Mice, Drugs, and a Day in the Lab
The best part about working in a lab with tons of mice and studying their behavior is that I never really know a day's schedule exactly until I get to the lab in the mornings. Mostly it's because mice are fickle, fickle, creatures. If a fire alarm goes off in the morning, the mice are way too startled to run any meaningful tests, especially when most of what I've been doing is testing mice for their startle responses. Last week, the fire alarm went off in LSRC twice in one day! (Altough our lab probably has to take the blame for one of the fire alarms going off -- opening the autoclave before the cycle finishes and it cools off = a large puff of smoke=very bad idea).
One of the tests that I've been helping doing is PPI, which basically consists shoving mice in and out of chambers in boxes that cost as much as a decent BMW. The test itself takes about 25 minutes, during which the machine takes over the experiment, provided that it's programmed correctly, for which I'm not responsible. So, there's a lot of "down time" during the day, the majority of which I use to read papers online. At first it was like translating Latin armed with only an inadequate dictionary and no knowledge of grammar, but the more I read, the more the information makes sense, like fitting pieces of information in a framework that I've constructed in my mind.
