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Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Of damned dilutions and green tongues

If I hadn't been a writer, I would have in all probability been a scientist. Err... let me rephrase that a little. I am a writer for I couldn't be a scientist. Don't get me wrong. I have the brain. What I don't have are a pair of hands that can hold a pipette without shaking uncontrollably.

If the Life Sciences Department at St Xavier's College, Mumbai, would have drawn up a list of the worst experiments ever conducted in the lab, I think mine would have featured near the top.

Damn dilutions!

First lab of the first year: I couldn't read the pipettes. So the dilutions looked, well, undiluted. Repeated colorimetric readings revealed the same. It's only after the whole class left for the day, did I realise that "pipette out 2 ml" meant actually measuring 2 ml on the pipette and not taking a volume of liquid (in this case Cobalt Chloride solution) upto the high 2 ml mark. Damn dilutions!

Microscopically motile
"Look into the microscope, they're moving," Sujaya, our professor and the then HOD told us after the demonstration. I looked into the ocular. Blank! What the hell was I supposed to be looking at? I moved aside. A fellow student went, "Ma'am I saw it!" I looked again. Blank. I started to feel dizzy, as if I was looking at water flowing over a bright white screen. I hated microscopes. We dispersed to do our own experiments. I loaded the slide on the microscope's stage. Blank again. I could even see a few scratches on the slide, but nothing else. It was as if we were simply loading water onto the slide. Even then I would have had something to look at through the 100X oil-immersion lens. The professor came over to me. She looked into the eyepiece. "They've stopped moving. You need to do this quickly." "Oh have they?" I tried again, and again and again. Each time the professor said, "It's stopped." And I still couldn't figure what we were trying to look at. "You should wear contacts instead of glasses," the professor suggested. I looked at the other students who wore glasses and they seemed to be doing fine. Some were even ready to go home after completing their pracs (practicals as 'lab' is called here in India). Finally, I mustered the courage and asked the professor. "What exactly are we seeing?" She turned around, "It's like a film of water flowing over a white background. It's so slow that it makes you dizzy if you look too hard for too long. We haven't stained them so you'll not see colour. Only motility." "Oh that!" I shrieked. "And I've been waiting for it to stop so that I could 'see' better. Darn!"

A green tongue
In the first and second years, my lab-partner was Sonali, who for all purposes was my friend and companion too. I wasn't the only one plagued with disasters. While I had my share only in the lab, Sonali seemed to be falling ill or hurting herself more often than a rugby player (if that can be a standard). Inevitably, we were friends. So when the professor told us to be careful while pipetting out the Malachite Green in the second year, I decided to ask Sonali to do it. I'd rather do the peripherals like sterilising the slides, etc instead of pipetting stuff. I heard some commotion at the back of the lab where the staining solutions were kept. I looked up and heard someone say Sonali. I thought she had burnt herself with acid. I called out to her. She turned around. And her lips were green. Malachite Green! I burst out laughing. "Damn Eisha, it's burning like hell and you're laughing!" I couldn't stop. Her teeth were green too! Why the hell did we use Malachite Green only for staining bacterial spores! LOL

Pneumonia-attack
Now, this one was scary. We had to plate Klebsiella pneumoniae, dangerous and potent by all means. Again, it was the pipette. I sucked in too much and I felt a sticky solution in my mouth. Pneumonia bacteria! I couldn't just hold them there. So instead of spitting them out, I swallowed them and carried on with the experiment. It would be over in five minutes, I assured myself, hoping the microbes in my stomach would wait till then or be killed by the hydrochloric acid there. It was Sonali who panicked. She rushed to Professor Prashant who panicked too. He gave her a phenolic solution. She asked me to drink it. I did, reluctantly. The fluid went down my throat. My mouth smelled like a hospital. I couldn't take more than a couple of sips. I set the beaker aside. The professor came in. Asked me how I was feeling. "It burns my throat." "You drank it?" He looked at me incredulously. "I just asked you to rinse your mouth and spit it out." Damn again. We ran to the canteen to get some Pepsi to neutralise the flavour of the phenol a bit. The next day, Prashant went like, "You're brave you know. You surived two fatal blows in a day." Right!

My antics in the lab were legendary and now when I think about it, I would have done much better for myself just analysing other people's results and drawing graphs (I could make a correlation between two completely non-comparable results) than actually coming up with those results in the first place. But I am glad that I  gave Life Sciences a shot at least. And to be fair to my professors, they were all good sport. I love science and it helps me a lot in my writing - the whole idea of jotting down observations and deducing conclusions is very effective when it comes to reporting events objectively. And most importantly, it made me realise that I would be better off out in the world than in the confines of a lab. 

2 comments:

Giovanni said...

To be part of this story... wow! Brought back memories of the good old days in the lab ;)

Innate Explorer said...

Thanks, Giovi :D