Meres: April 2005

Lestat's

Lestat’s is your ordinary neighborhood coffee shop. It’s located in Normal Heights, an all-in-all a family-oriented area. What is not ordinary about it is that it is the only all-night, 24 hr coffee shop in San Diego. So in the wee-hours on a Thursday, you get your usual misfits, rejects, computer geeks, and black-pleather goth-chic -- people on the fringe of society – and graduate students. It is an interesting community Lestat’s has created here in the middle of ranch-style houses and pueblos --
There is nothing quite like the mish-mesh sound of foaming milk from an espresso machine and Celtic death-metal at 3am…“suppose I have to resurrect you, from the fire of hell… die! die! die!… (Bagpipe solo~)”
You see the same people in the coffee shop-circuit – the self-medicating clientele circulating though the coffee shops. The people that got shoved out the door of Wired at 10:30 or kicked out of Kensington’s Café at 11pm all ended up congregating here.
It may be difficult to imagine how Celtic death metal, goth interior could be the ideal place to study -- but immerse all this in caffeine and coat it with a thick layer of 3am-haze: now we’re all one big happy family. A big happy family is not a far off description -- the community there is surprisingly tight knit. People will look over your shoulder to see what you are working on on your laptop, perhaps even give you some suggestions of improvement. It’s like the Olive Garden – “when you’re there, you’re family!”

Cochella

The beer tent

Dave patiently waiting in Line

On the way to Cochella

the highlight of Cochella

Trent Reznor

Cochella

Ben Huh's "Fun game" on the grass at Cochella Music Festival

Ladies and Bug

Ladies & bug

Yummy goop

Hiking at Lake Arrowhead

Hiking near Lake Arrowhead

Franken-Rat

So I started my new rotation this quarter a couple of weeks ago in the Callaway Lab. The lab is at the beautiful Salk Institute for Biological Studies -- its the monumental building Louis Kahn designed in the 70s (for those of you who are architectural-savvy or have seen the movie "My Architect"). The main interest of the lab is cellular anatomy of the visual system, and I’m doing something I’ve never done before – In Vivo recordings.
I wanted to learn in vivo recordings, and since I’ve had much exposure to slice electrophysiology (where recordings of neurons are done in brain slice preparations) I have been excited in trying it out for a while. Besides, it just seems totally like a mad-scientist thing to do – creating little Franken-rats with mutated neurons.
So for my project this quarter, I’m trying to record from cortical neurons in a live anesthetized rat, and then perform electrophoration to inject bits of DNA, virus or dye into the neuron I’ve recorded from. Its an exciting project since in vivo electrophoration is a relatively new technique, and would be powerful in examining the functional anatomy of a given brain area.
So I did my first surgery last Wednesday, and even though I’ve seen it done before a number of times, I was still shaken up when I had to do it myself.
It isn’t that I have a major issue with sacrificing laboratory animals, for I’ve killed numerous rats and mice for my slice electrophysiology experiments – but they were quick deaths, fast and painless for the animals. The in vivo surgery just feels like a prolonged, drawn out suffering death of the poor rat. I suppose the fact that I am not yet very good at the whole procedure makes everything seem that much messier and invasive than it really is.
Its heart rate and respiration is monitored throughout the experiment, and by the end of the day, I should have a little Franken-rat with its skull stitched back together, waking up from the surgery and some fluorescent dye or interesting protein expressed in its brain. (I haven’t gotten to this point yet – I’ve so far only managed to get through to the craniotomy). Later on, I would be able to go back into the same area and examine the anatomy of the cell I recorded from, or look at the effects of the expressed protein.
So my second attempt is this Friday. We’ll see how it goes.