Little drops make a... what?

My regular coursework is going on side-by-side with the project. And we’ve had guest lectures this week by a professor from the National Institute of Immunology, Delhi. A few of us were talking to her after class, and she told us that there was such a thing as too much vaccination. 

When a bug infects you and you’re able to fight it off, your body keeps some immune cells in your body which are capable of identifying the bug, should it ever infect you again. That way, your immune system will know that there’s been an infection, and it will also know what caused the infection. It will be able to tackle the infection that much more quickly. That’s why you never get the chicken pox more than once in your life.

When the second infection occurs, the cells that “remember” the infection (called memory cells) have to multiply and change into cells that can actually tackle the bug. But there’s a catch. Cells in your body can multiply only a certain number of times before they stop. (Incidentally, that limit is one of the reasons cells don’t turn cancerous very easily) So, if you have repeated infections, your memory cells will hit the limit and once they die, they won’t be replaced.

Now, vaccination is like giving you a mild infection that you can recover from, but which will also equip you with memory cells. That way, the body responds much quicker when an actual infection takes place.

Repeated vaccination is like repeated infection. There’s a risk that you could lose your immunity against a bug if you get too many booster shots too often. Which apparently is what is happening with the oral polio programme. In Delhi, oral polio vaccine campaigns are conducted nearly every month. Children under 5 are given oral polio drops. Which means if a child has very conscientious parents, it could get up to 60 doses in 5 years. That’s more than the limit on multiplication of cells. And that potentially defeats the whole purpose of the programme. There isn’t any experimental evidence yet to show that children who’ve gone through such a regimen have impaired immunity against polio, but there’s a risk that it could happen.

So, here’s the take home advice. If anyone tells you that you need booster vaccinations for the most common bugs more often than once in 6 months, check again somewhere else. Otherwise it might be as good as not getting a shot at all.

Back to the lab again yo, this whole rhapsody...

The project is back on track! We received new stocks of 293T on Friday, and HeLa on Tuesday. And I split my batch of 293T on Monday. Damn, it feels good to be back in the lab and get some real work done. And I mean handling something live, not just making solutions.

Not that making solutions is boring. We messed up the proportions of one of the buffers we were making last week, and ended up making 50% more buffer than we intended to. It was a nail-biting affair all right, trying to judge how much water we could add to get the ingredients to dissolve without the beaker flowing over!

So far, both cell lines seem to be healthy. The HeLa cells, especially, seem a whole lot healthier than the ones we got the last two times. My guide thinks it might be because the last two lots spent 16 odd hours in transit, and HeLa doesn’t like long train journeys. The new lot was in transit for 4 hours. I guess it makes sense. You do feel more out of sorts after a 16 hour journey than a 4 hour one.

It’s kinda exciting to think that I will work with the world’s oldest cancer cell line in about a week’s time from now. HeLa was first isolated in 1951, from a cervical tumour in a woman named Henrietta Lacks (hence HeLa). She died soon after, because the cancer had already metastasized by then. But a little bit of her lives in labs all over.

HeLa is very different from most other human cells. It has a chromosome number of 82, as against the normal human number of 46. This is partly because it has genes from the Human papilloma Virus (HPV), the virus that caused Henrietta's cancer. In fact it’s even been characterized as a different species, called Helacyton gartleri, after Stanley Gartler who discovered some of the many ways in which HeLa differs from human cells.

HeLa is so commonly used the world over it’s estimated that the total number of HeLa cells alive outnumber all the cells that were in Henrietta’s body. And soon enough I’ll be one of the thousands who’ve used this cell line. It feels good, it really does.

Up above the world so high...

Excuse me while I get into my Ivory Tower.

 

There, that’s better.

 

As you might have guessed already, my project is still at a standstill. I have started preparing the solutions and buffers that I need, just that there aren’t any cells to use them on. Although new cells are expected to arrive this weekend.

 

So what am I doing in my Ivory Tower? I’m going to talk about my experience with high-level research. And by that I mean the projects I have done in labs located on the 3^rd floor and higher.

 

Yes, that was a very lame joke. But I have to do whatever I can to amuse myself. Surprisingly though, all the projects I’ve done so far have been in labs located on the 3^rd floor and higher.

 

I guess it makes sense to put labs high up and the admin offices lower down in a building. That way, mail reaches the office faster. The scientists get a good view, which can do a lot for your morale. Plus, if your lab is high up, it makes going anyplace else seem like too much work. That way, you ensure that when people get to the lab, they work.

 

Of course, the flip side is that the lab may seem too far away and you skip going to the lab altogether. But that’s where the guilt comes in. You tell yourself “I’m getting so much in grant money. There’s so much shiny equipment up there. The people in my group depend on me being there. This is no time for feeling lazy!” And march off to the lab.

 

That’s when the feeling of being trapped up there hits you. And you come up with theories of being trapped. Like this one.

 

Okay, I’m done. Have a class now which thankfully is on the 1^st floor, so I’m going offline. And I’m leaving the Ivory Tower for now :)

Geeky cool

Since the project is still on hold, I’m reading papers (as if!). I’ve said that enough times already, so I’m going to shift track to things that are happening to me in college.

I’m a reporter with the college newsletter. My beat is “celebrity interviews”. Now, I don’t mean I’m the typical celebrity interviewer who has loads of contacts and blends seamlessly with the Page 3 crowd (ha ha!) Please, I’m doing a grad course in biology. I interview scientists who visit our college (we have a fair number of visitors) Yes, I know. I wear my geekiness on my sleeve.

 

So far, I’ve interviewed an evolutionary biologist from Bangalore and an astrophysicist from Cambridge. And one thing I’ve found in both of them is that they have a way with words. They aren’t great orators, mind you (I nearly fell asleep during both their lectures). But when you’re talking to them on a one-to-one basis, they seem very willing to talk and they put you at ease very quickly.

 

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been meeting the wrong kind of people so far, but I’ve hardly ever seen any scientist who lives up to the stereotype of a hard-nosed, hawk-eyed brainiac who’s miserly with both words and time. The kind of person who you can bet spent far too much time with his textbooks as a young adult, got picked last during games… you get the drift. The only one who are remotely like that are the ones who spent a lot of time in academia, and less in active research.

 

I guess this underscores two things. Scientific research today requires a great deal of cooperation. And the only way you can get other people to cooperate is by coming across as a decent human being. Besides proving that you can do solid research yourself.

 

The other thing is that scientists are in fact really cool people inside. Approachable, laidback and capable of frivolous conversation if need be (some of my questions are kinda frivolous. I try to maintain the “human interest” aspect, whatever that is). For instance, every professor in the bio department, up to and including the HoD, wears jeans to work. You’d only see that in a start-up, or in some kind of a media establishment. Makes me feel a whole lot better about what I’m getting into.

 

And hey if we scientists don’t call ourselves cool, who will?

Grand unification

I'm waiting right now for a lecture on high-energy physics to begin. We have weekly lectures in my college, where speakers are invited to give general talks in their fields of specialization. This one is about the existence of a unified theory that brings all the fundamental forces together. What's a biologist doing at a physics lecture? I'm bored, and we still haven't got any new stocks of cells yet. And there are only so many papers I can read before I drift off.

Since Monday, we've been having lectures in Immunology. The person conducting the lectures is doing a bloody brilliant job. And well, he should. He's on the committee that writes the NCERT bio textbooks, so he should be able to get ideas across well. Although the lecture on Monday was just a refresher, he still did everything from first principles and basic assumptions. And then brought up what difficulties and advantages a multicellular host would have over a single-celled host in dealing with a parasite. All of it makes sense. And since it comes up in such a logical fashion, I didn't have to take notes at any point in the last three days.

Honestly, if I ever get into academics as a career, I want to be able to teach like him.

That's probably a target worth working towards, even if I'm not in academics.