Heme Oxygenase I

Alternatively Titled: How, Exactly, I Spend Most of my Time

In case you were wondering, which I don't know if you were because... no one has ever specifically asked... I thought I'd provide you with a general summary of what I do. Feel free to disinterestedly skim. I got a little wordy.

SIDENOTE: While the mileage between work and home is pretty low, the trip involves three separate highways and all of the associated interchanges thereof. So thanks to rush hour and construction, etc, on average I spend about 45 minutes sitting in traffic every day. At least it adds up to a lot of NPR listening. While I still don't understand politics fully or the economy very well at all, I can toss around the jargon like a pro.

Okay, so I work in a scientific research laboratory. Our specific lab has one primary investigator (PhD), one post-doc fellow (PhD), one associate researcher (MS), the new guy (MD), the experienced lab tech (who has worked here longer than anyone), and me (BS). Please note the education/experience gap and infer as much intimidation as you can.

Add to that the challenge of learning extremely delicate lab procedures and techniques from scratch, the pressure of maintaining healthy cells for various experiments, and the looming requirement to produce meaningful results from those experiments, and you have quite a confidence killer. It's challenging and exciting, in a way, and cool. And I'm happy to have a job with a steep learning curve; it's extremely educational. But I still approach almost everything I do with nervous posture and extreme insecurity. Even after nearly three months of working here, the only thing I do at work with absolute confidence is go to the bathroom. And I'm sure it shows, too, but I'm usually just so relieved to have something to do that I've totally mastered. So all day long I'm hunched and lacking any show of confidence, careful and slow, so slow, and double-checking and quad-checking. And then all of the sudden, with unadulterated visible confidence, my back straightens, my jaw sets, and I briskly walk to the bathroom, shameless and determined. It's ridiculous, I know. But totally necessary. It gives me a break from the ice I'm otherwise walking on all day.

So anyway. I do little experiments on cancer cells. I add drugs to them and add DNA to them to make them respond differently to said drugs. I'm currently focusing on heme oxygenase 1, and if you ask me to explain, I would either answer very evasively with complicated vocabulary to make it sound like I knew all about it, OR the answer would take me a very long time because I'd have to sort through it for myself.

I also have my own flasks and dishes of cancer cells to maintain, which takes a surprising amount of effort. They're like very fragile pets that need to be tended to and fed every day. And tumor cells are lame pets.
(Another sidenote: I was lamenting to Jeremy after a particularly disasterous day in the lab that all of my cells had died. He asked "Cancer cells?" "Yeah." "Isn't that the point? Jori... You killed cancer." I then had to explain the irony and necessity of keeping the tumor cells healthy in order to kill them scientifically. Stressful.)

Oh, and my boss recently found out that part of my degree is in art, so I've been working on a lot of illustrations and animations for his various presentations and lectures. I immensely enjoyed doing that until, earlier yesterday upon completion of an illustration, I sadly realized it looked like someone made it in Microsoft Paint and that probably no one would appreciate its perfect alignment and carefully selected color pallet, and that it had little scientific value and almost no artistic value at all. I'm currently working on a short animation of apoptosis (which is cell suicide, basically). I'll show it to you sometime.

Right then, that's it. I know it was self-involved and long. But at least now you have some idea of what I do. Sort of.