Thursday, September 25, 2014

Murphy Strikes!

My master's project is setting some land speed records. Feeding trials, lab analyses, statistical analyses of the lab data, collecting and reading papers, writing the thesis, writing papers for publication, preparing a talk or two, and taking classes--all of it getting squeezed into slightly more than one year. 

Since early July, I've been toiling daily in my advisor's lab. I'm sick of the place, that's for sure. About the only positive thing I can say is there are windows. The lab is in the basement of a 60-plus-year-old building. Lining the ceiling of the basement hallways are the steam pipes used to heat the building. They contain steam year-round even if they aren't sending heat to the rooms in the upper floors. As a result, walking to the lab is like taking a trip into the underworld: dark, musty, and stinking hot.

The only AC source in the lab is a puny window unit at one end. At the height of summer, even with the window unit going full bore, it was usually no cooler than 85 F in there for hours on end. The ceiling of the lab, like the rest of the basement, is festooned with pipes.  The cabinetry was new when the building was built. It has a quaint charm, to be sure. I'd take air-conditioned over quaint any day, however.

I had previously agreed with my advisor that I would try to finish all the lab work before classes started, which they will do on Monday. It was an ambitious plan but she has learned that she can push and I will deliver. So I was counting down the days of this last week.

I planned everything out so that I only had some fairly simple tasks to do this week. I wanted to take a short break before the term began since I have been working non-stop all summer. I was planning to run the last GC samples on Wednesday night, get the printouts on Thursday morning, interpret them, and email the data to my advisor that day. Then take a couple of days off. But I'm sure you can see where this is going. Murphy, who deserves his own special room in hell, struck with a vengeance on Tuesday. 

The GC, or gas chromatograph, is a box-like machine that heats up liquid samples at one end of a glass tube, heats them enough to turn them into a gas, and detects the molecules that float out the other end. The tube contains materials that cause the molecules to come out in molecular weight order: little ones first, then bigger ones. And the detector also measures how much of each molecule it senses so you can determine both which molecules are in your sample and the relative percentage of each molecule type. We are using it to determine which fatty acids are in the chicken tissues--did we successfully enrich the breast and thigh tissue with long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. It takes about 11 hours to run 16 samples. I have 32 samples per tissue so I set up 16 samples to run at 8am, return to the lab in the evening, and set up and run the second half. I'm sure you are thinking, why not run them all at once? That would make sense, wouldn't it?

It would make sense except that it's so hot in the lab that the hexane that we use as a solvent volatilizes in the sample vials as they sit in the tray waiting their turn. The increased vapor pressure in the tiny vials (they hold about 1.5 mL) pops their tops off and entire samples evaporate into the room before the GC gets around to them. Yes, in case you were wondering, I learned this the hard way. (If I were to write a "pro tip" addition to my advisor's procedure protocols, it would run into the dozens of pages.) I pointed a box fan at the GC and turned the AC vents in its direction but that didn't help.

I was already resigned to this every-12-hour arrangement. Although it's a pain and increases the overall time that I spend running the samples, that in fact isn't the problem. The problem is that the GC oven is cooled with various gases (helium, compressed air, etc.) and, sometime Tuesday night during my run, the compressed air tank ran dry. The GC is smart enough to shut itself down when it can't cool the oven. But I still have almost 50 samples to run! Here's where Murphy really got me: the gas tank supply company only delivers to campus twice a week.

Fortunately, one of those delivery days is Friday. I plan to camp out in the lab in the morning and wait for the gas tank guy to show up. I'll be running samples most of the weekend but I think, just maybe, if Murphy has already done his worst, that I will just finish before classes start.

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