Took some pictures of my desk today and wandered over to one of my labs. Haven't been working in that particular lab all week, so the excessive piles of biohazard waste are not from me. For some odd reason, the Ph.D's feel as though they are above emptying the garbage and leave that little surprise for me when I return in there. I'll snap some pics of the bigger lab where I do my regular work (non molecular biology stuff) tomorrow when I head in.
My desk/cube
The Prion Lab
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orange Crocs ftw
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Your job seems pretty interesting (science geek here), and the shoes are rad, of course. What exactly do you do?
You have the best shoes. I wish guys could find gems like those. Where did you get those?
As the name implys, the prion lab is where we do testing on infectious prion. Essentially we take scrapie infected hamster brain homogenate, spike it into a unit of donated blood to make it contaminated (to simulate blood from a donor who contracted vCJD as a result of eating a "mad cow"), then filter the blood through one of our filters. I keep a sample of the infected blood (pre-filtration), then take a sample after filtration and run a western blot assay to determine the quantitative level of infectious PrPsc present in both. By comparing the levels before and after filtration, we can determine how effective our filter was at removing the infectious prion from the unit of blood.
There hasn't been too many cases reported thus far of transfusion transmitted vCJD, but it's expected to rise dramatically in the upcoming years. It's got a long incubation period, so all the folks over in the UK who possibly ate "mad cow" hamburgers won't be showing signs or symptoms of illness for another 10-20yrs. Even though they're symptom free now, they're still infected and could pass the disease along if they donated blood. Our filter is supposed to protect against that by removing, or at least reducing, the infectious prion from the unit of blood that's supposed to be saving someone's life - not ruining it.
I'd take a pic of us in full PPE, but it usually freaks people out. Everytime someone walks past the window and sees us in lab coat, booties, full face shield and double gloves, they make a weird face and quickly keep on moving.
I despise crocs. That being said, everything else was neato!
don't be hating on the crocs. they're the most bestest comfortablestest shoes I've ever owned. seriously, I can stand around in the lab for 10hrs straight and my feet are fine. with regular shoes my tootsies are hurting after 2hrs.
The Biomedical Support Lab (Blood lab as we call it)
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Fridges/Freezers and plasma expressors on the left
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Flow cytometers - where do we residual leukocyte counting and immunophenotyping
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Lab bench for general R&D purposes
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The poles on the left are where we hang up the blood units for filtrations so we can monitor the flow rate with the scales
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A filtration in progress
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Blood! This is whole blood at 100x magnification. The big cell is a white blood cells, the red ones should be obvious, and the platelets are the tiny purple dots. The RBC morphology is a bit funky cause the cells are old and our stain isn't the greatest, but you get the idea.
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This is a slide made from a buffy coat preparation. White blood cell and platelets counts are grossly elevated compared to normal whole blood. (50x magnification)
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Same slide just at 100x. The 3 main white blood cells are all shown here, lymphocyte up top, neutrophil in the middle, and monocyte down on the bottom.
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Isn't science fun? :)
Whoa, that job looks rather interesting - is it tough?
tough? not particularly. It keeps me thinking most days, which is what's most important to me. The toughest part would be having to deal with an incompetant idiot lab manager and senior VPs who haven't been in a lab in ages and don't believe you when you tell them certain tests take 3 days to do. It's the whole business end of it that I could do without. I don't like the politics involved, I'm just there to do science.
But to me, it's fun. I'd much rather have the freedom to do my own testing and get to do something different each day, than be paid tons of money to do the same boring thing over and over again (my old job at the hospital). So now I get the best of both worlds, do the fun stuff for my real full time job, and work at the hospital on weekends to help pay the bills.
And Jesse, smart people are allowed to like video games too :p: