Taiwan: Into the lab
Jaime's post from Taiwan continues.
So I was wrong in my count of lab members. There’s not twelve. There’s eighteen. But I’m doing much better on names, although by no means do I have all of them yet. Every Monday starts with a lab meeting, where each member discusses the work they did over the previous week. It was a long meeting this Monday, because they are not used to presenting in English. There have been some interesting mix-ups in translation, although the only one that immediately comes to mind was substituting “machine” with “mushroom” when explaining the menu at a restaurant.
The lab day starts at 8, for us at least. Angela and I have taken to coming in about half an hour early to set up our computers and take care of all the email and facebook checking that needs to be done, so we can be ready to start at 8. We have a lot of learning and training to do before we can even think about designing experiments. The quantum dots (fluorescent nanoparticles) we will be using are very expensive, so Dr. Huang is being very cautious about letting us work with them just yet. One of the first tasks we have will be to compare these expensive, purchased quantum dots with another volume which were synthesized by Missouri S&T’s very own Dr. Jeffrey Winiarz. Hopefully, they will work as well as the purchased QDs, and we can be a lot more lenient with their use, since we’ll have a lot more to work with at a much lower cost.
But not everyone shows up at 8. So yesterday we sat around doing nothing for another hour or more before anyone was there to show us our next lesson (besides that, they still have their own work to do as well, so we only get lessons when they have the time). Monday we learned how to care for the tissue cells we will be using in our experiments (a line derived from lung cancer cells), and how to make the solutions we need to care for them. Neither of those took much time, but the way the day was broken up with the meeting and then a big lunch break (courtesy of Dr. Lee, Dr. Huang’s counterpart here at Dong Hwa), there wasn’t enough time to teach us anything else, so we spent a lot of time on our computers. Yesterday we accomplished more; we learned how to treat our cells with quantum dot and use the confocal microscope to examine them. We also transformed E.coli cells to insert the DNA for the different proteins we will need for the experiments. We can grow these cells, and they will produce the proteins we want, which we can then isolate for use with our tissue cells.
Today is a little ironic. We actually have some work to get done, but we haven’t been able to get to it yet (and won’t until after lunch) because of the other training we are doing. I found that kind of funny, considering all the free time we’ve had the last few days, just waiting for work to do. Our work is going to start picking up now, since we’ve learned the basics for creating the “tools” for our experiments, and now need to maintain them (which is a daily task). Lunch was fun too. We ate in the cafeteria for the first time. Angela and I went first, by ourselves, and were a little lost at first. Then a random student comes up and points us to where Dr. Huang and Dr. Lee are sitting. Somehow everyone on this campus knows who we belong to? Well, Dr. Huang helped us figure out how the cafeteria worked, and Isaac came in shortly after with several students from the lab, so we all ended up eating lunch together.
Alright, moving back in time to the weekend now. Betty (one of the students) took us to a nearby beach on Sunday. Couldn’t swim, it’s too dangerous, but we did play in the surf. Well, all of us but Isaac. He decided to wear jeans and tennis shoes. The rest of us were wearing clothing a little more accommodating to hiking up out of the surf. Regardless, we all still got drenched to the hips from some rogue waves as the tide moved in. After that, we went up the road a bit to a “museum” showing how a special fish called katsuo is prepared. The end product is a dried, smoked fish shaved crumbling thin. I’m not a particular fan of fish, but I tried a piece it, and it really just tastes like woodsmoke.
We still had some shopping to do for supplies for our apartments, so we went to this huge department store called Carrefore’s. It’s like your typical department store combined with a Walmart Supercenter. Angela describes it as a supermarket on crack. Multiple stories, but the problem of maneuvering a cart between multiple levels was solved ingeniously: magnetic escalators! And not step escalators, more like the moving sidewalks at airports, at an angle. I tried overcoming the magnets to push the cart down a level, and it did not go very successfully.
And back to the lab: Dr. Lee has a lab class in a few minutes that we are going to go sit in on and watch, so time to go! I’m working on uploading all my pictures to Shutterfly, and will post a link when they’re ready.
Trying to decide whether the rain of the last few days or the stifling humidity is worse,
Jamie