science is hard

May 19, 2005

i spent the last month trying to get this little rat gene to fit inside a specific plasmid (doughnut analogy, remember?), but yesterday (after my like, 10th failed attempt), the post-doc i’m working with decided that maybe it would be better to use a mouse version instead. his reasoning was decent (it would allow us to determine whether the overexpression virus caused a change in native rat gene expression levels, and the mouse version has a special ‘tag’ already on it so that we could do westerns and blot for it without a protein-specific antibody, which may or may not be available) — but argghghgh.

i guess it’s not the worst thing in the world, because i can’t say i made a lot of progress on the rat version. but now i’ll never know why it wasn’t working, and that kind of sucks. however, if this time things work better (i’m using a slightly different strategy where i cut the mouse gene out of one doughnut/plasmid and put it into another) i suppose i’ll just be happy. it would be nice to be part of a paper so early in my lab career . . .

it’s already 9:09, and i’m still sitting in front of my computer in the dining room. i really *like* just sleeping until i wake up every day, but i think my body is greedily using up more sleep than it really needs. i know that the experts always say that a truly well-rested individual shouldn’t need an alarm, but perhaps i am an exception. regardless of whether or not i believe it, i refuse to accept the idea that i require 9 hours of sleep per night. i think it’s much more likely that i’m just lazy.

so i think it’s back to an alarm tomorrow. oh well. it was fun while it lasted. kind of like my early 20s . . .

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