Week Four . . . Halfway There!

It’s hard to believe that my time at Harvard and MIT is already halfway over. With four weeks down and four weeks to go, this week marks the midpoint of an amazing summer.

Contrary to my last entry’s tone, this week was anything but slow at the lab right from the start. On Monday, with two different polymers dialyzing, I was constantly checking my watch to make sure I didn’t miss changing the water at the correct time. We also created another polymer, which we left stirring on a hot plate overnight after adding various substances that needed to dissolve.

Journal club met as usual on Tuesday morning. This week’s presentations addressed how to use peptides to cross the bloodbrain barrier in order to distribute medicines (a topic also discussed in my HIV/AIDS class this week!) and how Markov chains can be used to predict the outcome of baseball games. After journal club, I changed the medium for all 10 plates of C2C12 cells and checked them under the microscope. After changing the water a few more times, I took the polymers off dialysis, freeze-dried them, and put them on the lyopholizer so that the water could be vacuumed out. Tuesday I was invited to attend a lunch with Dr. Langer and the other undergraduates and high-schoolers interning at the labs. We were able to ask him a variety of questions and congratulate him on his most recent accomplishment: being awarded the National Gold Medal of Science.

On Wednesday morning, Sarah and I defrosted macrophages and mesothelial cells and began growing them in flasks. Next week, we’ll transfer them to well plates so that I can perform MTT assays on all of our cells: macrophages, mesothelials, and C2C12s. We made yet another PXC polymer, which involved constant monitoring of the pH, before we put it on dialysis. For lunch on Wednesday, I took the train to Charles/MGH and ate with my uncle. I haven’t gotten to explore too much of Boston, so this was a new experience.

Thursday I changed the water for dialysis before our weekly Kohane group meeting. It went pretty long, so we didn’t spend any time in the lab in the morning and I caught up on some reading for class instead. In the afternoon, I saw the cold room, where we store a majority of our liquid supplies, for the first time. Sarah and I made mesothelial cell medium, a long process with many additives, including insulin, which I had to put into tiny 275 containers to store for another time. We also started making the nanoparticles to add to our cells for our experiments next week.

On Friday I changed the medium for the C2C12 cells again; Sarah will add the nanoparticles to them this weekend, and I’ll do the MTT assays on my own next week. We took two of our polymers off dialysis and experimented with different reactions, using a double-barreled syringe to see if we could make hydrogels that can be injected into the body. I also flew solo with the infamous lyopholizer (see photo below) and put some of our samples on there to dry.

It was Harry Potter weekend at Harvard. And of course, being an avid fan, I was in line to get my copy of the book at 12:01 am on Saturday at Queen’s Head Pub, a student hangout below Annenberg Dining Hall. It was a weekend of reading on campus, both Harry Potter and my AIDS textbook, as I prepared for my midterm exam, which is on Tuesday the 24th. However, I still found time to socialize; a few friends from Brooks came down to visit on Sunday for the day. I also had dinner in Cambridge with my family on Sunday night. This coming week will be busy, with my midterm studying, a full schedule at the lab, and a dinner planned for all the Cambridge interns and Mr. Palm.

Have a great week!