Bring to Light

Fall has most definitely arrived. On my 5-block commute home from the lab today, I was unmistakably cold, even with my scarf wrapped around my neck. It's not that I don't like the fall, I actually like it a lot, it's just the inevitability of the approaching winter, which makes it a bit blue. What I love most about the summer are the long days and not having to carry heavy sweater and jackets. But honestly, I am glad this long hot and humid summer is over now. As much as I sometimes I wish I lived in California where the weather was nice most of the time, I do like the seasons.

For some time now, I have been in a "fall mood". Like today, all I wanted to do was to come home after a long afternoon being stuck in the flow cytometry lab - I'll explain in a minute - and curl up on the couch under my fleece blanket with a hot cup of tea and something sweet. So I did. I finished reading the book I have been carrying around with me for a couple of months now, the story of becoming a doctor at NYU's Bellevue Hospital, Danielle Ofri's Singular Intimacies. This was the first time I had been in the mood to read in months. This happens periodically. Normally, I go through books relatively quickly, I love reading; even if I don't like one, I move onto the next one, I go to the library, Barnes and Noble, sit in cafes with books, read on the subway; but every once in a while, I just seem to run out of steam or patience, I am not sure what it is. I think that this time around it had to do with writing my paper. I spent too many hours reading and writing and editing and the last thing I wanted to do was more reading when I finally got out of lab. My paper was finally published a week ago, wohooo!!!!, and I could finally stop worrying about all that.

When you work on a project for three years, with all its ups and downs, frustrations and excitements, failures and successes, it becomes so much a part of your life that it is both difficult and necessary to let go of it. I had grown bored of mine by the end; all that reading and thinking about one thing: such a narrow detailed field of science, just one molecule in one pathway, all the same techniques performed every single day in the lab, the same experiments repeated a million times, analyzing the data, trying to put the results all in order to fit the bigger story, which is really not big at all and then realizing in the end that it is actually such a tiny fraction of what we call scientific progress that who the hell cares anyway??? But oh well, that's what one needs to get a PhD, and right now, that's what matters the most.

At 5pm this afternoon, as I was finishing my soggy salad I had left at my desk hours earlier because I had to run my experiment, which ended up taking over 3 hours, my friend, Victor came over to say hi. He is a postdoc in the neighboring lab. He asked what I was doing, about my weekend, the usual. I immediately started complaining about my soggy salad and how hungry I was and how long it took to run all my samples and damn, it's 5 on a Sunday and I am scarfing down soggy salad sitting at my lab desk. Arrrggghhh!!! He just laughed and said he was glad I was working so hard. He said, if this is what you need to finish your PhD and get out of here, then by all means come every Saturday and Sunday and eat soggy salads every day. I love Victor mostly for his always positive outlooks. He's rarely in a bad mood, always humorous and has that lively South American attitude about everything (he's from Chile). He always laughs at me when I say silly things like that. And then I laugh at myself with him usually.

Here it is, I have to admit that despite all the complaining, I have been really enjoying this new project in the lab. After finishing up the paper and basically wrapping up that whole previous project, I just wanted to do something completely different. I knew I had to if I wanted to have the least bit of fun in the - hopefully - last year in the lab. Learning new things are always scary at first; I used to get really stressed out about starting new things: when I first started studying for the MCAT's, whenever I had to learn a new technique in the lab, even when trying a new dish at my favorite restaurant. Now, instead of looking at new things as stressful, I try to think about them as new learning experiences, things that are gonna make me grow in more ways than just acquiring the actual knowledge. I don't want to be so detail-oriented and over-specialized. I feel like people used to be interested in broader things back in the day. People who used to be considered intelligent were those who were well versed in a wide variety of subjects. Nowdays, scientists are so focused on their niche in the field that they rarely have time to read about other fields. I think to deserve a PhD in Immunology, I should know about more than just Macrophages and the Notch pathway. Like to be a good doctor, I should know more than just the science and the anatomy.

So this has been a very satisfying experience for me. After a couple of months, now I finally feel relatively comfortable with the new system I am working in and the new techniques I am using. So back to flow cytometry. It's the most commonly used technique in Immunology these days. Yet, however, almost nobody in my lab uses it. Our lab focuses on things that go on inside the cells: signaling molecules and pathways, gene regulation and so on. Flow cytometry focuses more on the cell as a whole. And my new project focuses entirely on whole cells, mainly T cells, which are a very important part of the army fighting infections and cancer. The problem with flow is that it uses these fancy machines, which are complicated to use and are super expensive, thus, our lab doesn't have one so we have to go to a special facility where the machines are kept. The person in charge of the machines is a slightly psychotic Russian man who scares a lot of people - thankfully, I am on his good side and he doesn't scare me. So anyway, it's not the most pleasant thing to use these machines. The principle of the technique is that there are multiple lasers, which are directed at a point where fluid passes through, in the fluid, there are cells, which are labeled with various markers (usually antibodies that stick to the surface, specifically to certain molecules that we are trying to study) which are fluorescent. Basically, I have a tube with cells floating in it, which are labeled either with a green or red fluorescent dye (or other colors), they are sucked up into the machine, lasers shine light on them, they scatter the light and they also get excited and emit light at a higher wavelength and this is somehow detected by the machine - which I don't fully understand - and then they show up as individual dots on a plot on the computer. The reson this is very powerful is that you can look at each individual cell and ask a bunch of questions about it. I can label a T cell with a marker that tells me it's a T cell; then I can put that T cell in subgroups based on another marker, and then I can ask whether that cell has been seen an "invader" before based on another marker that shows activation of the cell. All of this information can come from one single tube. It's pretty cool. Also pretty difficult. And a little scary to work with machines that are worth a couple $100,000. It also takes forever for the cells to all get analyzed; hence I was stuck at the machine for 3.5 hours today. And that's before data analysis. But at this point, I feel pretty comfortable with all of this, and a piece of data that has come out of this new project might even make its way into a new manuscript that's in the preparation phase now. Not so bad.

Ok, enough of me being a nerd. I did not spend the entire weekend in the lab, only most of it. I also ran a good 13 miles in the most perfect sunny fall weather, which went really well, followed by a trip out to the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, which is right near the East River, near Queens and is one of those previously sketchy neighborhoods that is totally getting gentrified. As a consequence of its formerly sketchy nature maybe, it's impossible to get there from Manhattan. It would have taken 3 transfers and possibly more than an hour, so I just opted to ride my bike, which, after a 13 mile run, might not be such a great idea. Oh well, I had to be on a specific corner to meet my friend, Urszula and I hate being late. So I rode hard. The least fun of a ride across to another borough is getting up on the bridge; the most fun is getting down from the bridge - requires absolutely no effort from the legs, only breaking. The arts festival, Bring to Light NYC, we went to check out was really cool. It was in an industrial part of the city, old abandoned warehouses and factories, which provide amazing spaces for galleries and just to hang out in general.







There was even a smaller party going on, where they were handing out free cucumber-infused absinthe cocktails: rather delicious!




What was also delicious was the Polish dinner we had afterwords - Greenpoint is a very Polish neighborhood - I scarfed down a huge plate of stuffed cabbage and some pierogies, while Urszula ate about 2 bites of her Kilbasa :) well, I did run 13 miles and rode my bike over to Brooklyn and still had to make my way back home somehow. This I took on my way back home walking my bike up -way too tired to ride, but hey, I would have totally missed this sign had I ridden - the Williamsburg Bridge :) So Brooklyn, so New York.