Last night/this morning was Relay for Life. I was on a team with Stephen, Jordan, Pumpkin, Evan, Josh, Chuck, and Gummal's little brothers. Jordan was in charge of the Committee for Recruiting Girls and failed miserably. I only stayed till 2:30 and then I came back at 7:00. It was too long for me and I have a CellMolec test on Monday so I didn't want to be sleeping all day instead of studying.
Then this morning at 9:00 Dr. Gribble, Emily, Alex, and I spent about 3 hours doing in-vitro fertilization with the zebrafish. It was really awesome. We had a hard time getting the fish knocked out so that we could squeeze the eggs out of them, but after they were passed out we got tons of good eggs and sperm and we fertilized them and stuck them in petri dishes and we have 8 full petri dishes off baby fishes in their eggs down in the basement. The real test now is if the fish we did the experiment on today will live. They seemed okay and came out of the anesthetic pretty well, but it sometimes takes 24 hours for the drug to kill them, especially in this case when we had to use a much higher concentration than was advised.
And all morning I'm standing there working so hard and Dr. Gribble puts a slide under the microscope and tells me to come look and I sit down and there are dozens and dozens of these tiny little eggs and I can see on them where the cells are starting to divide on one end. That's how you can tell that it's working - when the cells start to divide. And we all started cheering. Nothing EVER works for us on the first try in the zebrafish lab. And I just couldn't stop staring at this slide. I was so happy - that's why I study science even though I fail sometimes - because when I look down the microscope at tiny little baby fishes and I understand, down to the tiniest detail, of how it works and I know that being able to do something like this matters, it makes sense. It doesn't matter that I can't balance my equations during chem lecture; I can make baby fish in real life.
