Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Half-way Mark

This morning, I woke up early to get my blood drawn. I woke up at 7:55 AM, and ran over to health services before 8:00. For my first time getting blood drawn, it wasn't bad at all. It came out smoothly. After the drawing, I went to breakfast at Ratty. Then, I napped for an hour.

Class started in the lab again (this week is a four-day lab). The purpose of our experiment was to extract our own DNA from the white blood cells of our blood. First, we centrifuged it to split the blood into layers. We removed the plasma part of the blood, and removed the supernatant stained with hemoglobin. What we were left with was a pellet full of white blood cells. We incubated these as a solution to break down the pellet, and left it overnight.

Tonight, we will get a visit from the Dean. He will check our understanding of what we are doing in lab. I hope we make Ms. Hall look good.

At this point, our class is half-way over. Only 1 and 1/2 weeks left.

1 comment:

  1. Frank,

    Always good to hear from you. We like reading narratives about what's going on but we also like reading about your thoughts about what's going on and how it's affecting you. Any chance you can share some of those thoughts?

    And by the way, with regards to having your blood drawn and how it came out smoothly: the way it works is that if you make a hole in the vein the bloods going to come out. As someone who has punched a lot of holes in my body--some by accident and some on purpose--the secret isn't getting the blood to come out. The secret is getting it to stop.

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