Photos from vacations

Posted on December 28, 2007

Ryan has been scanning some of the film that’s been developed from my Zero Image 6X9 pinhole camera. It’s been so busy recently with moving and finals and the holidays that I hadn’t given much thought to shots I had taken. Here are two. The first is the lighthouse at Bullard’s Beach State Park in Bandon, Oregon taken in December. The second is a waterfall called Fishawk Falls about 25 minutes inland of Seaside, Oregon taken in November. Many thanks to Ryan for helping me climb down to get this shot. It was steep and wet and slippery. I don’t think I’d have tried the descent if it were not for his help.

Ted D. Gets a New Outfit

Posted on December 23, 2007

This is my childhood teddy bear. His name is Ted D. Bear. He was a Christmas present from my godparents when I was in kindergarden or 1st grade, and I probably thought the name was pretty smart. I just arrived back at my parents’ house in NH and found Ted in my room wearing some new garb. It was 5 am in the morning when I found him and it was such a fun surprise. He’s now sporting a New England Patriots uniform, complete with helmet, jersey, pants, kleets, and a football. It’s AWESOME! Until now, he’s been wearing the same thing for over 20 years which was basically some of my old baby clothes that hadn’t been washed in about 20 years either. It was definitely time for a change, and I think he looks great!.

First PCR and gel electrophoresis!

Posted on December 11, 2007

I have a HUGE presentation to give before the department tomorrow. I haven’t even put together half of my slides yet. This will be done last minute and I’ll still be working on it right up until “go time.” Par for the course. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to be able to get things done ahead of schedule. Anyway, until about an hour ago, I only had one type of data for the presentation, fluorometery data. Alone, it doesn’t make for a very interesting presentation, or a very compelling conclusion. I wanted data from a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and subsequent gel electrophoresis. I’ve done precisely zero of either before in my life…ever. I ran the PCR on Friday and would have to wait until today to run the product on a gel. If anything went wrong, there wouldn’t be time to redo it before tomorrow’s presentation. With such a complicated and tricky protocol, your first PCR and gel should really be something simple, perhaps 6 or 7 samples including positive and negative controls and your size ladder. I ran 25 samples, not including controls or ladder. I was nervous. But an hour ago it was finished running, I stained the gel, and took this picture. This is the picture of success. My blanks were blank! My positive control showed up! The samples all ran well! I won’t get into the details of what this gel tells me, but I will say that it bodes well for the method of DNA extraction I’m testing in the lab. Woo hoo!

End of the Quarter

Posted on December 9, 2007

Finally! The end of my first quarter at OHSU. I took two major classes and one minor one where attendance was required, but there were no grades. The first class was EBHE, which I figured out a few weeks in stood for Environmental and Biomolecular History of Earth. It was a team taught course with three instructors. Each and every lecture was a crash course in a different subject. Prebiotic chemistry, paleontology, atmospheric chemistry, stable isotope analysis, thermodynamics, biomolecular systematics, phylogenetic analysis, elemental cycling, microbial metabolism, bioinorganic chemistry….just to name a few.

We’d get a crash course in one of these topics during every lecture and then have a technical paper assigned to read about the topic. During the next class we’d start with a new 30 minute lecture, and then spend the next two hours discussing the last lecture and the assigned paper. Because the lectures were just half hour tastes of the material, most of the learning came outside the class while doing outside research to understand the paper. All in all, it was a great class and I definitely learned a lot. Since the department is interdisciplinary, this course really helps put everyone on equal more equal footing with regards to what we’ve been exposed to subject wise. Everyone knew about at least one of the subjects from their past academic studies, but we all knew about different things. This course was great in that, though certainly not comprehensive in any area, we can all now at least speak using using the same language and terminology and understand each other. That’s always a difficult thing to accomplish when throwing engineers, chemists, biochemists, microbiologists, biologists, geologists, hydrologists, environmental scientists, and ecologists together.

By some miracle, I got a 6/10 on that question. No, that’s not very good, but considering a 65% turned out to be a B, it’s could have been worse. Below you can see what the professor wanted. To be fair, cartoon versions in the text book look like the image on the right, with the jelly bean-looking thing around the residues that make up the oxyanion hole. And though much much simplified, I oriented my tetrahedral intermediate in the hole properly.

© Copyright 2009 Chris Brow • Powered by Wordpress • Using Detour Wordpress Theme created by Brian Gardner.