Polite Dissent

I spent my junior and senior years in college working in a research lab. At my school, a high GPA would earn you a degree “with honors,” but if you wanted Latin honors you had to have both a high GPA and a research project.

I looked at a number of labs and ended up settling on a lab that evaluated plant growth hormones. My project looked at a particular stress protein in barley. My job was to evaluate what stresses would lead to expression of this gene, and what part of the seedling expressed the gene. It involved a great deal of RNA extraction and Northern blotting, but was actually a great deal of fun (although very tedious at times).

As part of our research, we worked with some low-grade radioactive elements. We each had to get federal certification to use them and followed very strict safety protocols. Those of us who worked with DNA and RNA used P₃₂ (a radioactive form of phosphorus) to radio-label our experiments. Other researches used S₃₅ (radioactive sulfur) to similarly radio-label proteins. While radioactive, neither of these elements was particularly strong. We used a Geiger counter to look for spills because both of these elements would set it off, but just barely.

There was a graduate student named Mike who worked in the same lab. To put it mildly, Mike was a little reckless. Since we worked in a lab specializing in barley, he decided to brew his own beer. The initial stages of the process went well, but when he bottled the beer (in glass bottles, of course), he decided he wanted strong carbonation so added a little extra yeast. Not a good idea. One night, the bottles all exploded and we came in to a lab dripping with beer and glass shards.

A few months later, he went on vacation out west. One day, he toured an abandoned mine. I don’t think it was any kind of organized tour; I’m pretty sure he just let himself in and started poking around. He wasn’t sure what kind of mine it was, but he found a couple of neat looking yellow-speckled rocks and brought them in to show us. He then put them in his pocket and forgot about them. Shortly after he left, I turned on the Geiger counter to make sure I hadn’t spilled any P₃₂ and it started screaming. It was clicking as loud and fast as it could go, particularly when I pointed it where Mike had placed his rocks. That’s right; he had brought home a nice souvenir of uranium. We had to shut the lab down for a week to clean it all up. Mike? He forgot about the rocks he put in his pocket when he washed his clothes, and managed to contaminate his entire apartment’s laundry. I’m not quite sure how that ended up except that the last I heard, he was a researcher for Monsanto.

I left the research lab after college, and haven’t really looked back. I enjoyed the work, but I was frustrated by the pressure to get results: “Take your time (wink, wink) but get results!” I also didn’t want to beg and scrape for grant money for the rest of my life. Medical school seemed like a much better option.

Most days, I still think it was the right decision.