A long day in lab

I haven't written much about lab and research lately. It's mostly because things have been going pretty well and smoothly in the past couple of months. That is, I had thought so until today.

In the middle of January I gave lab meeting - which just means that I presented all my data in front of the whole lab - and it went positively well, I met one on one with my mentor shortly after that and we made a plan as to how I should go about finishing up one of the projects I have been working on the most in the past year and a half. I made a list of a few focused and more or less simple experiments that I needed to do and I have been working on those for a few weeks now. I always work better - I am sure most people do - when I have a definite plan and I have also been feeling really productive even when I was running into some technical difficulties. In general, things have been going a bit slower because I haven't had the extra time to put in during the weekends, mostly because of fencing, and the brief vacation in Miami. However, I felt that it was making me more productive on the days I was actually in lab. Also, while refereeing is pretty hard work, it's completely different from science, and I felt that taking those couple of days off every week has been good for me.

I think most problems in lab right now are a direct consequence of the financial crisis. I didn't think that it would have such a profound effect on my every day life: after all, I am a poor graduate student who has absolutely nothing to lose financially, not having any money. Well, I was wrong. A couple of weeks ago, at lab meeting, my mentor announced that 2 post docs will have to be let go by the summer because of downsizing in general and more directly because one of our big grants that was up for renewal at the NIH - National Institutes of Health - got rejected. We're talking about million dollar grants for 5 years that fund several researchers' salaries as well as supplies and all kinds of related costs. Having lost one of those big grants was a big hit to the lab. In general, it'd been very difficult getting money from the NIH due to budget cuts during the Bush administration and I know of several labs that had shut down over the past few years due to lack of funding. I didn't imagine we would be affected this soon. The lab publishes very well and in very good journals and that counts for a lot when it comes to getting grants. I can't even imagine what other, smaller labs are going through at this time.
Thankfully, the grad school takes care of us unfortunate souls - I guess in this case, rather fortunate to be a student - and I also have my own fellowship that covers most of my stipend so I cost almost nothing to my boss.

To cut to the chase, again today at lab meeting, my mentor was talking about how to save money and how we're going to have to start prioritizing experiments - which I think really means that some people and some projects have priority - and making a lot of the supplies, that we are ordering from companies now, ourselves, which will take a significant amount of time away from the actual research. But all of this I guess is understandable in the face of the crisis.

My mentor must have a real scattered mind: random ideas occur to him, he says, on the subway or at the gym - I can relate at some level - and he has a habit of sending emails to people at those random times - usually on weekends or late nights. He usually puts several people on those emails who all work in the same general area of interest. About 5 people, including myself, got one of these emails a couple of weeks ago, on a late Friday night. He got a new idea about putting a new spin on one of the grant proposals he'd been working on with the hope of having a better chance of getting the grant if he adds this extra little bit to it. Of course, this extra little bit in his mind - probably no more than a paragraph in the proposal - is weeks if not months of hard work in the lab for us. He mentioned something in this email about some samples I had collected throughout the past year or so from a bunch of mice. I was testing these samples for a variety of genes I am interested in for my project. Now he is really interested in these particular mice in terms of another set of genes, not directly related to my project. He wasn't clear about what he wanted me or the other people on this email to do. I asked the postdoc who's project this really pertained to and she said that she wasn't sure either and that I should just do it whenever I had some time.

I had been totally swamped in the past 2 weeks, and so I just started thinking about these samples again. I asked one of our techs to locate some of them for me in the mess that is our freezer and he immediately assumed that I was testing the samples right now, and he told our boss sometime earlier in the week. So when I went to our usual weekly one-on-one meeting today, he was looking forward to hearing about these results, which of course, I didn't have. Instead, I had data from 4 other experiments I had crammed in the past 2 weeks, which we had discussed in our last meeting 2 weeks ago. After I showed him some of these data, he said, "Why have you been doing these experiments? I don't understand." WHAT??? Apparently, he really wanted me to go back to my old samples and do what he had mentioned in his email. This, though, he did not tell me. I tried to explain to him why I did what I did in the past 2 weeks, but he didn't really care.

All right, I understand that this is tough times with the grants and financial issues, but really, it's a little too much to expect people to read his mind and interpret his sporadic and random emails and pseudo-requests. Besides, none of this has much to do with the project I am supposed to be tying up, which he wants to publish in the near future - or so he had told me 2 weeks ago.

So here I am, rummaging through our freezers looking for boxes buried deep, and preparing them for a technique called PCR, which involves pipetting small volumes of these DNA's into 96 tiny wells on a plate, which looks like this,


and then doing this over and over again until my thumb aches and I have tested all of my mentor's 5 favorite genes on all my 80 samples, all in triplicates! It's gonna be a long night...

Lightness and Weight

I just finished reading the Kundera novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. At first I didn't get very into it. I started reading it at the wrong time maybe, but after a while I realized how beautiful it was. The language, the metaphors, the characters, all so complex, real but dreamlike at the same time. Kundera has a very rare insight into human emotions, I think. It's interesting because a lot of the plot revolves around love affairs and I thought that the female perspectives in the story were so accurate and the emotions so real, and when we talked about it in my book club - mostly girls but some guys too - the one male present also thought that the male emotions and actions were realistic and very insightful.

Lightness and weight, at the center of the novel, are easy to be attracted to. Some characters are so afraid of weight, they keep betraying people and nations and ideals to live unattached and light, while others need the weight of a man on top of them, of love, the weight of national identity and attachment to a country. I can identify with both.

Sabina leaves her country and can never find a real home, is always running away from people, from things, from her lover. She likes cemeteries, but only the ones that have soil covering the graves. She is frightened by heavy stones on top of graves: for her, that symbolizes the finality of death, the inevitable fact that once we are dead, we cannot leave the grave. She is always running away from that feeling of being stuck, being held hostage by some heavy object or feeling, like love of a man or of a country.

Teresa is completely defined by her love for her husband, even though she knows that he is a womanizer and sleeps with countless other women. The only feeling stronger than her love for him is her love of her country: when they emigrate to Switzerland, only after a few weeks, she goes back to Prague, choosing the communist oppression.

Is it possible to find a balance between lightness and weight? Maybe Tomas did: he was deeply in love with Teresa and yet he had numerous affairs with women he did not care about, but was so fascinated by. It was the "pursuit of the unimaginable" that drove him from woman to woman, trying to find that little piece inside each of them that was different from all of the others. Even with all his womanizing, I could not help but like Tomas. It was very clear that he had a deep love for Teresa and she was the only woman he loved.

We had some disagreement about whether his character was likable or not, one of my friends arguing that his affairs were inexcusable. Maybe so, but in the end, I felt that he was the only character in the novel who could find a balance between lightness and weight; and isn't that what happiness is; finding balance?

And just an example of Kundera's insight into human emotions. He writes about vertigo: "What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves." As I was standing on the subway platform today, looking straight at the approaching train, I had the strange feeling - which I often get in this situation - that it would be so easy, so effortless, would only take the movement of a few muscles to "fall" in front of the train. Don't get me wrong, I am not in any way suicidal. In fact, this feeling, this thought terrifies me. I think it's a form of vertigo. Like Kundera describes it: we realize how tempting the emptiness below or in front of the train are, and how easy it would be to fall into it, and our fear of it stops us.

Long weekend

Dinner with lab-mates last week: no idea how this happened, but so cool!

Today was President's day, kind of a pseudo holiday - some people had to work, some didn't - and I had quite a nice day: slept in, had a slow morning, long lunch with a friend, work for a couple of hours, a good 4 mile run - I am doing some faster runs these days, probably a little faster than 9 minute miles, which feels great - yoga, burrito :) and then saw Sigourney Weaver on the street on my way home. I always get a little excited when I see celebrities. It makes me feel like I live at a really important place - I know it's silly. Anyway, her face seemed a little older than I would have imagined, but otherwise she looked very natural, all bundled up in a big coat and hat, walking with a girl who looked like her daughter.

I really need 3 days in a weekend. I never get all the things I need to do done, and things I want to do, well, forget about that. Even if I wake myself up relatively early, I never have enough time. This weekend was no different. Busy, but also a really fun Valentine's day: romantic dinner with Rach, cocktails, wine, a few too many gin and tonics, double blind date, karaoke, not so much the hangover that lasted most of Sunday, while I had to referee and then shop and prepare for book club I was hosting.

I think I could do much better if I had an extra day every weekend. Now I am ready for the week ahead.

Love your Lab day

Unless you've been living in a cave or a deserted island for the past couple of weeks, it's been hard to miss the rather overwhelming number of pink window fronts, heart-shaped chocolates and all things Valentine EVERYWHERE. I feel pretty neutral and bleh about the day in general: my most vivid memory of it is from junior year of high school, when I got an anonymous letter from a not so secret admirer in my high school class, which resulted in me and my friends - around 16 at the time - subjecting the poor guy to some pretty childish and hurtful ridicule. To this day, I am not proud of it, but the weirdest thing is that he still holds a grudge, which he makes very clear to me every time we see each other at a reunion.

This time last year, I was making resolutions: I knew I had some emotional issues to work on and I wasn't sure how to go about doing it, but I decided to at least try. The only way I knew to do it was to shut it off for a while. I figured, that was the easiest way to avoid getting upset and hurt. I worked a lot, started running a lot, spent a lot of time with my friends, traveled to a lot of places, and all of a sudden I realized that half a year had gone by and I was really happy and sort of carefree, but something was definitely missing.

Then a friend recommended a book to me: Henry and June by Anais Nin. It's the story of a whirlwind love affair between the author and both June and Henry Miller. It's sort of an erotic and rather racy journal of a very sensual woman, who can't find what she is looking for in love and life next to just one man, or woman. It's not fair to blame a book, but in any case, it planted this idea in my head about experiencing life to the fullest rather than trying to avoid strong feelings by building a shell around ourselves.

I soon realized that adventures, especially forbidden ones, were still very exciting. What starts as an innocent adventure, can quickly and easily crack the shell one's been building with some amount of effort, if one's not careful. In the end, I am of the opinion that it is better to have loved and lost, or have experienced something great but maybe dream-like that can never be reality. Nonetheless, experiences make us grow, and I have definitely learned a lot in light of recent experiences.

For the first time in my life, I know what it feels like to be valued and accepted for who I am, what it's like to not have to pretend or put on a mask in front of someone, to be treated with affection and respect, no matter what. Even if for a few days, this was such a gift; whether dream or reality, it's something priceless. I don't know if I will ever meet anyone who will make me feel this way and to whom I will be able to give the same, but at the least, I know what it should feel like. Thank you!

At the end, the shell cracks and we feel weak and vulnerable, but pain does not have to mean suffering, life goes on as it always does, and a lot of new experiences are awaiting us along the way. And how wonderful it is that they are so mysterious and unexpected!

As for this Valentine's day, I am taking one of my best friends to a very nice restaurant - I have won a gift certificate at a grad school party raffle. She's stood by me through good and bad for the past few years and I don't know what I would do without her and my other friends! I think we're gonna hold hands tomorrow and will make a damn HOT couple!

And here is to Janice who made these amazing balls of sweetness for the whole floor in lab today!!!

Sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry

My friend, labmate and fellow grad student (no longer as of yesterday) defended her thesis and is now Dr. Erin Kelly!! Congratulations! She did awesome and enjoyed her much much deserved champagne at the after-party.



At the celebratory dinner - amazing Tapas place in the West Village, where you can order every item on the menu for a small fortune of $400, but truly, the food was great although there were so many dishes that I can barely remember anything I ate - I had this big candle right in front of me on the table and spent a significant amount of time trying to take artsy looking pictures. Trying to show off the new ring I got over the weekend on this one.



Playing ping pong at The Fat Cat. So much fun! As I mentioned in my last post, why be so serious? We should play games more often, be silly and dance with the racket in our hand and take funny artsy pictures with someone else's hijacked camera.



I got into a reflective mood after getting home - instead of much needed sleep, I was sitting on my windowsill looking at the view. It's something I see every day, but rarely appreciate. Truly beautiful, in a very urban and disorganized kind of way. Like Milan Kundera writes in The unbearable Lightness of Being, "The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry."

The giant burrito

I am trying to get back to a somewhat regular running schedule. The weather has finally been a little warmer and I had a weekend at home - so I went for an hour long run over the weekend (the longest since the marathon) and it felt great. Then I had a pretty tiring Sunday, refereeing most of the day; being around all this fencing and all the people two weekends in a row was a little intense. So this morning, I knew I really needed a good de-stresser run. I got to the park a little stiff so I stopped by a perfectly ordinary looking bench near the 72nd street entrance. I saw a lady standing by another bench just a few feet away. I saw her walking up to me as I had my foot on the top of the bench so I took off my headphones. She said to me: "Why do you have to stand in my line of sight when there are thousands of other benches in the park? You are a fucking liar and very rude." Yes, I swear, it was exactly what she said to me, at 9 in the morning, in Central Park. I was totally taken aback. The lady looked completely ordinary, nothing crazy about her before she started talking to me. I just said "Sorry" and moved over to another bench.

Something inside me snapped after this encounter. It was a Monday morning after a not so relaxing weekend or previous week, I just wanted to get away and have a nice run alone, just to listen to music and turn my mind off to be in the moment. I realized that the lady was most likely mentally ill, but still, her words were so hurtful and unexpected, that I started crying. It just all came pouring out. I was angry, mostly: angry at the lady, angry at myself for being angry at a crazy person who probably can't help herself, angry at Monday, angry at the unfairness of life, angry because sometimes I can't do the right thing even when I know what's right. It took a few moments to collect myself; now I looked like a crazy person, there was even a man who walked by me and look over and then he kept looking back at me with a confused look on his face maybe 5 or 6 times before I finally started running and passed him. This happens pretty often: when I am upset or angry, I just need to run as fast as I can. It's incredibly cleansing. If you push the body near its limits, the mind somehow falls away and all you have left is this shell and all this space inside it. By the time I stopped about 35 minutes and 4 miles later, I was in physical pain, but I felt completely at peace inside.

I once read in a book that when you really feel like crying, you should try to suppress it no matter what. The book was written by a neuroscientist and his theory was that negative emotions keep feeding on each other and so when one cries, he or she dwells on negative thoughts and emotions, which in turn build more negatives in the mind and it becomes a vicious cycle until one can consciously break it by stopping negative emotions from taking control of the mind. In general, I agree with this, but sometimes, tears can be quite cleansing. Just like sweating while running. In a way, I think about it this way: tears and sweat, they get rid of toxins and negative things if you want them to do so. Not by dwelling on the emotions, but by focusing the body or mind on something else and thereby creating space inside the shell that can then be a place for new experiences and emotions such as inner peace. Sounds a little new agey but it works, for me at least.

Then I remembered why I liked Monday evenings. I have been going to the same yoga class for a few months now, always on Monday evenings and then to get my Chipotle burrito always afterwards. I really like the yoga teacher even though I think she talks a little too much, but often, she gets things so right, things she says stick in my mind for a while. Tonight, she said that we should try to remember what it was like being children. So we did some silly poses, which were actually really hard and people kept falling over left and right but it was quite amusing and people started giggling and soon enough, the whole room had this great vibe and everyone was smiling or laughing out loud. She always comments on how seriously we take ourselves and how New Yorkers can never relax and always try to do everything so perfectly that falling over is really not an option. Except in yoga class which is based on the philosophy of non-violence and non-judgement. Then she said something I found beautiful: when is that point in life when success stops being measured by pleasure and starts being measured by money and position? What an insight! How true, when we are children, all we care about is having fun and playing. Of course, we grow up and things get a lot more complicated in general and a certain amount of seriousness is required to succeed in life, but seriously, why does everything have to be so serious? When did we forget how to enjoy ourselves?



Then I was reminded that there were indeed lots of good people in the world. The same woman always makes my burrito at the 52nd street Chipotle on Monday nights, and she recognizes me now, we usually speak a few words. Today she was extra friendly and I was so happy to see her smiling and being so nice, she gave me a little extra of everything so at the end it all just barely fit into the tortilla and for the first time in my life, I couldn't finish my burrito!

Friday's thoughts

Two mostly unrelated thoughts, on two great struggles in life:

I was watching "House" with Rob last night (our weekly TV "date"); in this week's episode, the promising cancer researcher - who had almost cured retinoblastoma already - decided to quit her job even though she was apparently very close to curing this particular type of cancer (right!). She said she had realized, after 8 years of education and 12 years in the lab (holy shit!!), that she wasn't happy and she hadn't done anything she really wanted to do in life: becoming a chef, taking dance and piano lessons, etc. All the other characters - doctors - on the show were super judgemental and acting like she had singlehandedly killed all the children who were dying of retinoblastoma and could have had a chance to survive if the "cure" was found blah blah blah.

I know it's just a TV show, but still... Should you follow your heart and do what makes you happy - maybe seemingly selfishly - or should you do what's most rewarding and will result in the most benefit to all of humankind? What if those two don't coincide in one person? I envy those who are so sure of what makes them happy and that's also what they find most rewarding. I am not sure about either. Yes, research I am sure can be so rewarding and can help so many people. But, so few of all scientists actually contribute something significant to the vast knowledge that's needed to cure a disease. I don't feel like I am putting even a tiny piece of the puzzle in its place. Maybe I am wrong, and it's just impossible to see the end from where I am now. Or maybe in order to achieve something, you can't look forward to the end, you have to set small, short-term goals and by achieving those, eventually you contribute to the big picture.

I asked Rob what a guy's perspective was on something. I don't even want to mention that something, because it's not worth my time to write or think about. But, what he said made me think. He said this about a guy he knows: he just doesn't know what he wants, and he didn't expect anything much, so when something did happen unexpectedly (really, how unexpected could it be???), he didn't know how to handle it, so he just disappeared without a word. Excuse me?? Didn't know how to handle an unexpected situation, which by the way, was not even unexpected, at least not by anyone who has half a brain!? The beauty of life is all in its surprises and wonderful unexpected events. The happiest moments in my life that I can remember were the ones in which I was utterly surprised. We just need to keep our eyes and hearts open, and welcome what comes along and enjoy that amazing feeling that accompanies the realization that something new and exciting has just happened to us. If it wasn't for those adventures and unexpected moments of happiness, life would be so boring! And honestly, I just feel really sorry for people who get scared and don't know how to handle those moments.