The Air Up There: Taking the Fumes out of the Dreamliner

Check out my post on The Bill Nye Effect about Clem Furlong, an awesome researcher in Medical Genetics at the UW who does some interesting Toxicology field work with toxic fumes on airplanes.

While you're there, read some other postings on our blog!

Vicious Cycle

Like politics, research funding, and most everything else, life in the lab seems to run on a cycle. All of the visuals that come to mind-- a pendulum swinging left to right, the peaks and troughs of sinusoidal waves (or a roller coaster, for the less geeky)-- accurately describe the highs and lows of life. Sadly, the commonality of such patterns doesn't make the lows any easier to bear, nor the highs any more lasting.

Things were going well in the lab, and I guess overall, still are. Unfortunately for my sanity, there are still a few outlier experiments that should be working and aren't. And, as in the past, I have no idea why. This is the vicious cycle of lab research: knowing something is wrong but not knowing what it is, which makes it impossible to fix, and ultimately dooms you to repeat the mistakes. Until, perhaps, something magically changes. (Laugh if you will, but it's still the only explanation I have for my experiments beginning to work correctly back in March.)

I feel like a broken record saying all this, but it's so head-slamming-against-the-wall frustrating that I can't help but vent about it. Positive vibes are welcome these days, send them with care to the angry little lab rat.

I feel you, cat.

Feeling the Crunch

I'm having trouble deciding which time crunches in life are real and which are self-inflicted (and likely unnecessary). In my head, it's all about the next thing that has to be done, and it has to be done ASAP. No exceptions. That nagging voice telling me to work faster and walk quicker just doesn't quit. Maybe the academic environment is responsible for this: you're made to constantly worry about not producing enough data, or not fast enough (what if you get scooped?). What if your funding runs out? Many aspects of these things are not controllable, so the one thing that is-- your productivity-- becomes the main object of obsession.

I'm feel like I'm always late, and I'm unsure how important that date really is.

I walked out of a lab meeting today and was immediately stricken with a mix of anxiety and panic. My presented progress was sufficient this time around, so I left relatively unscathed. Regardless, my brain switched to scheduling the next 2 months+ of my lab life the instant I finished discussing my data. No matter how much progress I feel I made, or how hard I had worked in that past month, I ALWAYS walk out of the meeting overwhelmed by how much more I still need to do. Is this me being too hard on myself, or is this really just the reality of being a productive worker? When do you get to the point where you feel like you were productive enough?

For someone who really likes to strike a line through such things, mentally and physically, these lingering loose ends are guaranteed to induce panic. With the nature of lab work-- tedious, relying on cells to grow over the course of days and weeks-- I can't just rush to my desk and bust out the work that needs to be done. I am forced to sit and plan, and work for weeks to finish even one more experiment, one that may work to my benefit...or it may end more tragically (See: cell contamination). It's a horrible lesson in patience that I'm really tired of learning.