Look, a Mammoth! Pt. 1

      The right filter on anything can make it the place where the zombie apocalypse begins.

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    I'm back! Sorry for the long wait! But I now present, for your personal reading pleasure, the next installment of-- THE BLOG. (Don't you think the entrance to my lab looks inviting? That biohazard sign beats any scratchy welcome mat I know of.) This story comes to you in four chunks, spread over four posts, installed over four days. Today,

-  THE PAST  -

   Let's start with where we left off--the mice.

   The mice live in a separate facility downstairs (that I can't access quite yet.) and are brought up to the lab. When we talked last the mice were being collected --a nicer word for killed, yes, but let me be clear, the mice are put to sleep and then collected as humanly and ethically as possible. Every organ in a mouse is a wealth of information. The brain, brain stem, cerebellum, blood plasma, fat, beige fat, brown fat, lower spinal cord, sciatic nerve (the largest nerve in the body, mice and humans) dorsal root ganglia, the liver, and footpads are all collected in their own little eppendorf tubes for analysis--and with 16 mice, a total of around 240-ish samples are collected for testing. All in all, it took a tag team of three people--Thomas, my mentor/PI, Joe, the lab tech here, and Martin, who researches Alzheimers--two days to get all the samples. Joe dissects the head and removes the brain, Martin makes the first incisions into the rat, and Thomas removes the small samples under a dissecting microscope.

  Stages of labeling 240 tiny tubes--denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and OCD insanity. 

   This study has two groups of mice--control and high-fat. The control are just your ordinary-Joe-schmo mice that you'd meet on the street with an ordinary diet. The high-fat mice are fed with, you guessed it, McDonald's quarter pounders with cheese. Ok, with food pellets that have a high fat content (Which are colored green, so--cool fact--the intestines of the mice look bright green upon dissection). A diet high in fat is associated with weight gain/obesity in humans and mice, which can increase risks of type-2 diabetes and a host of other problems. Although if you're looking at changing your own diet, I recommend you consult your local nutritionist for detailed advice. The high-fat diet can cause symptoms of neuropathy, which leads to my current task involving the staining and sectioning of teeny-tiny mouse footpads. Think "30 micron-thick" teeny-tiny (Human hair is about 50 microns thick). But more on that in Part 2. 

    So the amount of time and money that goes into making a single data point for this study is crazy! Growing the mice for months, then processing the samples for weeks, then analysis of that data--not to mention all the equipment, materials, and manpower--sorry, personpower--in the journey from nothing to published paper. I'm truly grateful for this opportunity to peek into the scientific process, and to play a small part in the inexorable march of science towards discovering the great unknown. Go Science!

A note about "."
  
    In each plastic box a mouse chatters behind metal grates, oblivious to the gloved hand which will drop it into a glass box in a few moments, from which it will never see or smell the sawdust in its enclosure ever again. I'm morbidly fascinated by the entire process by which a living, breathing being is broken down into its component parts in just a matter of moments. So this collection of bones and blood is what sustains life in its infinite beauty and multitudes? I can't help but feel pangs of existential dread, knowing that I am like the mouse, in this fleshy container that I call "me". Alas, poor Yorick! My molecules, aren't alive, they're made up of the same elements found in books and trees and even stars and rocky planets beyond our galaxy. But I believe that consciousness makes the human collection of atoms unique--as Descartes said, "cogito ergo sum." I think, therefore I am. We are bridges that touch the banks of life and death, coalesced into a point in space and time to gaze at the universe all too briefly. One day my dust will return to where it came from--but until then, I will never cease wondering and wandering in the world, learning broadly, and without fear. 

~ Liam