I’m going to be honest, I’ve never blogged. Or tweeted. So if this comes across as a bit rambling, I apologise. I also spent all of last night moving, so am a little exhausted and all over the place.
It’s been nearly 6 months since we all started our studentships, and everything is finally starting to feel a bit less overwhelming. Working at the SAF building really feels like a big deal (especially coming off the back of working in a tiny kitchen at minium wage for a year just before it), and starting in the section in a group has been a real benefit, as we have all experienced everything at the same time and been there to help each other whenever we need it. As we all have very differing projects it also makes for interesting discussion in group sessions, and you get input you wouldn’t normally expect. It helps that we all get on pretty well too, though it is early days yet!
My project is primarily looking at acquired resistance to drugs in human colon cancer cells, and if any sort of metabolic or genetic change is seen with the inception of this resistance. The first few months dragged a little bit, as it involved large amounts of (admittedly entirely necessary) background reading, and attempting to get hold of cell lines and the cancer treatments I was going to be looking at. Now I’m spending a lot more of my time in the lab, which I actually really enjoy. As I am still in the earlier stages, I’m tissue culture room most of the time counter intuitively keeping cancer cells alive and trying to prevent them from picking up some form of infection. If I let them get overgrown they sometimes form little undulating tumour-like clumps that look like something out of The Thing, which is slightly harrowing and fascinating in equal measure.
I’ve been doing my lab work at the Hammermith Hospital campus in the IRDB building, working with my primary supervisor’s group there. The drawback of this (apart from there being nothing of interest near HH) is that if I have things to do at both campuses in the same day I end up wasting time on buses between the two. It’s not too bad though. On the plus side, I get to work with two different groups full of really friendly and helpful people from largely different backgrounds and different perspectives, which I think will prove very useful.
Today I’m just finishing up a cell proliferation assay on some cell lines I’ve treated over the weekend with increasing concentrations of a monoclonal antibody, and passaging my cells so they will hopefully survive the few days the college is closed over Easter. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to the long weekend! I’m expecting to read this in just over 2 years, cursing myself for taking any time off from working ever (and probably cursing myself more for procrastinating reading an old blog post when I should be writing up my thesis. Get back to work Future Adam!).
Until next time,
Adam