Why are we this far through April already?
Ah. I mean aahhh! Does that look scary and in peril? It should do, because today my PI (which for those not living in graduate labs is the terse version of Principal Investigator, the ultra big boss of the research group) casually announced that we need a bunch of results before the next grant deadline in order to get funding. Unfortunately the next grant deadline is in about five weeks; and the results are supposed to occur on a new microscope which is currently partly in pieces, and partly a bunch of diagrams on my computer.
This has led me to consider going into lab at 7:30am for the future few weeks, although it is even more likely to lead to huge amounts of guilt after hitting snooze and going in at 9:00.
What I am building is a new optical tweezers setup, which uses a laser beam to pull on microscopic stuff, and measure the forces and positions that the stuff experiences. In our lab we use it to poke and prod on the proteins which do things to your DNA. There are hundreds of tiny biological machines which unwind your DNA strands, or run along them like trains, or chop them up. For the most part we don’t really have a very good idea of how they work. If they were cars it would be as though we understood that they use an engine which needs gasoline and air, and if you rip the wheels off or replace one of them with a shoe then it won’t run, but we don’t understand how the engine actually works or what most of the other things under the hood are for. That’s what we are trying to work out.
So what appropriate music shall I listen to in order to commiserate with myself and pretend I am going to wake up early to? Shosty’s violin sonata I think, it’s a tough sucker to beat for the sparse futility earfeel effect factor.
Tags: graduate school, optical tweezers