The devil is in the details

Feeling hot Hot HOT.

Once upon a time, there was a grad student in my lab named F. F. did some very old-school biochemistry/immunology experiments that were a little tricky and required the use of some very bad radioactivity. When F. was nearing completion of his thesis, our advisor decided that it was important to have someone in the lab that knew how to do/had experience in these tricky radioactive experiments. I was the sucker most junior grad student in the lab at that time, so I was the lucky winner of this task. The experiment involves two parts-in one part you add very bad radioactivity to a peptide. Not only does this involve using a huge amount of VBR, but it also involves taking the VBR through an even worse super hazardous intermediate. As a consolation, you do get to wear a fun lead apron and work with lots of lead bricks in a special room and get a thyroid scan afterwards. As if THAT makes anyone feel better. The second part of the experiment involves taking your radioactively labelled peptide and seeing whether it binds to cells (sort of. That is a really simplified version). This part of the experiment is much better for you-you use far less radioactivity and it is always in a stable form, although you still do the experiment behind lead bricks. You can do the second part of the experiment ~10 times for each time you do the first, scary part. I learned how to do the first part by watching F. do it once, and I later perfected my technique on the second part by doing it many times. This process makes me "the expert" on the experiment, F. is long gone to a post-doc. I was taught about a year and a half ago.

E. now needs to learn this experiment, so I am "teaching" him (specifically, I am "teaching" him the first part today.) I put that in quotation marks because I don't know/remember how to do this part at all, having only watched F. do it once. We have the large quantity of very bad radioactivity in the lab right now and yesterday we tried to check out the "hot room" where we needed to work today and found out it was locked. To make a long story short-we've had quite the day trying to get this experiment set up (it took us hours of comical attempts at various steps) so that we can go upstairs and do the radioactive step. While E. was finishing the setup (attempt #3), I went upstairs to check the room. It's still locked. I then tried to track down the person in charge of radioactivity for the lab, and he made some calls. We are still trying to get someone from some other hospital department to give us access, so we can't do the experiment today. And I have other experiments planned tomorrow. So.....we are going to have to wait 'till Monday. I'm NOT really comfortable having that much very bad radioactivity just sitting around the lab all weekend, although it is properly shielded and protected and I know a weekend won't do much to the half-life.

While the lab radioactivity guy was making his calls, he talked to the hospital radiation safety office and they were chatting about the type of experiment that I was doing. There is currently some confusion and I'm waiting on an email, but it looks like I may need special radioactivity training (above and beyond normal lab radioactivity training) to do this experiment, which F. never mentioned. I'm sure he didn't do anything wrong purposefully and I doubt that I'd get in trouble for it, particularly since I'm taking care of the issue right away now that I've heard about it, but it sucks. We may be held up with the bad stuff festering in the fridge for even longer. If you see me glowing in the dark...this is why.

posted by Immunegirl @ 3:06 PM