Of labs and sadness
Well i guess i'd like to take you around my lab! (well at least my desk)
But first i'd like you to meet somebody,
This is 'becky' short for rebecca; or as i like to call her, "the murdering psychopath", lol, not discreet; dont be fooled by the pleasant smile and the innocent waving of 1.5ul microfuge tubes! This Croatian-Italian will take any opportunity she has to pour compounds such as -diphenylamine- and -concentrated sulphuric acid- down my shirt (it burns i tell you).
Aside from that she's a lovely girl who shares a lab desk with me! Thus making her my lab partner =D!
Lol, i'm joking (...no actually i'm quite serious) - she's good though. Quite a smarty, and she's from MLC; which means we share the same background of going to 'same sex' schools. Well we get along well when we need to, but at other times it's more of a battle for the flaming ethanol/bunsen burner. I digress!
We're using the G15 Lab at the QE2 complex just north of the UWA main campus. I guess all dent students know where i'm talking about because it's next to OHCWA or something like that, which is supposedly where dentists live (ask Collin, he'll tell you all about them).
It's an expensive complex in terms of materials and stuff, i recall one of the demonstrators telling the class that the object on my book (above pic) which is a P-20; (an automatic pipette that can pipette amounts as small as 1 microliter) can cost up to 400 bucks per instrument. Yes, and guess what? EVERY desk in the room has 3. A P1000 (can pipette up to 1ml), P200 (up to 0.2ml) and a P-20 (0.02ml). Since there are around 50 lab teams in both labs, you're looking at a fairly sizable amount already; and those are just pipettes.
This doesn't include those machines like the spectrophotometry machine, which costs something like 20k; and all the bunsen burners and fume cupboards etc. In short, it's a very expensive complex and if you screw up, you pay big time.
Becky tried to stab me through the neck with one of these once (she was joking - i hope).
Every week we do things like prepare agar plates with antibiotic agent; and then release a bacteria like E.Coli onto the plate to determine things like rate of spontaneous mutations; extract DNA from chicken liver homogenate...yes and all sorts of other wonderful and lovely things. This is my Molecular Biology of the Cell unit (SCIE1106) btw.
Sounds complicated doesn't it? Clearly you haven't been to the lectures yet. I think we spent something like a week studying the composition of a mitochondrion (an organelle in the cell). I was showing Collin (he's like a really smart MED student) my test questions and even HE was like woahh. which is saying something.
At the same time i guess it's nothing to be proud of since i couldn't answer any of them xDDD, but you know, the fact that the unit goes into so much detail is..quite annoying sometimes actually; especially when you have a weekly quiz to test how much you know.
Behind my hand you can see those agar plates on the desk containing ....well nothing yet, the E.Coli broth is in the P20 i'm holding.
One thing i've learnt from these lab classes is that you have to be amazingly accurate. If you're 1MICROLITER off in terms of your pipetting, or measurements, or calculations; you're screwed, and you generally would start all over again (yes, from the beginning); which means that many many students are usually in the lab for around 3 hours at a time. Praise be to God, i've only stuffed up once (when Becky stabbed me as i was pipetting) - and thus have only sat through a 3 hour molecular biol lab once.
Chem is a different story ._.
But yeah, i love my lab actually. It has a very homely feel, and (aside from Becky ._.) when you have collaboration experiments, you really feel the teamwork as everybody does their best to obtain the most accurate results (or to get out of there the fastest if you're a pessimist). The pain you all go through together....ALMOST makes you like family. almost =.='
Hm. I thought i was going to blog about something else, but no; i'll leave it there for today.
Have a great week all!
Fin~
why must you always?
But first i'd like you to meet somebody,
This is 'becky' short for rebecca; or as i like to call her, "the murdering psychopath", lol, not discreet; dont be fooled by the pleasant smile and the innocent waving of 1.5ul microfuge tubes! This Croatian-Italian will take any opportunity she has to pour compounds such as -diphenylamine- and -concentrated sulphuric acid- down my shirt (it burns i tell you).
Aside from that she's a lovely girl who shares a lab desk with me! Thus making her my lab partner =D!
Lol, i'm joking (...no actually i'm quite serious) - she's good though. Quite a smarty, and she's from MLC; which means we share the same background of going to 'same sex' schools. Well we get along well when we need to, but at other times it's more of a battle for the flaming ethanol/bunsen burner. I digress!
We're using the G15 Lab at the QE2 complex just north of the UWA main campus. I guess all dent students know where i'm talking about because it's next to OHCWA or something like that, which is supposedly where dentists live (ask Collin, he'll tell you all about them).
It's an expensive complex in terms of materials and stuff, i recall one of the demonstrators telling the class that the object on my book (above pic) which is a P-20; (an automatic pipette that can pipette amounts as small as 1 microliter) can cost up to 400 bucks per instrument. Yes, and guess what? EVERY desk in the room has 3. A P1000 (can pipette up to 1ml), P200 (up to 0.2ml) and a P-20 (0.02ml). Since there are around 50 lab teams in both labs, you're looking at a fairly sizable amount already; and those are just pipettes.
This doesn't include those machines like the spectrophotometry machine, which costs something like 20k; and all the bunsen burners and fume cupboards etc. In short, it's a very expensive complex and if you screw up, you pay big time.
Becky tried to stab me through the neck with one of these once (she was joking - i hope).
Every week we do things like prepare agar plates with antibiotic agent; and then release a bacteria like E.Coli onto the plate to determine things like rate of spontaneous mutations; extract DNA from chicken liver homogenate...yes and all sorts of other wonderful and lovely things. This is my Molecular Biology of the Cell unit (SCIE1106) btw.
Sounds complicated doesn't it? Clearly you haven't been to the lectures yet. I think we spent something like a week studying the composition of a mitochondrion (an organelle in the cell). I was showing Collin (he's like a really smart MED student) my test questions and even HE was like woahh. which is saying something.
At the same time i guess it's nothing to be proud of since i couldn't answer any of them xDDD, but you know, the fact that the unit goes into so much detail is..quite annoying sometimes actually; especially when you have a weekly quiz to test how much you know.
Behind my hand you can see those agar plates on the desk containing ....well nothing yet, the E.Coli broth is in the P20 i'm holding.
One thing i've learnt from these lab classes is that you have to be amazingly accurate. If you're 1MICROLITER off in terms of your pipetting, or measurements, or calculations; you're screwed, and you generally would start all over again (yes, from the beginning); which means that many many students are usually in the lab for around 3 hours at a time. Praise be to God, i've only stuffed up once (when Becky stabbed me as i was pipetting) - and thus have only sat through a 3 hour molecular biol lab once.
Chem is a different story ._.
But yeah, i love my lab actually. It has a very homely feel, and (aside from Becky ._.) when you have collaboration experiments, you really feel the teamwork as everybody does their best to obtain the most accurate results (or to get out of there the fastest if you're a pessimist). The pain you all go through together....ALMOST makes you like family. almost =.='
Hm. I thought i was going to blog about something else, but no; i'll leave it there for today.
Have a great week all!
Fin~
why must you always?