Duke University | Howard Hughes Undergraduate Program

 The seminars were necessary to the internship experience, I felt.  Sometimes on low days when your research is not at all that exciting or satisfying, you realize that there are some really cool things going on at Duke.  Who knew someone was looking into the reproduction of marsupials?  I am glad that there was a variety of topics presented instead of just cell biology, for example.  That might be because I work in a cell bio lab looking at small things under a microscope or in agarose gel.  I prefer to work with things I can easily see and touch.  

The most rewarding aspect of this experience is getting to know people.  This sounds cliche but it's so true.  I didn't realize how much my lab enjoyed my presence until the last two weeks of the program.  Having someone with more knowledge and skill than you appreciate your input and contribution can truly make you happy and proud.  Additionally, I missed all my fellow fellows the most during that poster session and wished I got to know them more.  Maybe we needed more planned social events but I should've participated more.  

I would recommend the Howard Hughes summer fellowship to anyone who wants to expand their skills and social network.  I want to thank everyone who made my summer eye-opening and enjoyable.  Good luck!

The coolest thing about working in a cell/molecular lab was working with real DNA!  I had to get used to wearing latex gloves and pipetting ridiculously small amounts of DNA from zebrafish tail clippings into PCR mixes.  I'm really happy that I can see to my future lab that I've dealt with DNA. 

So why should I be so excited about this?  If you have ever watched the show BONES on FOX, then you might be familiar with forensic anthropology which is the identification of human skeletal remains in a forensic context.  I began reading some memoirs and case books by Dr. Bill Bass, founder of the "Body Farm" at UT, and Dr. William Maples, director of the CA Pound Human ID Lab at UF.  This field appeals to me because I love the social sciences and the methods employed in forensic anthropology are used in archaeology as well.  There's a real human connection because while you are using scientific approaches, you are using them on a person that was alive and no different from you.  You can be involved in historical cases and even cases dealing with human evolution.

So as you might remember from the chalk talk, I have been creating and naming genetic markers this past week.  Genetic markers are just sequences with known locations.  It's pretty simple to find one: you just look for repeats like gtgtgtgtgtgtgt or cacacacacaca, etc. in a DNA sequence.  Then you put that segment of the sequence containing the repeat into a program (we use Primer3Plus) to find primers at the 3' and 5' ends of the markers.  The crazy thing is that you can order these primers the way you might order a birthday cake.  With some good ole grant money (accessed by a code on a Duke website), I typed in the names of markers and sequences of the primers into the order cart.  With just $4.60, a machine somewhere out there will take those sequences and synthesize the primers that we need.  Really now?!

So I'm waiting on those right now but in the meantime, I might help to collect eggs in the fish room.  I can't even imagine how much water we use for the fish, and it makes you realize--more than ever--what a huge investment and risk science is.

I think being selfish in the world of science is not all that bad.  You start out wanting to do something that's never been done before (or done well), carrying with you one of many purposes for doing that crazy thing: fame.  Like Gallo there.  Yes, the movie protrayed him as a whiny brat but he was intelligent and (disregarding the controversy) discovered HIV.  This quick discovery saved lives, and I do believe that it takes a certain level of dedication and concern and insanity to lead any kind of research.  That passion, while with good intentions, is selfishness of variable levels.  This makes me realize how lucky I am to have such a patient PI and patient mentors who allow me to see what they are so dedicated to. 

Now good scientists are good scientists who may or may not be good people.  Something that stood out to me from And The Band Played On was a line that was something to the effect of "doctors should be doctors, not businessmen."  It's powerful in that it points out how important it is that specialization exists in a functioning society.  By specialization, I don't exactly mean the term used in your hs economics class to describe mass production and Ford.  Rather, there are different ways of thinking, decision-making, and conducting among groups.  For example, it is an insult to describe a doctor as a businessman as that would suggest that he/she puts money over human lives.  That is certainly wrong for a doctor under the Hippocratic oath to think.  But when people die because the doctor cannot obtain the funding, is that the same?  Is it more difficult to be idealistic or realistic?  

 This ties in with an anthropology article I looked into that got retracted.  (I wanted to get away from the rather overwhelming world of molecular biology.  This article deals with human leukocyte antigen used to discern genetic distances among individuals but very interesting to me as I love cultural and biological anthropology.)  There was no fraud involved in the typical sense, but the scientific nature and integrity of the researchers was questioned and such questioning can be lethal for one's career.  The article, titled The Origin of Palestinians and Their
Genetic Relatedness With Other Mediterranean Populations by Antonio Arnaiz-Villena et al., concluded that Palestinians and Jews have very little genetic differences and hostility between them is a matter of culture and religion.  This paper with a controversial political agenda has no place in a scientic journal.  While perhaps with good intentions, the scientists had a responsibility of bringing science to light, not politics.  Personally, I don't understand much of history to grasp the scope of this conflict.  To me, the illumination of any scientific discovery or step forward has political and social baggages because the common citizen is more complex than the empiricalist. 

I just I want to end this post by saying that we do what we can do best the best we can with whatever baggage we may carry.  Hopefully, something good comes out.  And then we repeat.

So cystic fibrosis doesn't really come to mind when looking at cute zebrafish zipping around a tank trying to avoid the net of a deadly undergrad.  I had greatly underappreciated the lab's work mostly because I had spent a few days restlessly going through maps upon maps of genetic markers, a jumble of incoherent letters and numbers.  It is cliche to describe a research project as a small piece of a huge jigsaw puzzle but that's how it is.  Our lab looking at fish is such a small step in the overall goal of curing cystic fibrosis.  Zebrafish are so different from humans that how can studying its gut give any understanding to a lung disease?  Here is my undergrad comprehension of it (thank you, mentors!): Biological tube formation (organs) is controlled by certain genes.  Obviously, tubes in our bodies are differentiated based on function so that the stomach is different in form and function from the esophagus or the intestines.  The zebrafish gut develops from two lumens (openings, channels) to one lumen but sometimes a mutation occurs that brings about an intestine with two or more lumens.  By finding out how this process of lumen formation is regulated, scientists in the lab can better understand how organs are formed--or deformed.  Another mutation is more closely related to cystic fibrosis.  In zebrafish, the gut has an ion channel that regulates the transfer of ions in and out of the gut.  Naturally, water would enter the gut as it is the vehicle, so to say.  So, when there is no channel, no water comes through.  In cystic fibrosis patients, this results in the build-up of mucus in the lungs (yet another tube).  The mutation leading to this is actually pretty common.  Overall, that is the goal of the lab and I have come to appreciate it more.  Genetic mapping can be tedious but as my PI reminded me, that's how it is.  Brilliant man.