Ry Gould: First Week at The Scripps Research Institute

My name is Ry Gould and my internship is at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla California, an area of San Diego that is close to the shore. Arriving in San Diego for my internship things started a bit slow. This was due to the lab having the majority of its members away for different conferences. Myself and Wynton Brown, the student I was sent here with, began our work by assisting a PhD student working at Scripps. We work in the neuroscience department of Scripps working in the addiction lab run by the Pi Olivia George. He is a french scientist with many projects being run all at once, so his time in the particular lab is limited to what time he is able to spare.

The PhD student we worked with most of this week primarily studies the connection between the microbiome of different rats and their susceptibility to oxycodone addiction and dependence. In order to do this rats are trained to build a dependence on oxycodone while they are in the lab, and they are then sacrificed and have their gut microbiomes and brains analyzed. They are typically sacrificed while in a state of withdrawal so that their brains can be frozen, cut into slices of 40 microns thick, and died in a way  that any cells having activity within a few seconds of death will show up as extra dark dots. The abundance of dots and location of them can be viewed under a microscope and allow scientists looking at them to tell what is happening during withdrawal, and the severity of each specific rat’s withdrawal experience.

Wyton and I helped only with a small process of this data collection because there are a lot of rats being studied and a lot of small tasks that must be preformed in order to get the necessary data. The part that we did was the slicing of the brains. The brains are first frozen solid in dry ice (solidified carbondioxide) and then placed in a machine called a cryostat. A cryostat is basically a very thin slicing deli slicer that is inside of a freezer box. This is so that the slcies and the brain do not thaw out during the cutting process. 40 micron slices are about the width of two cells, so as one might imagine it takes quite a while to slice even one brain, but the reward of this labor is that each hemisphere and region of the brain can be analyzed for activity individually and precisely.

The remainder of the week was mostly spent cleaning the cages of rats that we were not yet allowed to touch and taking training courses in order to be allowed to legally handle rats being used for humane experimentation. Doing a variety of work like this was great for getting to know everyone in the lab. We were able to get to know several postgraduate students, a few undergraduate interns, and a few lab technicians. We happened to have the opportunity to meet Dr. George as well which was terrific because an undergraduate intern who we worked with had been there for three weeks and not had the opportunity to meet him yet.

Everyone in the lab is incredibly friendly, and because the lab has received interns from Pinhead for a few years in a row now they are quite adept to deal with scientifically naive high school students such as myself. This meant that none of our enthusiasm or willingness to work went under appreciated, and they knew plenty of specific areas in which they could expand our knowledge and usefulness.

In the free time that we have had in San Diego so far we have not done too much yet. The whether has been somewhat overcast almost everyday so we have only made it to the beach one time, but the one experience was great as there is a beautiful and hardly crowded beach within walking distance of our host family’s home. Our host mother has been incredibly kind to us and could not have made us feel any more welcome in her home. One of my favorite parts so far has been exploring different restraints in the area and having the opportunity to eat fish caught the same day it is eaten for the first time in my life. The cooks out here know exactly what they are doing and the cost of eating here is not too much higher than it is at home in Colorado.

I’m very excited for the rest of my time here, particularly for having more going on in the lab so there is more to do, and I could not be any more grateful for my wonderful host mother and the Pinhead Institute for providing me with the means to be here. Hopefully next week I will have more to say for adventures outside of the lab, but it has been a great time here so far nonetheless.