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July 20, 2007

I had a fantastic weekend:

Friday night - watched Frida, a superb film about the Mexican artist
Saturday - went to lab and did a transformation, and then saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on IMAX. The greatest aspect of PRISE is undoubtedly their enormous budget, which they use not only to sponsor us aspiring undergraduate scientists by providing room and board, but also to partake in various social events. PRISE rented us shuttles that took us to the IMAX theater in Natick, which was actually an extension off of a branch of Jordan's Furniture. The movie was excellent, and got me ready for the release of the seventh book next Saturday.
Sunday - had brunch with my school-year roommate, who was visiting from teaching Summerbridge in New Haven, and then went whale watching with the other PRISE fellows.  Afterwards, it was back to lab to pick colonies, and then to Brahms Soc rehearsal.

This week has been relatively relaxing - no no, it doesn't mean that everything's been going well, it just means that progress of most of my experiments are restricted by time. For instance, I need to send my DNA samples to be sequenced before we can figure out what to do next, and that usually takes two days. Or, I need to wait overnight for the bacteria to grow. Darn bacteria - I know the thought of E. coli dividing once every 20 minutes is already pretty scary, but it'd be nice to have some superbacteria that would grow upon command...

Anyways, things here have been getting a little confusing, too. Lately, we've been trying to clone DNA fragments into vectors - no, that doesn't mean we're cloning sheep or anything, it just means that we're inserting a little fragment of DNA into a larger loop of DNA. After we do that, we sequence part of the loop of DNA to see if the fragment we wanted to insert actually got in.  However, our sequencing data lately shows that not only is the fragment missing, a chunk of the original loop is also missing. Strange, eh?

Oh well. That's science for you - who knows, I might have messed up some tiny minute detail step and not realized it, or maybe, well, maybe we discovered a DNA-eating fragment (highly improbable, but still possible).

This weekend will be Harry Potter - where Harvard Square will be turned into Diagon Alley, and hopefully I'll be able to taste a bit of non-alcoholic Butterbeer - although I won't be reading the book.  Alas, on Saturday, I'll head over to Six Flags with a few other PRISE fellows, those few souls who won't be sleeping all day because they'd just spent the entire night reading.  Hopefully that means shorter lines, eh?