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hokuwf
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Name: Hoku
Gender: Male
Interests: Mountain climbing, motorcycle riding, skydiving, rock climbing, offending violent psychopaths, and long-term retirement plans.
Expertise: Everything I do.
Message: message me
Member Since:
6/22/2005
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| Right now we're growing a cell line for some of our experiments, instead of using fresh blood donations for every one. "Cell lines" are generally cancer cells, often isolated from patients, that have certain desirable features (like, for example, not dying, and in this case being vulnerable to HIV). The accompanying datasheet can be a little creepy, though.
"<Cell line> was originally derived from the peripheral blood of a 19-year-old male with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in relapse."
I wonder if he survived? There are many cases of peoples' cells being used in the laboratory long after they themselves have passed on.
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| New tires on the bike!
I go now, to find some dirt roads on which to try 'em out.
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| Today the BCMB office released an updated policy on time limits for completion of a PhD. As "...timely completion is essential to the academic integrity of our program", we now are required to complete our PhD within 8 years, with two 1-year extensions for extenuating circumstances. We are dismissed if we do not complete our PhDs within 10 years.
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| I was watching yet another crime show set in Baltimore with my housemates last night. I don't know how it started, but Basil joked that we needed to get a shotgun to keep ourselves safe. Paul, taking it seriously, was...opposed to the idea. He thought that someone would get drunk and shoot themselves. We started pointing out the obvious advantages, like cheap ammo, the fact that it would only be $50 each if we split it, the fact that it would look so good hanging above the TV in the living room...
You have got to admit, those are fairly compelling reasons. Maybe, instead of calling it a shotgun, we can refer to it as "crackhead repellent". | | |
| Today I submitted my choices for my first lab rotation. The rotation process is, essentially, how you pick an advisor and a lab, by spending a few months in each of three labs that you're interested in.
This year, unlike last year, the program is stepping up their schedule, which means that today (the second week since the start of grad school) we had to submit our choices, and next week we start our first rotation. The program has about a hundred faculty members in a broad range of subspecialties. We're expected to email the ones we're interested in, talk to them about research and rotations to determine who we want to choose for our rotations, and then actually rotate with them. To help us pick (or to confuse us more), we have been hearing from 4-5 PIs (Principle Investigator...the guy who runs a lab) a day about their research. In addition, of course, to classes, journal club, and one-on-one interviews with them.
Because I have somewhat broader interests than many of my classmates, I probably interviewed with more people, in more departments, than your average BCMB student. Fortunately and unfortunately, the program is actually pretty good...which means that it's chock-full of great research, with great PIs. Winnowing down my list of, well, twelve PIs that I interviewed with, has been hard. How big of a lab do I want? More pure science, or more clinical? Biophysics, biochemistry, developmental biology, immunology, neuroscience, or pharmacology?
Right now, I think that's I'm going to use the rotations system to sample a bit of everything. My first rotation will probably be similar to my work at Children's, with fast-paced work and a much closer link to the clinic than most other labs. Next I'm planning on doing a rotation through a crystallography lab, which would involve attempting to solve the 3-dimensional structure of a protein of interest and thus be able to draw conclusions about the link between structure and function. This is a very "hard-science" type of lab (with an energetic, young PI), but it's a very reductionist view of biological processes which is hard to apply to very complex interactions (the work becomes technically overwhelming). My final rotation is a bit more nebulous, because there are at least three different PIs who have very interesting work in very different areas. Hopefully by then I'll have a better idea about what I need in a lab.
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