This is my sixth and final week at the George Lab at UC San Diego. It feels like I’m still just getting started and I can’t believe it is coming so quickly to an end. The week ended up being somewhat uneventful, as our dose-response experiment has come to a close and the long-term experiments are not starting until next week.
Monday: It was a very chill day, with our only main goal being mouse habituation, which simply entails taking simple physiological measurements while getting the mice used to human touch to help eliminate handling and transport as a possible source for anxiety in future experiments. Going one mouse at a time, we would walk around the room with the mouse in a transparent transportation tube, then would record its weight and give each mouse a unique identifier on their tail using horizontal and vertical stripes colored with a sharpie. We then recorded body temperatures and tested their sensitivity to pain by recording the time it took each mouse to put its tail out of hot water when submerged. These are all very basic measurements but are important for providing a baseline to see what physiological effects nicotine can have on the body.
Tuesday: Today was supposed to be a staining day but unfortunately a series of mishaps resulted in my mentor getting an important meeting of hers rescheduled from the morning to early afternoon, making it unsuitable for us to stain considering the process requires 3-4 uninterrupted hours. I decided to make the best of the day and began preparing the presentation I will be giving to the lab next Wednesday. It is supposed to be a quick recap of what I learned about the lab as a whole and my work in it, but I’ve found myself incredibly stressed out while making it, constantly second-guessing everything I’m saying. While they are all very nice people, I’ve become fully aware that any small inaccuracies will be immediately spotted by everyone in the lab, since I am of course teaching them about their own job. I balanced out my presentation preparation with some slide mounting using old brains that were sliced long before I got to the lab. These slides will be used for a future staining process that I won’t be here for.
Wednesday was also somewhat lax, with our only main goal being a deep clean of the nicotine vapor chambers in preparation for upcoming experiments where the mice will have vapor exposure every day for three weeks as opposed to the acute exposure we’d been studying during my time here. Nicotine stains and sticks to everything and is extremely hard to remove, so we spent multiple hours scrubbing and wiping the tubes and chambers connecting the chamber, syringe, and nicotine pod the best we could. Following the deep clean, I did a practice presentation for my mentor and one of her students for feedback and fact-checking. I’m glad I did because I had a ton of small inaccuracies, as well as some larger conceptual errors, mostly from mixing up procedures from different experiments. It was humbling to get their feedback but I’m very grateful for their help in fixing my mistakes as it ensures that I’ll have an accurate presentation to give the rest of the lab.
I don’t have a photo of the tubes we cleaned but this shows how much nicotine can stain surfaces.
I was given Thursday off because my mentor and some of her students were going to Comic-Con, and because I’ll be flying out early on Saturday, I treated it as my unofficial final day, and used the day to do some of my favorite things in San Diego; frisbee golfing, surfing, cliff jumping, and had the pleasure of trying delicious Chinese food with my host father. I’m very grateful for an off day so late in the internship as it allowed for a definitive closure, and I now find myself excited to return to the mountains.
Friday: Every member of the lab attended a talk from Dr. George Koob, the “grandfather of addiction” and former PI of the George Lab. He is now the director of the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and gave a talk aimed at changing how we view alcohol. He talked about the dependence cycle and negative reinforcement and gave data showing how different genetic and environmental dispositions allow one to enter the cycle of dependence at various stages. He introduced a new word he coined called hyperkatifeia, used to describe the negative emotional state due to withdrawal from drugs of abuse. It was both interesting and somewhat horrifying to see the presented death and other adverse statistics of alcohol, especially considering how widely accepted it is in society. I finished off my internship creating nicotine solutions for the long exposure tests starting next week. It was sad to realize I may never see my mentor and other lab members again, and that realization strengthened my gratitude for their willingness to teach me everything about their jobs. This has been an eye-opening and thoroughly unique and unforgettable experience, and I would like to thank my mentor, the George Lab, and the Pinhead Institute for making this dream come true.
Dr. George Koob, Director of NIAAA
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