Week 43 - Restart

Moment of silence... for period 2 of the study. Nothing is more frustrating in research than the knowledge that you need a parameter measurement which you never took, and your experiment ended months ago. But when you experimental units die off like flea-bitten rats in a Paris sewer - that's a close second. My protozoa are dying, and I can't figure out why, but that's not even the worst of it.

We've been doing everything right, transferring them quickly from the dairy farm after good variation in sampling locations. The temperatures are good, and the rotational mixing and filtrate removal/buffer input rates have been steady and low to eliminate washout by confusion or overflow. We start off with great counts of nearly 1.1 x 10^6 cells/mL, but drop off quickly to the 1.1-2.3 x10^5 cells/mL. That still being a solid fermenter number, I was willing to celebrate until they dropped into the 40-50k range. This is too little and might have been more than in period 1 data, but the fate was sealed with the great arcing debacle on Saturday/Sunday at the beginning of this week.

I entered the lab to smell burning plastic and immediately asked our Brazilian if she smelled something burning? "Yeah," she answered with a wrinkle of her nose and then she walked out like nothing was wrong. Her compatriot informed me a few minutes later that he had been having trouble with the fuse on hot/stirplate 4 and the temperature was dropping. There was just no saving her as the temperature fell quickly. I looked at the back of the plate and the arcing was severe enough to have knocked someone down if they touched the wrong spot. I was lucky that my Brazilians were even standing to tell about the problem. It was melting through the fuse case and actually even melted some of the metal casing for the fuse itself. This was almost a huge disaster. I'm thankful to God that we didn't burn down the whole department building or have a staff member in the hospital. I just need to duke it out with the lab gremlins now to stop dinking with my stuff. The following Sunday we also had a problem with a faulty GFCI box, and a cross-threaded CO2 regulator (thanks a lot to whoever wanted to prove they could tighten that one down...) which resulted in a second restart of the system at the end of this weekend. And we still can't get those numbers to hold high.

What might be our last night out on the town before Baby arrives!

At least at the end of the day, I have this lovely lady to come home to! She was a sport and went out with me to the POTP3 fundraiser for Pelotonia with some friends from work. A few beers later (and a regrettable shady Taco Bell stop later), we were back in our warm bed with the cuddly dog and I wasn't a headache worse for the wear. Great new location for the POTP3 at EndZone, although I'm skeptical if it is always that clean and friendly - something seemed a touch off from the usual. You can see it in the employees. But a great turnout and a good cause. If you'd like to join our fight against cancer, you can post in the comments or check out www.Pelotonia.org.