What have I done lately?

Time flies when you are busy. It has been nearly a month since I last wrote. I wish I could say that we have made earth-shattering discoveries this last month but that is never the case. Science moves forward one small data point at a time.

My mutagenesis experiement worked beautifully. It is always nice when something works out the way it is supposed to. I am looking forward to getting these plasmids packaged into viruses for further experiements.

I hired a new work-study student a couple of weeks ago. I am not sure how she will work out but I have high hopes. She has been very sick the last week and a half so I haven't seen her in lab but I am hoping she gets better soon. We have a lot to do and really need her help. I have been very fortunate to this point with my undergrads. This woman is the fourth student I will have hired and I hope she works out as well as the others. The last three students I have hired have been great - particularly the last one I had over the summer. This new woman is young (she's only a sophomore) which is both good and bad and both for the same reason - no experience. It's bad because I have to teach her everything but it is good because there will be no bad habits to break.

Today I am doing more Western blots (am) and then I will be doing some animal surgeries this afternoon. On the subject of animals, we have had an outbreak of Tyzzer's disease in the rat colony in one of our animal care units. The animal care facility has not been able to eradicate it so they are requiring us to kill all of our rats and start over (sounds familiar). Although it is a big headache because I now have to start my breeding colony over, I really can't complain. I only have/had 13 rats. Other labs are out thousands of dollars and have to start many ongoing experiments over. All of us can at least be thankful that the mouse colonies haven't been affected. I have a friend whose lab has 250 different strains of mice. Some of them are worth $100,000. How can a mouse be worth that much? If you take into account the amount of work that goes into making a transgenic mouse and the complexity of the process, $100,000 is quickly reached.

My timer is going to go off in one minute. I need to get back to work.