Duke University | Howard Hughes Undergraduate Program

 This post will be pretty short-- in terms of my research, not much has changed over the past few weeks. My results are still trickling in and I’ve gone into overdrive for the last stretch in a last ditch attempt to get as many results as possible. So far, it’s going well. Unfortunately, I can only make educated guesses as to what my results will be until later on in the week, which is making starting my poster and abstract extra fun.

It is great to see graphs finally coming together and having the fruits of my labor on Excel. It will be interesting to see how everything comes together in the end.

In other news, my worms are doing well. They send their best to anyone reading this. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was great. The cinematography and Ms. Granger looked particularly great this time around. Bruno, the new Sacha Baron Cohen movie, was offensive, uncomfortable, and incredibly funny! I would definitely recommend it to anyone who can sit through moment after moment of awkward scenes.
I’m now caught up with House Season 5 and have started Kings, the new NBC show that already got cancelled. Surprisingly it’s great! Way to cut another good show…

 Chalk Talks: To be honest, I wasn’t too thrilled at first about having to duck out of lab for an hour and a half for four days straight. Man, I was wrong. So many of the projects the other fellows are doing are amazingly interesting. There were many times that Suzanne and Alex had to cut us off because we had lost track of time asking progressively more and more complex questions about the research being presented. I’m sure summing up a month’s worth of research into 8 minutes makes projects seem more interesting than they seem most of the time, but still, I was astounded at how involved in and excited by their respective projects everyone was. Rock on guys. I can’t wait to see the final posters…

Finally, results: It’s a great feeling to finally be able to look at a graph of the data I’ve been collecting, it means I’m making headway. It’s great, but at times, frustrating. I’ve learned that not all data is viable data. I have to be sure that the results I get can be reproducible, which means they are large enough in sample size as well as have a low enough standard deviation to not be the product of chance. For someone who hasn’t taken stats yet, this is somewhat of a daunting task. I first noticed something was up when my results indicated that dead worms were coming back to life. I guess relevance is everything! Still, I feel a sense of accomplishment when I look at my Excel sheets and see what I have accomplished on paper.

My First Lab Meeting: As I’ve mentioned before, my lab is small. There are five of us: My PI, Dr. Ryan Baugh, my lab manager, Brenda, a grad student, Yutau, another undergrad, Ilka, and myself. We all have pretty good ideas of what everyone else is working on, but Dr. Baugh thought it would be a good idea for Ilka and me to present our research as practice for the real world as well as the poster presentations at the end of the program. We’re planning on doing it the Monday before the program ends, which will be great for bouncing our ideas off of Ryan before our actually projects are due.

Outside of Lab: My schedule and PI allowed me to head home to Massachusetts for the weekend to see my family and friends, who I’ve missed seeing since being here. After a lovely 3 hour delay at JFK due to fantastic Boston weather, I finally made it home to surprise my Mom and twin brother, neither of whom knew I was coming home. The night of the 4th was a blast, and among other surprises, I managed to get pretty nasty poison ivy. I got back to the apartment late Sunday night, slept well, and returned refreshed for lab in the morning.

I think that’s all that’s new for me for now. Who’s pumped to go see Harry Potter next week? Ah, may we never grow old.
Until next time,
Tucker

 Who says procrastination doesn’t come in handy some times? If I had tried to blog on this topic earlier in the week, I would have had to be BS my way through my entry. This isn’t to say I didn’t know what I was doing; it was more that I wasn’t as to why.

As I briefly mentioned earlier in my blogs, I am working with C. Elegans, a particularly useful model organism, one which I used to resent, but am slowly but surely growing to love.

Organisms in the wild are unable to walk to the supermarket when they get hungry, so when food availability becomes sparse, it is evolutionarily wise to have some sort of mechanism of prolonged-survival. C. Elegans are no exception. At the Baugh lab we are studying the worms’ reactions to periods of starvation.

Just as some quick background on the worms’ development—if an egg is laid and hatches in a favorable environment (i.e. with food), it progresses through four larval stages (L1-L4) before becoming a young and then gravid adult. If food is not present, the worms will go into a form of developmental arrest, L1 arrest, and will not molt and become an L2 until they have sufficient resources. If the onset of food deprivation comes later in life, the worms can go into another form of arrest, forming dauers. These dauers are long, move very little unless provoked, and have been known to live up to a year! (The normal life span of a worm is roughly 2 weeks.)

What Ilka (another undergrad) and I are doing is starving larva for variable amounts of time and looking at how well they respond and recover when exposed to food again. For me in particular, I am looking at mutant strains which lack a protein known to contribute to growth development as well as others which lack proteins necessary for dauer formation. My research question, then, is what role do these genes play in starvation recovery and what can we deduce from this knowledge?

I’ll let you know as soon as I figure it out.

 The world of research is very much a cutthroat competition. Just look at doctors Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier in the movie, “And the Band Played On”. In conditions like these, where the pressure to succeed and do so in a timely fashion is so great, we can see where scientists fold and fudge or fabricate data to publish new papers or claim a discovery. And although we don’t support their decisions, we can empathize as to why they were made.

Since we first started playing capture the flag and freeze-tag in kindergarten, we have been taught never to cheat. But is there an appropriate time to cheat? More specifically, is it appropriate to cheat in the world of research science? Looking at two historic examples of the past, I would say yes.

Rewind to 1863, to Gregor Mendel in his pea garden. He had just finished one of the most important papers of the last two centuries. The paper regarded his discovery of what would later be known as genetic inheritance. His data was incredible. Actually, it was a little too good to be true.

Nowadays, with application of statistical analysis, we see that what Mendel pulled off, the exactness of his inheritance ratios, the convenient traits he decided to consider, was incredibly lucky, or a little distorted. This isn’t to say that Mendel completely falsified his results. We have no way of knowing for sure that he did in fact cheat. However, what is most likely is that the data which went again his theoretical outcomes were conveniently put aside, perhaps by him, or even his assistant. Either way, some form of academic dishonesty almost certainly occurred.

But was this a bad thing? Hell no. Mendel made an incredible discovery. Somehow, he had enough evidence to deduce what was going on in those peas, and was able to apply this knowledge in order to weed out evidence to the contrary. He was able to ignore traits which were controlled by multiple genes and stick only with those legendary seven. He knew what was going on—he now needed the world to see it the same way. Less convincing results would mean more likelihood of having his results and theories dismissed. So in order to make one of the greatest modern discoveries known, he most likely skewed the data. And the world is all the better for it.
(more on this http://www.ayubmed.edu.pk/JAMC/PAST/19-3/22%20Faraz.pdf)

Flash forward to the late 1970’s when the AIDS epidemic first came to light. The CDC as shown in the film had great suspicions that the AIDS virus was transferred by sexual contact and blood, but had no way of proving it with statistical certainty. (What do we think? What do we know? What can we PROVE?) As a result, the call was made not to shut down the notorious San Francisco bathhouses; the disease was allowed to spread rampantly. How different might the world have been if Don Francis had lied, had stuck to his convictions and said that without a doubt, the disease was spread in such and such a manner? Perhaps the disease could have been contained.

The point of this has not been to encourage cheating. I don’t plan on it—I don’t have the confidence and commitment to risk my integrity and future career to put forth something I know to be true, even is the data is unable to show it. Cheating 98% of the time only ends poorly. But it’s those very few times when cheating can be done for the greater good that cheating should be done.

 “Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.” – Mark Twain

Two weeks into this program I’m finally starting to figure out what it is I’m expecting to get out of being here. I’ve already learned a ton about working with living organisms, and how very different (and at times frustrating) it is to live by their schedule and not mine. I learned quickly not to expect fast success, even when I’m convinced I’m close to winning some small lab-room victory.

There are a lot of setbacks in scientific research. For me, my worms’ eggs don’t hatch, and those resilient few that do, stubbornly refuse to grow. But things always get better, which leads me to my most hopeful expectation for the summer. I don’t want to make some huge break-through discovery or publish a paper after only 8 weeks. I do, however, want to experience one of those “gee whiz” moments, as Dr. Baugh puts it, where all of the hard work and past failures seem to come together and things just click. I want to get this small look into the researcher’s world and find a taste of that feeling that keeps them going when everything seems to be going awry.

Outside of the lab, my expectations are to meet new people and have a blast. I’m already on the way to accomplishing this goal—tomorrow a bunch of us are heading out to the shore for some beach time! Can’t wait! I have a feeling it’s going to be a good day.