Thur June 17th

Today I spent my morning up in the lab - lots of fun! We worked in the culture area, with shields and airflow control, and I used the new skills I learned to make a batch of media to grow cultures in. Very precise measurements of several different ingredients, all combined to make stuff to keep cancer cells happy and thriving. My mentor upstairs, Michael, is very knowledgeable and is teaching me a lot. He is going to assign us some genes to investigate to help further his research. If we end up lucky enough to find some that turn out interesting, we will get credit on the paper he publishes! We observed as he treated two different cell lines with different chemicals to see how they change.

After that, we went downstairs to the computer area and I did more tutorials on MatLab, and then Cenny took us over and explained the files we are going to use and what she wants us to do with them. By the time she was done, my brain was about to explode! So, I took lots of notes, and I hope things will sink in overnight. Trying to visualize how all the graphs relate to one another is conceptually hard enough, and then I have to figure out how to program with MatLab to get the parts of the different files together and interacting with each other. Phoenix seems to do better than I in that - but I guess she said she has had experience in similar projects in school, and I have never done anything like this - at least that is what I keep reassuring my aging, and aching brain!

Today I also I have some homework to do. I never learned metric measurements in school - back then, that was for those silly folks overseas. So now I have catch up to do in that area. And a quiz tomorrow to prove that I studied it! Plus I still have to learn Excel and how to graph my pipette measurements - I think I like taking measurements better than graphing them. But both are very important in research, and I know that learning these things now will really pay off later.

For now tho - time to rest the gray matter!

Bye for now-

Leslie