qualified to do any work on animals that keeps them alive, so that was cool.
At lunch I met a load more people who work in the lab, some of whom are my sort of age which was fun. I'm used to scientists being a bit weird and not having personalities, so I was pleasantly surprised by the banter going around the room. Tamasin told me that she loves my voice and that I sound like Kate Middleton, which I know is inaccurate, but it proves what I'd heard about Aussies liking the English accent!
The one downside to today is that it's been raining really heavily, which I wasn't counting on. I'll remember to bring my coat tomorrow, as I got absolutely drenched running up to admin to get a visitor's card. One requirement of said card is having a photo taken, in which, thanks to the monsoon, I resemble a drowned rat...
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