College

The exam is done and dusted and I really don't give a shit about when the result is out. As long into the future as possible, with a bit of luck.

I'd have liked a bit of a break this week, but last Friday I emailed my project supervisor to ask him if he wanted me to come in on Monday and pick up my work from where I left it before Christmas. Personally, I'd sooner have stuck pins in my eyes than go back into it, such was my frame of mind at that point, but I felt that I should at least pretend to give a shit. So I got in touch, asking him if I should come in this week. Secretly I was hoping that he - like most of the other supervisors - was taking a break for the next two weeks. "Why yes", he said, "Come in on Monday, but I'll be teaching for most of that time, so I won't really be around to help." Bollox, I thought.

Yesterday wasn't too bad, though I was stuck in there until 5:30, as per bloody usual.

Today is looking rather different. Have you ever worked with animal tissue, dear reader? No? You should be profoundly grateful...

Basically, a big part of my project involves working with parts of dead animals. It's not particularly nice, but the work we're doing could result in the development of drugs to slow down the mental decline associated with Alzheimer's disease, so I suppose it's for the common good. Well, for the common good of the human population. Less good for the playfully cute mice that end up donating their brains and internal organs to us.

This morning, another one shuffled off this mortal coil and we...erm...honoured her by taking out her uterus and suspending it in a solution, where each end of it was attached to terminals designed to measure muscle contraction. The idea is that you inject novel drugs into the solution, and from the response of the tissue, you get an idea of whether or not the drug will have a noteworthy effect if used as a psychiatric drug later. Unfortunately, the reliability of the tissue as this kind of indicator relies on its uniformity of behaviour, i.e. it should stay still in the absence of external stimulii and contract in presence of drugs with an established mechanism of action.

Right now, it's not staying still on its own at all. The ghost of its pissed off host must still live on in its uterus, because it's spontaneously contracting of its own accord, which shits up any chance I have of using it. Which means that I won't have obtained anything in the line of useful results today, and let me tell you, it was not an easy exit from my bed this morning, dear reader.

(Later)

I'm at home. The treacherous uterus yielded nothing. I decided to call it a day. I'll be back in there on Thursday afternoon to try again. The one catch is that I'll be teamed up with two med students who've never used an organ bath before, and it'll be my job to inculcate into them the joys of using it.

But overall, it's OK. I'm making reasonable progress. Not as fast as some, but that's because I'm very exacting (bordering on obsessive) when it comes to lab work, making sure everything is done correctly and precisely. Project work is a good way for the lazy to pick up marks, as it involves doing things more than thinking or learning about them. Most of the time you're just walking around a lab making up solutions and using pipettes to deliver volumes of them, without having to think too much about it. I'm liking this project, hell I'm in the middle of it, doing it, and I still think it sounds impressive.

Basically, it's about this neurotransmitter called Angiotensin IV. In the last ten years, there has been a lot of work done in certain areas of neuroscience, memory and diseases like depression and Alzheimer's disease, and it has been discovered that if you raise levels of this neurotransmitter in the brain, you get improvements in memory and learning. This is of interest in the area of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimers, where deeply embedded memories remain untouched until the latter phases of the disease, but acquisitional memory (the mechanisms involved in making new memories) suffers earlier on. Raising levels of Angiotensin IV in the brain seem to be the obvious way to combat this.

Except you can't raise them directly. Giving someone a tablet with Angiotensin IV in it accomplishes nothing because its chemical properties make it orally inactive, i.e. it won't be absorbed through the wall of the gut into the bloodstream. Injecting it directly doesn't really work either, as it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier that well, if at all. The only solution is to modify the molecule slightly, making it more likely to cross into the brain, but still act on the same targets in the brain in the same way. So I've been handed two different variants of Angiotensin IV, and my job is to run a battery of tests on them, assessing their suitability for the aforementioned scenario, and finally test it on laboratory mice, and see if they display any improvements in memory or cognition. Compared to some of the projects my classmates are working on, it's fairly rigorous stuff, but I don't mind. I like getting my teeth into it, and because it's a joint effort with other students on the course, if the research shows promise, we can publish, and our names will be under that of our supervisor. At the moment, the two variants I'm testing don't look particularly stellar, but as we're all working under the same umbrella, so to speak, so my chances of having my name on something worthwhile aren't much affected by that. There's also the bonus that this project work is heavily weighted in the award of my degree (close to 40% of my overall mark, if I'm not mistaken).

I like that I feel good about it, because there've been times - even before I started this degree course - where I wondered if I was doing the right thing. I'm still not fully reconciled to the idea of having to work 9 to 5 like everyone else, but I had to be pragmatic in the face of my flights of fancy, and as much as I'd like living a more artistically-minded existence, I value financial security just as much. I've always managed to do consistently well in science subjects, so this course seemed like a safe bet. I can say now, though, that I've no regrets. If you have to get out of bed in the morning and work for a living, then you may as well work for yourself, and get paid well for it. With this I have a chance of managing both, and actually liking the job into the bargain. Not bad, all in all.

It feels weird now that I'm nearing the finishing line. No doubt the next four months will be rather shit, but barring some major disaster, I should graduate. I won't cover myself in glory: Old habits die hard, and I still have the odious habit of mastering crucial concepts on the syllabus of a course for the first time mere hours before an exam. This, along with the odd stressful external circumstance, has kept me from breaking any records. There'll be no first class honours for me, not even in my wildest dreams, but with a bit of luck, I should get honours of some sort, and then get on with the business of pulling in the dough after that.

Onward ho...