{"id":1246,"date":"2010-09-29T16:01:46","date_gmt":"2010-09-29T20:01:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/?p=1246"},"modified":"2010-09-29T16:06:52","modified_gmt":"2010-09-29T20:06:52","slug":"taking-the-plunge-into-the-world-of-ultrasound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/2010\/09\/29\/taking-the-plunge-into-the-world-of-ultrasound\/","title":{"rendered":"Disappointment Returns By Way of a Poke in the Eye With a Flimsy Diatom"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

It was another late start this morning, another 8-miler that didn’t start an hour before sunrise as it would have had to, were I to have made it into work at a respectable hour. As I sat down to start the day, I was forced to acknowledge that it’s been a long time since I last made any real sort of progress and my momentum flagged\u2014really, it’s been since the last successful three-day push, and that was almost three weeks ago now. I’m not really sure what to do about it, but I am getting tired of this lack of momentum. Aside from the very real and urgent distractions of Dave’s manuscript review, the visa situation, and the confusion about\u00a0Lophocyrtis,\u00a0I think I’ve been holding back on launching into the sonication project because I’m afraid it just won’t work out. But, as I have realized many times before, waiting for something to go wrong is no better than doing it, making it go wrong, and moving on. In fact, it’s much worse.<\/p>\n

So, the plan for today, then, is to tick a few smaller items off my to-do list this morning, and then head out to give the sonication a shot this afternoon, come what may. Finally sent off an email to Dave asking how to request the MRC samples for the lineage-based study. That was a long time coming, and I’m glad I’ve gotten it done.<\/p>\n

But the afternoon proved to be a repeat performance, in a novel guise, of a now well rehearsed theme in my PhD.<\/p>\n

“Science is frustrating,” Jacques pronounced, as he peered down the microscope at the sample of the diatom culture I had plopped onto a slide minutes earlier, to see what it looked like. “Did you take a look at the cells before sonicating them?”<\/p>\n

I tried to see if he was joking. “Jacques, these are the unsonicated cells.”<\/p>\n

“What? Well, they sent you garbage. These don’t even look like diatoms… you should call them up and get your money back.” Now, unfortunately, he was joking; I could try, he said, but that probably won’t work. I offered my hypothesis why they may look like they do\u2014having run out of nutrients as the cell density skyrocketed, the cells started growing with very little silica in their walls\u2014and Jacques thought this was the most likely explanation. It was reassuring to have another pair of eyes, professor eyes no less, see the same thing I saw, but it was cold comfort. This project, it’s rapidly becoming clear, is headed the way of all those other projects.<\/p>\n

As I took a breather for cookies and tea with our new postdoc Tinker, Andy came to join us in the lounge. He asked how things were going and, wincing, I told him what had just transpired. “Well, if you grow these up in nutrient-replete conditions, will they turn out OK?” I could barely believe it, the suggestion that I might do my own culture work after the disastrous failed attempt two years ago, with the shitty conditions in his lab, and so close to what I had once hoped would be the end of my PhD.\u00a0\u00a0I brushed him off with the remark that I didn’t know whether frozen cells would be viable. No, that’s not my biggest concern\u2014hell, for $50 we can order a perfectly viable starter culture from the CCMP, but it’s the fact that it would take six months of full time work to set up the lab to a point where I could do this sort of thing. And for what? A stab in the dark\u2014a half-baked idea for a sonication experiment of which nobody knows whether it’ll show anything worth writing about anyway?<\/p>\n

I trudged back to Colleen’s lab for the rest of the afternoon, to find the confirmation of what I can only suspect must be true. Check the other vials, to see if those cells look the same; sonicate and wash a few of them, make SEM stubs, see if they look like I think they look. The proof will be in the pudding, but when the milk’s already curdled before you start, you don’t need proof to know what it’ll taste like.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was another late start this morning, another 8-miler that didn’t start an hour before sunrise as it would have had to, were I to have made it into work at a respectable hour. As I sat down to start the day, I was forced to acknowledge that it’s been a long time since I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1246"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1251,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246\/revisions\/1251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}