When I arrived at the lab at the beginning of July, I was eager to make a discovery of my own that would, in some small way, help scientists to find a cure for HD. I imagined myself working feverishly under the fume hood, swirling neon-colored chemicals in Erlenmeyer flasks. I envisioned myself peering into a high-powered microscope to observe the elusive structure of the huntingtin protein. As ridiculous as it sounds, I even imagined jumping up from my chair and crying, “Eureka!” as I bounded down the hallway in triumph.
As I settled into the daily routines of the lab, however, I saw the fantasy evaporate before my eyes. My biggest discovery this summer was that, while some discoveries may come in the form of intense flashes of insight, this is a rare event—except in the movies, of course. Getting to this point is much more prosaic.
Working in a lab was a brand-new experience for me. I am, however, familiar with the biology behind HD. For the past three years I have worked for Huntington’s Outreach Project for Education, at Stanford (HOPES), a student-led educational service project working to build a global Web resource on HD. Our site is a “layperson’s guide” to the scientific intricacies of HD and HD-related research. Akin to science journalism, my work has consisted of writing news briefs on the latest research, drugs, and other treatments, as well as interviewing eminent scientists and writing articles about their work on HD. My first interview was with Drs. MacDonald and Gusella during the summer of 2004, published on the website as the first chapter in a section called Research Frontiers. The two researchers discussed at length their approaches to HD and touched upon some of the myths of scientific research, including the ever-popular notion of a sudden cure or “magic bullet.”
Several months ago, just prior to my graduation from Stanford, Dr. MacDonald invited me to do an eight-week internship at her lab in this summer. After earning my BA in English with a minor in Human Biology, I headed east to Boston to begin my work. I was going from writing about science to actually doing science—a big leap.
Dr. MacDonald introduced me to Drs. Gill Gregory and Surya Reis, the two postdoctoral fellows who would be supervising my independent project. In preparation for conducting future research in their area of specialty, postdocs are in the last phase of their training, preparing them to start their own research laboratories, each working on a piece of the research puzzle. Research technologists, on the other hand, are responsible for performing one or more experiments that may either be varied or more routine, requiring long-term concerted expertise. For instance, Lakshmi Mysore, who has been working on HD for twenty years, specializes in genotyping, or determining the genetic makeup of an organism. The lab also depends upon the work of animal technicians, such as Edith Toral Lopez, who oversees the breeding of the animals and provides the genetically altered mice used in experiments.
During my first week I was outfitted with a white lab coat and notebook, given a tour of the lab, briefed on safety procedures and experimental protocols, and taught basic lab skills such as pipetting (using a syringe-like instrument to measure and transfer liquids from one container to another), taking care of tissue cultures, and transferring cells onto cover slips to be mounted on slides for viewing under the microscope.
Tissue cultures are a means of keeping populations of cells alive outside the body in a nutrient-rich liquid called a medium. I was responsible for monitoring the cells’ growth rate from day to day and splitting up the cells onto new dishes with fresh medium when the old dishes became too full because the cells had multiplied. The cells came from the brains—specifically, the striatum, the part of the brain that is first affected in HD—of mutant mouse embryos (those with 109 glutamine repeats in the huntingtin protein) and their normal (“wild-type”) counterparts.
Last Modified: 05/22/2009
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