Ain't nobody got time for that

I learnt from day one here that performing tasks that other researchers are too qualified and, more importantly, too busy to do themselves comes with the territory of "placement student", or "lab bitch" as one of my colleagues eloquently put it the other day. I feel it necessary to share what I consider to be a prime example of this. Carole had taken some images of samples of spinal cord treated with various drugs. The microscope takes an image every few micrometers and collates these into one 3-dimensional picture of a tissue several millimetres thick. A piece of tissue that thick requires maybe 100 images, all being analysed for three different dyes to locate the axons, nuclei and nodes, which causes a huge amount of interference in the final product, making any further analysis difficult. In layman's terms, they're really blurry.

My happy Tuesday afternoon job, therefore, was to sit in a freezing cold (for cell storage) and pitch black (for cell protection) room with an ancient computer that still uses Windows 98 and a whopping great cell-central microscope, find each of Carole's images and hit "deconvolve", which removes the interference but takes about twenty minutes per image. You'd think that working in a state-of-the-art laboratory such as this one, kitted out with multi-million-dollar equipment and run by some of the pioneers of the world of neuroscience, would eliminate mundane tasks such as this, but no. There were 16 images, so that was my afternoon wholly occupied by the agonising cycle of Open - Deconvolve - Wait - Save. The only bright side to this hell was that the outrageous amount of waiting involved gave me an excuse to watch The Untouchables on my laptop; replace the wheely plastic stool with an armchair and would have been just like going to the cinema.

My companion for the day

Although this kind of work isn't exactly what I signed up for, I understand that jobs like this are part and parcel of every scientist's career, even for people as high up as my supervisor Lindy. At the other side of the scale, I'll be carrying out my first solo experiment on Wednesday, a.k.a. my birthday. It has taken a huge amount of planning and, with four days to go, there's still a lot I'm unsure of and I'm pretty terrified. Happy 21st to me eh? Talking of my birthday, I'm spending this gloomy weekend doing the online theory for the Scuba Diving Course my wonderful parents have bought me, which I'll be doing next weekend. It's something I've wanted to do for as long as I can remember and I'm so excited to get started.

For anyone that didn't get the reference in the title of this post, first of all, shame on you. Here is the lovely Sweet Brown (yes, that's her genuine name) to explain its origin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGxwbhkDjZM. Too good, right?