There is that...

There are many things which I have not anticipated doing in my life.  Among them:

1) Bungee jumping off a cliff
2) Climbing Mount Everest
3) Selling a painting I have done for thousands of dollars (if you have seen me draw - art scholarship from grade 2 notwithstanding - you would understand)
4) Fronting a rap group
5) Giving a rat a neurological examination

Well, after this week, find some elastic cord, gather up the rock picks, break out the oil paints and help me get down with my bad self in repetitive, poorly constructed rhyme because number 5 has been crossed off the list!  How does one do a neurological exam on a rat (in our case, 12 rats)?  Well, seeing as the title of this post is perhaps not that helpful in terms of anything resembling real life, let me describe it for you:

1) You pick up the rat by its tail and wrap the front part of its body in a towel (not always that easy a task, they are a pretty psyched up about life at this point).  
2) If you have anaesthetized one of the rat's two feet (as we did), you put the rat's foot on a hotplate until he (they are all "he"s) lifts it up, or not longer than 12 seconds so as not to burn the little guy's foot (the hotplate isn't that hot - you could keep your hand on it comfortably for about three seconds, which is considered a "normal" neurological response).  Repeat the experiment on the other foot, which is not anaesthetized.  This is considered to represent the nerve response time.
3) Next, you put the little guy on a scale and see how much weight he can bear on each of his feet - this is the motor response evaluation
4) Then, with Mr. Rat sitting comfortably on the counter, you pull each hind leg backwards and see how it responds - if it snaps back underneath the rat as before, that is "normal"; if it stays hanging backwards, that is considered "blocked"
5) Finally, with a pair of tweezers, you give Mr. Rat a small pinch on the bottom of both feet and see if he recoils the foot

Actually, if you a lab rat, this is a pretty sweet experiment to be assigned to - very minimal pain (the whole point of the experiment is that you are hoping to block the nerve response, such that the rat would feel nothing) and very limited post-experiment effects (actually, all the rats would be considered to be perfectly normal even after the experiment).  Plus, the living conditions in the animal facility are quite nice - plenty of food and water and large cages to move around in (the space issue in particular is very tightly controlled - animal husbandry experts check all the animals each day and will separate animals which they deem to be too crowded into their cages).  However, based on their repeated waste excrement (both solid and liquid) during the experiment, I am not sure the rats truly appreciated how lucky the were (or at least they didn't show their gratitude to us).  In particular, rat #11 was a real troublemaker -- I am convinced his weight dropped roughly in half over the course of our appoximately 2 minute experiment sequence on him given his nothing-short-of-prodigious production in the waste generation department.  My personal favourite was rat #6, who was really on the ball with his responses (fastest control paw lift off the hot plate of all the rats!  Good job #6!).  They are actually kind of cute in person, particularly if you can't see their tail at any point (as the picture would indicate - although it must be noted that this isn't a picture of one of my rats, only other rats of the same breed, since there are no cameras allowed in the facility due to PETA concerns).

At any rate, the experiment went very well, with my formulation almost tripling the length of time over which the nerve impulses remained blocked when compared to the drug solution injected alone.  Also, when the rats were sacrificed later in the week for dissection (not nearly as unpleasant a process as I was expecting), there was no significant tissue response whatsoever and the polymers I had used had basically been resorbed into the body, where they would degrade in a couple of weeks into components which the rats could add to their prodigious excrement production.  So, with a couple of cell culture experiments this week, some more materials analysis to be done in the next couple weeks, and another 12 rat set to examine in order to test one more formulation and perform a couple more controls, I will have my first MIT paper, which is kind of exciting.  The other neat part is that all the materials I used are non-modified versions of materials already approved by the FDA (the U.S. Food and Drug Adminstration) and is easier to apply to the desired site than the competing materials.  So, it is not outside the realm of imagination to see this being used on real human patients in the not-so-distant future (assuming a company is interested in actually taking the idea to market).  So, good times in the lab indeed! 

This was a big weekend here in Boston where the world's largest regatta, the Head of the Charles, was run right outside my window on the Charles River.  A total of 7500 rowers, mostly from university crews but also several from recreational and competitive crews from around the world (two Rowing Canada Olympic-track rowers were 3rd and 4th in the competitive class single sculls), competed in 26 races from Friday night until this afternoon.  Seeing as I live on the course, I thought it would be wise to go down and check it out - plus, I had heard rumours of free food (confirmed) and the seventh stroke in the MIT-Sloan 8-man club crew works in my lab, so I had at least had some semblance of a rooting interest.  It was also a spectacular day which made a six mile walk up and down the course a real pleasure.  This is a very atypical rowing course in that the river bends repeatedly and the five bridges en route (four traffic bridges and the famous Weeks footbridge at Harvard, pictured below) have relatively narrow passages for the boats to pass through - given that the rowers are actually facing the opposite direction to their travel path, I was told that it is not unusual to see a boat (in particular the single and double sculls, in which there is no coxswain to guide the rowers along) ram into the bridge abutments, although I cannot confirm that since I saw no such incident while I was spectating.     

Based on the huge number of competitors and the relative difficulty in keeping "on course", the boats are sent out at staggered intervals instead of coherently in heats as we are used to seeing in Olympic-type events.  As a result, it is very difficult to figure out who is winning and who is losing, and at times it seems like the competition is just a series of boats out for a pleasant Saturday afternoon river trip.  The excellent scenery along the course also did not help to shake this perception.

So, in many ways, the crowd was quite a bit more interesting than the races themselves.  One thing that I definitely noticed was that the crowd was much different from a typical crowd of people at a Boston event - that is, very caucasian and very, let's say "not economically disadvantaged".  There is certainly a "rowing culture" which attracts a certain type of person to the sport, and when you are used to such diversity around you, it is actually sticks out more to you when you are surrounded by a relatively homogeneous group of thousands of people.  As an example of the prototypical rower which I encountered while touring the site, here is an actual coversation I overheard while walking by (I may have added one extra "like", but otherwise this is verbatim):

Girl #1 - So, like, the wind is, like, totally blowing at 20 miles an hour!
Girl #2 - Like, no way! 

Fun!  Oh, and the MIT crew I had the connection to?  Well, they finished 49th out of 58 boats in their class.  Well, you know, we are a little busy changing the world through technological advances around here, so what do you want? :)

OK, I'm not going to lie to you - the last couple of weeks have been pretty tough for me.  But, before getting into that, let me outline all the good stuff that has happened:

- My lab work has been going quite well, although I have put in a ridiculous number of hours in the last couple of weeks.  When you work on drug delivery applications, the key factor to figure out is how quickly whatever gunk you have formulated releases the drug you want to deliver to the body.  Unfortunately for me, given the time frame of the release from my gel formulation (approximately 24 hours), I have had to be in the lab at (in the very least) 12 hour intervals, 7 days a week in order to collect the relevant data points to understand the drug release kinetics.  This has meant many late nights in the lab - indeed, from Tuesday through Friday last week, between my new small group (which is actually pretty good), worship team practice, grocery shopping, and lab work, the earliest I got home for "good" in the evening was 11PM.  Fortunately, I am almost done the series of experiments I needed to do, so the pain should be over by mid-week.  In better news (I guess it's better only in this context though): the rats are in the house! (cue the hip hop music... wait, only adult contemporary will do...)  Actually, there are apparently 60 rats downstairs waiting for various experiments from our group, 12 of which belong to me.  This is of course very exciting that I have finally achieved a life-long goal of being a rat owner.  We are doing the injections of my material tomorrow, so hopefully we get some positive results.  If so, I probably have about another week of background experiments to do and then I could write a paper which, after only two months of lab work, would be absolutely amazing.  But the rats need to cooperate with me first before that can happen, so we'll see how things go.

- Thanksgiving, er, I mean "Columbus Day Weekend", was a lot of fun.  This year was, to the best of my memory, the first time ever I had not been home for Thanksgiving weekend, but the Plan B weekend I had was a pretty good substitute.  I had a Thanksgiving dinner amongst other Canadians at Courtney and Brett's apartment, which was really fantastic - a pretty impressive effort for the first (albeit highly modified) Thanksgiving dinner made!  The only negative of the night was that I was defeated playing Boston Monopoly (really... all the properties are Boston landmarks).  I foolishly made a "no rent" deal with Courtney in order to acquire Back Bay (a ritzy Boston neighbourhood which is the equivalent of Park Place in normal Monopoly) which, although effective in muscling out the other players in the game, left me pretty much without an income stream near the end.  Between this and my shuffleboard debacle a few weeks back, I am getting worried that my leisure activity dominance is waning... must recover soon...

- On Columbus Day on Monday (also a holiday here), I went to southern New Hampshire (about an hour and a half drive) with three people from my lab to enjoy an absolutely perfect fall day hiking up Mount Monadnock, which is apparently the world's first or second most climbed mountain peak (just behind or just ahead of Mount Fuji in Japan, depending who you believe).  This was recommended as an "easy" hike by my office mate, a gentle, two-hour jaunt to the top of a mountain peak providing a vista of six different states and, on a clear day, the Boston skyline.  However, I did not factor into my thinking that this is the same guy who did a 60-mile bike ride a couple of weeks ago and "felt great" afterwards.  Needless to say, after about 2.5 hours hiking and already bordering on exhausted, when we asked a guy coming down how much further it was and he told us "only about 45 minutes - but it gets steeper", we convinced ourselves that we were satisfied with the still very nice vista we were able to see having made it up approximately 1500-1600 of the 2000 feet total elevation of the mountain.  Actually, I would have kept going regardless of the fatigue level (I am incredibly stubborn and HATE not finishing something I started), but one of other people with me had to be back to Boston by 7PM so it simply couldn't be done.  I'd like to go back at some point next year and actually make it to the top, perhaps up the other shorter and easier trail which we were unable to access due to the insane number of people at the park that day.  However, it was still a tremendous day to be outside, the leaves were quite spectacular (see the next post for some pics), and it was fun to get to know a couple coworkers a little better.

So this all sounds pretty good, no?  Well, sure, but all these positive vibes were overwhelmed by the insane sadness brought on by another event - the end of the fantasy baseball season.  I now have at least a glimpse what it must be like to try to overcome a drug addiction - it was very sad, me glued to my computer repeatedly hitting "refresh" on our live stats page to see how "my team" was doing that night, only to see the repeated flashing that there were "no games scheduled".  There was much twitching, a little convulsing, and several gallons of tears, but I'm starting to get over it now.  The (small) solace to the whole thing was that my season was really quite successful, finishing second in our Philpott Church league.  The only problem with that result is that the one team that did beat me was that of Jason and James, fantasy baseball gurus extraordinaire and the one team in the league which I am really eager to defeat (in a way, I would prefer to finish 11th as long as they finished 12th) :)  The one soothing factor was that, on the final day of the season, I overtook them to win the team batting average title by .0009 points... a harbinger of things to come next season my friends!  Actually, I was particularly fond of my team this year because I didn't have too many "stars"... indeed, my top-ranked player was 19th in the overall player rankings at the end of the season... but I had a lot of very solid, workmanlike players who together made for a pretty impressive group.  It was pitching that killed me this year, so the job this winter is to plot and scheme and (oh, that sounds bad... let me rephrase) "plan constructively" for improving this performance in the '07 season.  By the way, your fearless World Series prediction is Tigers over Mets in 6.  You heard it here first.

Ever since I got my first digital camera (which died a tragic death outside the Paris opera house on my final night in Europe), I have become a bit of a photography buff.  This fact is likely much to the dismay of some of you who have been subjected to my never-ending slide shows from vacations - 950 pictures of Hawaii for instance is essentially the dictionary definition of the phrase "too much of a good thing").  Fall is therefore a particularly dangerous season to be around me since any picture worth taking in the summer is, in my opinion, most certainly worth taking again while featuring a brightly-coloured tree (often from multiple angles).  So, if you want to be bored by my complete encyclopedia of trigger happiness from around Boston and climbing Mount Monadnock in southwestern New Hampshire, you can check all the pictures out here and here.  However, I have posted my (tightly edited, for me at least) series of favourites below: 

My favourite pic - a pond at the trailhead to Mount Monadnock

The view from the (almost) top of Mount Monadnock

The main building at MIT

A doorway in the Back Bay neighbourhood of Boston - almost looks like more of a spring picture actually.

Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay

Public Garden in downtown Boston - the John Hancock tower (the blue glass building, a landmark in the city) is in the background

Beacon Hill neighbourhood of Boston

Boston Common

It's again been a while... slacking off after only two months of blogging, it is shameful.  However, I have a compelling excuse (or rather a laundry list of compelling excuses, including laundry, as described below):

- Two weekends ago I was back in Canada for Mike and Larisa's wedding.  It was a spectacular weekend to be in Muskoka and it is always great to see two friends find happiness in each other.  It was also fun to see a lot of Hamilton people again and catch up - it is neat to see how, even after two and a half months "out of the loop", it almost seemed like I'd never left.  Four of us stayed together in a "cottage" (I use the quotations since no building up near Lake Joseph is really a "cottage", just varying levels of full home luxury) with beach access and a ton of activities, which we got to enjoy only partially on Saturday and Sunday morning.  I did, however, find the one leisure activity I apparently am not that talented at playing - shuffleboard.  This upset me a little bit since, as a curler and leisure activity enthusiast, it seemed like the kind of thing I would dominate in, but alas not (redeemed myself in horseshoes though, so it all ended well).   I suspect that when I become 70 my shuffleboard skills will be revealed to facilitate leisure activity dominance in all phases of life.  I have never understood how weddings are so exhausting when all you are actually doing is sitting around watching and eating, but this one was no exception to that rule - plus, no matter how great the ceremony is (excellent!), how tasty the food is (very!), and how happy you are for the married couple (extremely!), when you are 28 and single at a wedding, there is a little part of the day which is just not fun.  However, I would not have missed it and it was terrific fun to be back in Canada for even a couple of days (congratulations Mike and Larisa!).

- Airline rant: on the way back to Boston on the Sunday night, my flight was delayed an hour because (and I quote the pilot) "there are too many planes in the air over Boston".  Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this something that somebody, say a scheduling guru at the airport, could have figured out ahead of time?  You know, count the number of airplanes coming in and going out per hour and compare it to the number of gates?  I volunteer to take a look at the schedule for future dates I'm flying to give them a hand with these complex mathematics.

- Suspiciously three days following my flight (Air Canada strikes again!  I think blaming Air Canada for everything that goes wrong in life is a key part of Canadian culture), I came down with a very nasty cold/flu combination which forced me to take three days off work and really knocked me on my rear end.  To be fair to Air Canada, getting sick at this time of year is pretty much a tradition for me - my body senses the equal hours of sunlight and darkness at the autumnal equinox and doesn't like the prevailing trend (or something like that).  Even a week and a half later I am still having the occasional coughing fit from it, but life has been much better for the last six days or so (i.e. I can at least function as a member of society again).  The only moderately entertaining part of the experience: when you work primarily for a surgeon and are told to go home due to sickness, you can literally say you are leaving work on "doctor's orders".      

- Also from the "fun part of working for a surgeon" file: this week, I heard what was probably the strangest sentence ever directed at me.  I have been working on a formulation for a hydrogel containing the drug bupivacaine, which acts as a nerve blocking agent to anaesthetize the area in the body to which it is applied (or systemically if it is injected in the blood).  The idea is to have a material which can be injected into the body through a syringe (i.e. is essentially liquid outside the body), solidifies inside the body to form a gel which entraps the drug and controls its release over time, and then re-liquifies after several hours to remove the material from the application site and eliminate the anaesthetic effect.  Anyway, my lab experiments were suggesting my formulation was working reasonably well, so my most immediate boss and I had this conversation:

Me: "blah blah blah" (boring scientific explanation of cool properties of material which makes me think it might work)
Him:  "Sounds good.  Order the rats"
Me: "Um... OK"
Him: "Yeah, order the rats"
Me: "How does one go about ordering rats?"

Never did I think the phrase "order the rats" would be the scientific equivalent to "good job".  Anyhow, even though sewer work in Back Bay (across the river from me) has apparently stirred a large population of mutant giant rats into the streets which we could acquire for free, we are going ahead and ordering the rats ($12 each I am told) to test this material.  Although it won't exactly be earth-shattering science if it works, it is certainly enough for a paper (and something that may very easily see human use since all the materials used in my formulation are already approved for human use in other forms). 

As a side note, in order to do animal experiments, a highly extensive list of protocols must be followed in order to minimize the discomfort of the lab animals.  This is obviously a very good and worthy idea.  I have somewhat mixed feelings over doing animal experiments where you are actively hurting the animal (prior to trying to fix it) and ultimately sacrificing it to find out what effects the material had not only where you inserted it but also on other parts of the anatomy.  This is particularly true with rabbits, a favourite animal model in my lab, given that my pet as a kid was a lab rabbit rescued from a genetics experimental lab at the University of Guelph.   However, it is absolutely true that there is NO other way to find out if something may be medically useful without having to put people into very real health danger - you could do lab bench or even cell experiments until you are blue in the face and still be totally unable to predict what may happen in the body.  So the practical options are (a) do animal research as humanely as possible (b) use human subjects and potentially cause immense side-effects in the process or (c) be satisified with current medical technologies and not worry about easing human suffering to any greater extent.  Given the choices, I can accept the need to do animal experiments.  Anyhow, the point of all this is that in order to perform protocols on rats or rabbits at MIT (or, I suspect, most other institutions), one must both provide toys for the animals in their cages and - I kid you not - provide them with music 24/7 for their listening pleasure.  Apparently rabbits really dig adult contemporary music (throw on some jazz and the experiment is ruined I tell you!).  Some may argue that this is another form of "inducing cruel or unusual suffering" but let's let that pass.  The thing that struck me when I learned this is that this is a whole market that music producers are just not exploiting.  I envision this conversation in the board rooms of studios everywhere if this news gets out:

Music Executive #1: "So, the new CD has pretty much tanked in both the U.S. and Europe radio markets"
Music Executive #2: "Yeah, yeah, but let's get to the key issue - how are we doing on the "Small Rodents" chart?"
Music Executive #1: "Top 10 baby!"
Music Executive #2: "Sweet!  Plan the follow-up album!"

- I have had a busy weekend this weekend as well - a little lab work, a little work on papers from my PhD (7 published, 1 submitted, one to submit tonight (in theory), and 4-5 more to go... woo hoo!), but also a little fun.  Saturday was Smithsonian Museum Day here in the U.S. of A., which meant that 4000 museums nation-wide were offering free admission, including the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston.   So, sensing the price was right (regular admission was $15, which is a little rich for my blood), I went with Courtney and Brett to check it out.   Lots of nice stuff and a fantastic building to boot.  My favourite part was the musical instrument room and, in particular, a guitar which was played with keys on the side which, when pressed, would induce ivory mallets to pop through the hole in the guitar to strike the strings.  Why bother with such a contraption?  So women could play it without breaking their fingernails - of course!  I also had a good time at a welcome dinner for newbies at my church last night (at the pastor's house - he has 8 kids, so it was hardly noticeable when the 20 guests showed up in terms of added activity).  It is nice to have a home cooked meal that you don't have to prepare, and I ended up meeting a lot of nice people to boot.  The church is small, but the thing I like most about it is that the vast majority of the people there really "buy in" - that is, they just don't show up on Sunday for the service and then take off but are active throughout the week in other ministries, small groups, etc.  It's much harder to be a passenger in a smaller church, which is why I enjoy it.  I played on the worship team again this week (and apparently will be weekly for the forseeable future, which is quite OK since it is a lot of fun outside of the 8:15AM starts on Sunday) and start in a small group this week.    

- Unrelated side note:  Dunkin' Donuts Munchkin donut bits are tastier than Tim Horton's timbits.  There, I said it.  Go ahead and start the Canadian citizenship revokation process.