Cicadas

Cicadas are making news. With millions of cicadas crawling above ground after 17 years of underground life, we are going to have a noisy summer.

For many people, cicadas are not pet material. They are suspiciously harmful to the trees (which, in fact, is untrue). Their singing is loud, piercing and monotonous (which, unfortunately, reminds me of my rude neighbors). And they are ghastly ugly. Although they do not rank high on my own scale of insect aesthetics, either, I do not have particularly bad feelings against them. In fact, I always have a soft spot in my heart for them.

Odd, right? I think it is because of the French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre's book The Stories of Insects. We had an excerpt from that book in our middle school text book. That excerpt, by coincidence, is about cicadas. Fabre's magic essay turned the grubby life of cicadas into a charming fairy tale, with a sublime ending by something like:"Four years of hard labor in the dark, one month of rejoice under the sun. A note so high to sing his happiness, so precious, yet so short."

I guess I never listened to cicadas' singing with detesting feelings again.

Language Tips

To me, summer means more work and less money. No classes in summer, so no excuses to be absent from the lab. And three months' hard work only get me one month's money I usually earn during semesters. I am not complaining anything. Knowing that a lot of grads don't have any money at all during summer, I am more than glad to get any money. It's just a fact.

But to get summer financial support, I have to submit a "brief description of your summer research plans signed by your advisor" to the Department. I spent two days to write up a 3-page "brief description", which is so bad that I wouldn't read it twice.

When I gave it to my boss, he took a look and go:"I will look it over and probably there will be many changes."

Translation: "Just one look and I find many mistakes".

I said:" Great! I appreciate it. I am glad I have someone to revise it."

He said:"Yeah. I remember my boss used to revise my writings too. He liked to cut some of my words out and pasted them on a piece of paper, and then add some of his own words. So when he returned it to me it was like a sentence of mine and a lot of sentences of his and then a few words of mine and then a lot of sentences of his..."

Then he said:"It must be hard to write in a second language. I can't imagine myself writing in French, although I learned some in high school."

I nodded:"Yeah, it's hard."

"But there is one advantage. When Jin(former grad student from China) was at his defense, someone asked something, like, what is the name of, like, a certain enzyme that he used. He said,'Oh, I know it! But I only know its Chinese name, which is blah, blah, blah, but I don't know its English name...'"

I showed my full sympathy:"It's probably true. When we learned genetics, we learned it in Chinese. Those Chinese names got so burned into our brains that it's hard to replace them with English ones."

He said with a grin:"Yeah, but even if you really don't know, you still can say: I only know its Chinese name, but I don't know how to say it in English."

I laughed:"That is a nice trick. I will remember it."

See what I mean? Lab life can be fun after all, if you have a boss sharing such tips with you.

The day when the Boss is away...

...so are most of us. This morning, after she set up her gels, M, the lab technician, asked me if I could take pictures of the gels for her, because "she will be away for a couple of hours". "Sure I can", I gladly said.

She never came back.

That was 10:00 am. Now it's 3 pm. The lab is practically empty. I am the only one in the lab, NOT doing my experiments. F and X, the other two grads, are probably in the gym.

I am going there too, in half an hour. It will be my first time in gym. I am not even sure where the gym is. Believe it or not, I have been here for 4 years, paying the student activity fee for 8 semesters, and NEVER been to the gym! My friends in Economy Department finally convinced me that this is the biggest waste of my investment, even bigger than my frequently-broken second-handed TOYOTA CAMRY.

The red-eye fly

This is my first lab blog -or should I say "lablog"?. It's nice that something good happened today for me to put it down in this blog.

I walked into the lab this morning, feeling as usual: miserable and frustrated. I am frustrated with my experiments. I have been trying to put a piece of DNA into flies for months now. The way I am doing it is called "injection". Just like a nurse injects drug into you with a needle and a syringe, I inject DNA into flies’ eggs. If everything goes well, I will find a red-eye fly among many white-eye flies in a vial about a month after the injection. The procedure is simple enough, but it is not that easy to make it work. Many things can go wrong and you end up with vials full of white-eye flies and a heart full of frustration. But if you want to do any molecular genetics with fruit flies, you have to take all these trouble to pursue your red-eye fly. In short, Red-eye fly is an injector's Holy Grail.

Today I monkeyed around for a while before settled down at the anethesia bench to check my injection flies. The last time I did my injections was a month ago, and got 21 survivors. From the past injecting experience, I came up with this myth, or voodoo alert as my boss would call it: If there will be a red eye fly, it will be among the first that emerge. I have check all the 21 vials and no red-eye fly yet, so I have lost my hope on this bunch and started another round of injection a week ago. But I am still checking these 21 vials from time to time, just in case. First vial...nothing. Second vial...nothing...20th vial...nothing. Last vial...a red-eye fly! OMG. Is this real? Could it be a runaway fly that got in from outside? My mind quickly went through all the possibilities that this red-eye fly might not be the real one.

It's ironic: when the thing that you desired so much for so long suddently appears before my eyes, your first reaction is denial.

Finally, I decided to jubilate: this fly is indeed my Holy Grail.

So months of effort finally leads to a happy ending.