Experiment Hell Week

My experiment was so disastrous it needed it's own soundtrack of prat falls and canned laughter.

My experiment: Grow lab cultured vibrio in a dialysis tube w/ filtered pond water, incubate the tube in a bucket of pond water and test infectivity of mice using 5 different incubation periods and 4 different lakes.

Moumita, Michael and I set out early Tuesday morning to collect lake water. We wanted to collect water from 5 ft below surface so the surface rainwater doesn't affect pH, salinity etc. I made a contraption to connect the centrifuge tubes to a 5 ft stick and carried jugs "sterilized" by my constant scrubbing with ethanol.

Besides the crowd that formed to watch a little white girl reach into their pond going "Eew Eew Eew Eew" the first collection was completed without a hitch. The second we found the bank to be too shallow to collect from 5 ft so I asked some kids playing in the water to dive down and fill up my tubes for me. I don't know how I am going to write this up in my experimental procedure. "...and then I made these little Indian children collect my water samples." I gave them 10 ruppees, which I found later could have gotten me in trouble with the communist government.

The next lake we collected on this Indiana Jones style, rickety, babmoo suspension bridge. I'm on my stomach, leaning over when it starts to pour rain. I was waiting for Angelina Jolie to sweep down from the heavens. The 4th lake we had to finagle in the pouring rain for this guy to collect water for us. I may have lied and said we were testing the lake for Cholera. I never knew science could be so full of deciet and adventure.

To filter the pond water I had to use these 5 ml syringes. It took 3 hours and a self diagnosis of carpal tunnel to filter all the water. It's funny that I thought I could pick time points--as if I have that much control over anything. The time points adjusted to when the stars aligned and I could culture the vibrio fast enough to put it in the dialysis tubes. We ran out of dialysis tube clips, so we had to painstakingly seal them with thread.

The mice arrived a day earlier than expected. These 20 little pink wrigling squeaky things with no eyes or ears. AND no mother. We forgot to order the mother. "Just put another mother in there and as long as she's lactating she'll feed them." I turned around for 2 seconds and the mother was in the corner eating one of my time points err... mice. Fuck. Fuuuuck. "You're going to have to take them home and feed them milk through the night every 4 hours through a syringe."

I did behavioral work in my previous lab for a year. Hours spent alone in an animal room running the mice through drills. I would come out every day smelling like them. I was the crazy mouse woman. They're baaaack.

The mice shook the whole way home. I tried pressing an earphone playing Fiona Apple to the box--it always makes me feel calmer. But who knows--they're mice. I was a real happy camper at 4 am blearily and patiently waiting until 19 mice had their fill of milk. Only one died over the night! I should consider switching species.

By the next late night (still in lab at 10pm) I was ready to innoculate them 2 more had died. Then the news came that their would be a transportation strike the next day. THe most important day of my experiment. I went through my options: Staying at a hotel near the institute would be too expensive, the guest houses were being renovated, I couldn't hire a driver because there would be no way for the driver to reach the car without a bus, so I could walk the 15 km to the institute. And I'm not even getting paid. Exhausted in the taxi ride home late at night I forgot my bag in the car losing: my cell phone, books, GRE flash cards, my glasses, deoderant etc etc etc.

All night I worried about my mice and the experiment and grieved my lost things. When I woke, it only took an hour of walking before a private bus took me the rest of the way. When I saw the mice I almost started crying. 2 more mice had died and 6 mice had rubbed off their markings (I had marked each mouse with PERMANENT marker to represent an individual time point and lake.) SO I could only use 8, out of 20.

The results were decent, they showed an obvious trend correlating longer incubation periods with less infectivity. Similar to literature results. But with only 8 samples it all means zilch. Remember that joke about the mathematician, physicist, and the statistician trying to put out a fire and the statistician created more fires so she could have more data points to analyze the situation? I have to repeat the experiment with many more fires. Then maybe I'll jump into one.