I am working at the George Lab at UC San Diego, a Psychiatry lab focused on drug addiction headed by Dr. Olivier George. I am working under my mentor, Selene Bonnet-Zahedi, a post-grad who will have her PhD within the next 12 months and holds a prominent position in the lab despite her age.
I was given a brief overview of the work that goes on in the lab, centered around work with rats and mice and the effects of drugs including cocaine, nicotine, alcohol, oxycodone, and heroin on the rodents’ brains. We skimmed the surface of single-cell whole-brain imaging, administration procedures, methods for measuring stress levels, and a few other topics during a quick tour of the wet lab and other lab rooms. I also got to see a vaporization device invented by Selene. Heated-up coils burn nicotine liquid into vapor, which goes through a chamber containing a rat who breathes it in, then goes to a filtration system so the person manning the machine doesn’t inhale the vapor.
The next day we got to work. Other members of the lab were doing rat dissections and gave blood samples from each rat they dissected to me and my mentor. We prepared the blood and put it in a centrifuge to separate the red cells from the serum in the blood. We then used pipettes to extract the serum into separate capsules, measured their volume and purity (determined by color), and put them into an industrial freezer for future analysis. For us, the serum will be primarily used to determine the amount of a substance present in the rats’ systems. 
Wednesday was Juneteenth and the lab took the day off, so I took advantage and went surfing, which was unfortunately cut short when my fellow intern Luka got stung by a stingray.
The next day I performed a bit more serum extraction to make sure I had the hang of it since I would be performing the entire extraction procedure by myself next Monday, then went to the dissection room to observe the procedure there, which started with the euthanization of the rats in a CO2 chamber, then removal of the spleen, tail, and head, as well as blood extraction from the heart which would still be beating at the time. I then watched the meticulous removal of the brain from the severed head, carefully breaking apart the cranium, cutting off meningeal blood vessels that help provide blood to the brain but could cut through the brain like floss through a cake if they’re not taken care of, and finally the careful removal of the brain. All organs harvested in the autopsy are placed in labeled containers that are frozen in dry ice and transported to the biobank, which provides said organs to any accredited institution in the United States that requests them, UCSD included, of course.
On Friday, we started the day creating nicotine concentrations which will be used for vapor administrations next week. We combined propylene glycol with glycerol to create a base vapor compound, then separated it into 4 vials and added differing amounts of nicotine to each. We then moved to the dissection room to perform perfusions on practice mice, as my mentor and a colleague of hers will be doing perfusions next Monday. They first sedate the mice in a chamber doused in isoflurane, then make precise incisions on the chest to gain access to the mouse’s heart, and tried their best to rupture the mouse’s main coronary artery and bottle the blood for analysis, but this was extremely difficult to get right because of the size of the mice and the difficult placement of the vial. They couldn’t puncture the heart because the purpose of the perfusion is to extract the blood of the mice and replace it with paraformaldehyde, which preserves the cells and keeps them as they were upon death, so the heart must stay intact to allow the PFA to travel its course through the body and “set” the cells as they are. They never fully got the entire procedure, but they improved a ton and it was somewhat gratifying to see that even post-grads sometimes don’t know exactly what they’re doing since that’s all I’ve felt all week. I’m not allowed to take photos of the mice or rats but here is a mouse brain extracted after the perfusions, with my fingers as a size reference.
Outside work, I’ve been surfing, exploring the city, watching the serene sunsets on the water, and improving my cooking and cleaning skills while my host parents are away. I am so grateful for my placement and can’t wait to report what I will have learned next week!
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