12th
talk less, and more will listen
I started working at my father’s lab again, probably due to his indignance with my inability to get a job. The lab is in the old VGH Heather Pavilion, which stands miserably as a stone structure with a newer building built around it. Notice in the linked timeline that the Heather Pavilion was completed in 1906, and patients were transported to this location on horse-drawn carriages via dirt roads. This highlights how dilapidated the building should be by now (2009). The lab is in the east wing of the building, located in the ‘department of infectious diseases’. It occupies the entire length of a corridor behind a locked door, above which a label reading ‘Infectious Diseases’ hangs from the ceiling. The lab mainly investigates the molecular biology of Mycobaterium tuberculosis.
In the summer of 2006 I spent a little more than a month repetitively exposing incubated samples of S. Aureus to Nitric Oxide in order to achieve a strain of Nitric Oxide resistant bacteria. This was part of an FDA approval process that would eventually validate Nitric Oxide as an anti-microbial agent.
In the morning I would remove my bacteria sample from an incubator and I would analyze it using a spectrophotometer to see how much bacteria had grown over-night. I would apply samples of this bactera to multiple petri-dishes, and I would incubate the petri-dishes in a Nitric Oxide filled gas-chamber, with varying ppm concentrations of CO2, NO2, O2, and NO. As any sane person would, I wrote profane words on the petri-dishes that would only be legible once the bacteria had multiplied for approximately three hours. In these three hours I was meant to be clearing out ancient medical equipment, left-over from when the building was a working hospital. Once, I took the liberty of stealing some chloroform from an old supply cabinet.
My father nagged me frequently and told me to keep a lab journal. I took notes on everything I did each day, from each spectrophotometric graph to the number of hours I wasted sitting on the roof of the hospital watching the birds. I discovered the roof early in July. I was asked by Mary, a lab technician who resembles a female version of Yoda, to carry a large box filled with blood-transfusion kits to the balcony. The balcony is where we dump all the old shit we don’t need, like portable sinks and large metal structures that were meant to prop up a patient’s leg or something of the sort. Just today, Xinji (another technician) found a vial of old Pertussis vaccines from the 80’s, surely useless now but still pretty cool. And yet nothing in the balcony could compare to the roof, which is three steps and a ladder from the balcony. It was maybe my second week when I decided to climb the ladder and sit in the sun with the swarm of birds who nested in the many crevices and vents of the roof. Not only could I see everyone down below on heather street, but I could also hear everyone working in the lab. There were even a few old chairs on the roof, which I presumed had been left by construction workers. I basked on that roof for hours each week while listening to the rampant squaking of birds. It was almost perfect because no one knew that I was up there. I would stay up there until my frustration with the squaking birds exceeded my pleasure, or until my petri dishes had finished incubating, at which point I would remove the petri dishes from the gas-chamber and chuckle at the funny words that I had written only hours previously. Then, in a test-tube, I would infect a culture solution with the bacteria and I would incubate the bacteria overnight. In the morning I would start over again, sometimes I would do the exact same thing as the day before. Sometimes I would vary the ppm concentrations of the different gasses.
Almost every year, my father talks about how the University is going to move his lab to a new building. He’s been working at the Heather Pavilion for twelve years now. They gave him a new P3 lab in a different building (for dealing with highly virulent strains of TB or occasionally SARS), and they gave him an office in the Wesbrook building at UBC, but every day he still comes to work at the shittiest building in the entire Vancouver Hospital system.
Tony Chow retired last year, so my father moved his lab from one large room to the corridor behind the locked door, which was were Tony’s old lab was. Since then, my father came to acquire a series of useless laboratory rooms stockpiled with old equipment used by the previous lab. Today my father gave me the privilege of clearing out one of these rooms.
Today I came to work at 1, which was incredibly late, but I’d been falling asleep at 5 am almost every night since school ended. It didn’t matter because my father doesn’t care, and even if he did care, he almost never get’s angry. I said hello to the workers who I knew, specifically Dennis, Xinji, and Mary. Mary had worked with my father since I was very young and much shorter than Mary. But now I tower over her, which might have something to do with why I think of Yoda when I see her. Xinji was once a student in my father’s lab. My father would frequently make fun of him, yet would enjoy his amicable presence very much. Xinji finished his master’s degree at the lab, and instead of leaving he stayed at the lab as a technician, he’s fun to laugh with and still very young. Dennis is the youngest, he has a slick honger haircut, nice clothes, nice shoes, and a constant smile. My father calls Dennis ‘the clone-master’ because he’s apparently amazingly adept when it comes to genetics. Dennis was accepted to med school and to a PhD program, and is going to be attending both. I enjoy the presence of all three of them, Dennis, Xinji, and Mary.
After greeting the lab, I go to the room that I need to clean and Mary explains to me what needs to be thrown away and what doesn’t, what’s useful, what’s recyclable, etc etc. After about two hours of cleaning, labelling shelves, and shoving random shit onto the balcony, I decide that the fume hood needs to be organized. There are two vents that lead directly from the top of the fume hood to the roof of the building, and I can already tell that the fume hood is broken by the many feathers scattered around the hood. Mary said something about how she could sometimes hear birds chirping in the lab, and now she knew where the sounds came from. Mary also mentioned that when it rained, the rain would come down into the fume hood. Since the fume hood was out of order, it was filled to the top with soggy cardboard boxes, which we later found were all filled with bags of pipettes, Tony Chow’s pipettes. Of all the interesting things Tony Chow could have left for us in that fume hood, he left over a thousand volumetric pipettes. I took down a few of the higher boxes, and they were all covered in bird-shit. Some of them had maggots crawling through them. At first I tried to convince myself that these were medicinal flesh-eating maggots, but this fabrication did not survive the sight of two bird-eggs on top of the third box that I brought out from the fume-hood. Both of the eggs were broken, and both of them looked as though they contained the rotting embryo of what may have been a crow or a pigeon. This is ridiculously ironic, considering that pigeons are one of the most disease-ridden animals on the planet, and that the fume hood was meant to be a sterile environment. I stared at the dead eggs until I felt a little sick and then I threw them in the trash. We threw away most of the boxes and kept the pipettes. I don’t know what Tony Chow had against pipettes that made him give us a lifetime supply.
I’m still not done cleaning that room, I’ll have to go back again tomorrow and clean the other side of the room.
In our case, the word ‘Lab’ does not refer to a single room in which experiments are carried out, but to a number of rooms along a corridor as well as to the team of people whom cooperate in carrying out a series of related experiments inside said rooms. When I say ‘lab’, I can either be referring to the actual place, or to the researchers at the lab.
Note: I hope people realize the point of this excersize, because I’m not even sure I realize what I was doing.
