Ok so this summer was lively, full of memories and new challenges. I worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Dr. Anne Churchlands lab. For those of you who haven’t heard of CSHL, it’s located on the north shore of Long Island. The campus has this mysticism to it and I tried to capture that in the following photos:
The campus also has a surprising history to it, and as a New York local I was totally immersed by this. The two photos on the right were taken by the McClintock laboratory. On my second day at CSHL, I was on a campus tour and apparently Barbara McClintock was an absolute savage. Her lab is in a now rustic, warn-down building facing this flat field that eventually extends to the border of the harbor. In 1983 she won a Nobel Prize for her discovery of transposons – pretty much pieces of DNA that jump around. She found these transposon elements in maize (corn), which were grown in the field in front of the building. There are recorded accounts of sudden gunshots and fun fact, it was Barbara. She’d sometimes see ducks eating her corn (tsk tsk), walk out to the balcony, take out her shotgun, and BANG. GOTTA PROTECT THOSE CORN, MAN!
But anyways, DNA was discovered at CSHL by Dr. James Watson, who I had a brief conversation with. I was nervous as hell before meeting him, afterall, the guy pretty much created the field of genomics. I walked up to him… said ‘hi my name is George’… he responded with ‘Hey George, your face looks kind of dubious’. Yep, and thats the end of that.
Moving on, I worked in this awesome lab with awesome people. Anne Churchland is the principle investigator, you can think of them as the captain of the ship. In each lab, the PI oversees the work of the postdoctoral fellows who are fluent enough in science and technique to run their own project. I like to think of the postdocs as managers of the shipdeck or sails. They tell people like me (undergrad, therefore rookie) and grad students (soon to become PhD’s and eventually postdocs) what to do. The lab has four postdocs: Ashley, Simon, Matt, and Farzaneh. Each of which is an absolute homie.
I worked with Ashley, and my projects varied greatly. It began with me designing this casing for a biosensor, then I designed a soundproofed box for our experiments – which I eventually titled ‘The Magicians Box’, and it finally progressed to me doing some joyfuly immersive data analysis :))))))((((. Anyways…
In order of uppest up to lowest low:
- Working with Ashley. Her energy went well with mine. Something that allowed me to work quite well with previous postdocs, like Joshua Sarinana at MGH, check out his bloggo here: (http://www.joshuasarinana.com/). Oh she likes tequila and mezcal too, so naturally we got along.
- Designing the biosensor casing and implanting it the first time. It worked pretty well!
- Wooping Simon’s butt in chess. (Our record is 1-1, but he won a match because I got lazy :P)
- The lab has a competitive volleyball culture so I improved my game a bunch
- Lab meetings with Panera catering where I would secretly smuggled some sandwiches home for dinner.
- I messed up an experiment pretty badly, it’s called a perfusion, google it if you want to learn more about the procedure. But yea, I f’d up. (this is where the lows start)
- I invited a few coworkers to play BBall with me, and both were injured. One with a jammed finger and the other strained ankle -_______________________-
- Ok…lowest, low. My first day at CSHL, I meet Anne for the first time, and she says ‘Hi George, it’s nice to meet you!’. Struggling to put a thought together, my reply was: ‘Hi Anne, I found parking so easily!’ (there was an awkward enthusiam in my voice). BRUHHHHHH, great start to the next four months
My most valuable lessons this summer:
- Don’t be afraid to ask for help
- Nothing is as simple as it seems
Anyways, here are more photos from this summer
Oh, and as always, here is the blog post song:
Mildly Muddling 