Hi everyone. Week five was the best so far. We started off Monday doing the the usual work in the lab and then we went to Sierra’s, a graduate student in the lab, house for Korean barbeque. On Tuesday, most of the lab went to a neat Mexican place for lunch as it was Will’s last day in the lab. Will and I worked on, and practiced our presentation that we were planning on giving to Olivier. Sadly, he wasn’t available on Tuesday, which means I will give the presentation myself at the end of my time here. While it would have been nice to do the presentation with Will, we were very tired at the end of day and we were both having trouble forming coherent sentences. The fun didn’t stop there… Lora took us to a Padres vs. Mets game where we had great food and amazing seats at Petco Park. On our way home we stopped at one of Lora’s favorite spots by the Bay with an amazing view of the city.
Friday was the most hectic day of the whole internship. I was the only student intern partially because Rio and Kirrolos, interns from San Diego, had a field trip to the beach with their program. A new group of rats finally got out of quarantine this week and “The Amazing Molly” somehow put catheters in all of them in three days. Along with Dana, I had to handle these fifty-five rats to make sure they were used to humans before starting the experiment next week. This new experiment will go on for five years. The lab will make the organs of every rat available to many different labs so that they can independently research as they choose. These rats consist of many different genes and the goal is to hopefully single out some genes and see how they are affected by cocaine addiction.
I also participated in irritability tests on rats that are dependent on cocaine. Some of the rats received deep brain stimulation (DBS) in the Nucleus accumbens. The goal of the “Bottle Brush Test” is the examine how irritable the rats are. I scored the reactions of the rats. Basically there is defensive and aggressive behavior and the hope was that the rats that received the DBS would be less irritable.
This weekend Angel and I hit some golf balls with our host dad Tom at 
the Torrey Pines golf course which is just up the street from the George Lab. I hadn’t played much golf in the past, but Tom was a great teacher and I’m definitely going to try and continue to play more in the future. I really looking forward to my last week here. Hopefully it will the best of all.
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