This week has been similar to the first one, and I have been practicing most of the techniques I learned the first week. I still am not able to work with the mice yet as I do not have sufficient training, but maintaining and performing experiments on cell cultures are proving to be time consuming tasks. A recent high school graduate has also joined the lab, so that makes for a total of three volunteers in the lab, including me. San Francisco has been pretty nice this past week, and it hasn't been as foggy as everyone else said it would be.
On Monday we actually had to deal with a contamination of our cell cultures, which was not fun. As it happens I don't think it was my fault, but we did have to toss out most of the cell lines we had cultured and thaw some more cells from the cryotubes. Apart from that it was more of the same, maintaining the new cell cultures and performing more assays to test the effectiveness of the experimental drug on the cell lines. My post doc's pilot mouse experiment is almost coming to an end, with now even the treated mice dying off. I just got my ID, so I will be able to receive some training and start working with mice soon.
I attended a symposium with the rest of my lab on Thursday about mutations in Ras, and how the Ras gene mutations lead to various types of cancer including leukemia. The talks were probably a bit too scholarly for my understanding, but I did catch a few concepts I understood here and there. Lab days have been getting a bit longer, and the workload is certainly more than the first week.
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