The devil is in the details

Where's Noah when you need him?

In the HIV/AIDS field (and particularly in the vaccine development field) there is often talk about "the developing world." The goal in making our vaccine, at least, is to generate a vaccine that will be protective against the strains of the virus that are prevalent in the developing world as well as a vaccine that can be produced and distributed in other areas (a vaccine that doesn't require a cold chain, for those of you in the field). I've been to meetings where the research and diagnostic capabilities of labs in other countries were discussed and suggestions were offered at how we, the haves in this whole scenario, could help out.

When I call "us" the "haves", I refer to the US, those at our university, as well as my lab itself. My lab is exceedingly well-funded. We could probably buy you, if we wanted (and if the pesky Constitution didn't prohibit it). We are currently awaiting the announcement of whether or not we received a grant that is worth a huge sum of money. The funding is nice-we are able to ask the questions that we need to ask without having to think of cost as an object, and are one of the few, if not the only group in the world able to do certain experiments (generally due to reagent/animal cost or labor-we also have an enormously large lab). It's an odd situation for a graduate student in some ways-I see the funding issues that are hitting the field in general and I watch some of my friends end up in difficult situations due to their labs being unable to secure funds, but at the same time, I am entirely insulated from feeling the problem myself and our lab just keeps getting bigger. I think that the problem that we work on is profoundly important and I don't think that it is solvable without the types of work that we do, which are inherently expensive. It certainly leads to uncomfortable situations, both with other students as I mentioned above, and with others outside of the lab. At the big HIV vaccine conference, Iceland and I were trapped at a dinner table one night where we were somewhat abused by a scientist from another university who was very offended by the amount of money that our advisor has and felt the need to take it out on us. (He also stole Iceland's dessert, so that may have added to our ire about the situation.) As exciting as the levels and inequalities of science funding are, however, they are not really the topic of this post.

My affluent lab currently occupies two floors of a small-ish, nearly unmarked brick building that was formerly a high school. This anonymitiy helps to keep us insulated from both protesters and other researchers and sort of keeps us united. It's a good system. Except for the whole converted high school thing. The building is kind of old, and was obviously not designed to be lab space. In the time that I have worked here, we have had a number of power outages due to a poorly designed electrical system. Our vacuum, a lab tool as necessary as electricity or water, is intermittent at best. Even those labs in developing countries that we are supposed to support don't have their experiments disturbed by lack of vacuum power. Lots of other pieces of equiptment are sporadic as well. The most ridiculous part, however, is the heating and cooling system. In each room, there are two wall units. One is the heating unit. The other is the cooling unit. They are each under separate control, and neither should ever be turned off entirely. We have some thermostat controls and can tune them up or down to try to make them battle towards a reasonable temperature. Should we turn our controllers off, however, the units will not turn back on again until maintence plays with them. Maintenance can also shut them off internally leaving us some wall-unit control. I'm sure that you can imagine how much maintenance loves to come over to our out of the way building, and how prompt they are. The controls for the A/C are at my desk. There is also a vent that brings in some air from the outside above my desk, which generally means that I work in temperatures approximating Antarctica. So, in short, the temperatures here are not good. (And that's not mentioning the time when we somehow had snow coming out of one of the units.)

Earlier this week, in my room, the units have started to leak. Every day there are increasingly large puddles everywhere. Today when we came in, a large area encompassing three desks was flooded, and the water showed no intention of subsiding. After many attempts at cleanup, our eventual solution was to turn off the a/c, even though Boston is in the middle of a major heat wave. Maintenance promises that they will come over today to fix the issue, but for now I am working in an over-heating flood zone. Please send aid in the form of diet coke and chocolate.

posted by Immunegirl @ 12:25 AM