Stress Can Kill You! Or At Least Your Telomeres

It's official: Stress damages your DNA, or, more scientifically and less sensationally, your DNA's ends-telomeres.

So, people, don't worry, be happy, longer telomeres make you more healthy.

Priceless!

Our shaker was broken.

I turned it on yesterday and left it on overnight to grew my bacteria in it. After a night's growing the bacteria that multiplied should make the clear yellow culture media look clouded.

But when I took it out this morning, the media was still clear, indicating no growth. The reason, as I quickly found out, was that the shaker wasn't heated to 37 degrees celsius, the optimum temperature for my bacteria. Instead, it was only 27 degrees.

I tried to turn up the temperature, first a little, then a lot. Nothing. The heating module must be burned dead or something.

I told Mary, the lab technician, about it. She said:"Oh, it's broken again. Let me call that fix guy." She made the call, he wasn't there, so she left a message.

When the boss came in later, Mary said:"Our shaker is broken again. The temperature won't go up."

The boss said:"Really?" and turned to the shaker room. We followed.

The temperature was still around 27 degrees. He looked at the shaker for 30 seconds and pointed at a button:"This 'heat' button is off. That's why it's not heating." He pressed the button. The temperature began climbing, then stabilized at 37 degrees in less than a minute.

Geez! Why didn't I check it more carefully? How stupid!

I said to Mary:"You better call the guy not to come."

Boss said:"Yeah. I don't want to pay him $20 just to press a button."

Me:"Oh you have to pay him to fix it?"

Boss:"Yeah. To press a button, $20."

Me (laughing):"It's like that Mastercard commercial:'To press a button, $20. To know what's wrong, priceless.'"

Boss (laughing too):"Yeah."

What I didn't say was:"To know how stupid I am, priceless."

Data Deluged

The latest issue of the journal Science, under Random Samples/People/Misfortunes, tells a story about how an overflowed river brought "misfortunes" to a population geneticist by flooding his lab and drowning one third of his fruit flies.

How devastating.

This reminds me of one of my dreams.

In this dream, my biology building somehow got bombed.

(Dear reader, if you happen to be a CIA/FBI/Homeland Security Officer, please note that it was only a dream, and that I had nothing to do with the bombing, and that I will never bomb anything, ever, except perhaps in video games. Thank you.)

I was outside the building and witnessed it all. As a very very noble and very very very brave person hero, I dashed into that partially collapsed burning hell and very skillfully rescued a couple of fainted colleagues. I put them gently down on the safe ground and dashed back in. But suddently a huge ball of fire dropped from above and hit me in the back and sent me into a temporary coma. When I woke up in a fancy hospital, the first words I said to the surrounding people, including the grateful people I saved, a bunch of camera-ready reporters, and my boss, who happened to visit me at that time (good timing, boss), was:

"I guess I have to do the flies all over again, right?"

Oh, how vain I am, even in dreams.

Moral Values

Friday is our lab's "paper day". Each week, one of us picks a research paper and leads the group to discuss it.

Today is my turn. In the paper I picked there is a gene named Shibire. It is a Temperature Sensitive leathal mutant, which means that under normal temperature it lives pretty happily, but under high temperature, say, 29 degrees Celsius, it dies. We usually call this kind of mutants "TS" mutants. For this particular mutant, Shibire, it suffers so many defects in every part of its messed-up body that death seems to be the best thing that has ever happened to it.

Weird enough. But its name is even weirder. Shibire? It's not in the dictionary.

Me:"What is 'Shibire'? What kind of word is this?"

Boss:"Well, it was first discovered by a Japanese guy. So it's a Japanese word. I have no idea what it means in Japanese, but he named it Shibire, and its abbreviation would be Shi, and because it is a temperature sensitive mutant, he could write it as..."

He spelled it out:

" S-h-i-T-S."

We wrote down the letters and all laughed out loud.

What a smart wacky guy!

"By the way," my boss added,"its abbreviation has been changed to Sh1, for, you know..."

He paused to find a word for this.

I held up my fist high above my head and cried out:

"For Moral Values!"

"Yes. Exactly."

The Quiz

The Genetics Lab has two sections: Wendnesday and Thurday. Feng is Wendnesday's TA. I am the Thurday's.

Yesterday, after his section, Feng told me:"They had a quiz today."

Professor H's quiz, for many, is a scary thing. On the first day he took over the lab, before anything else, he said:"Let's do a quiz first. If you have read the handouts I gave you last week, you'll have no problem." Apparently, few students read it, for most of them scored 0, which deeply angered him, and triggered his constant yelling in the lab.

So today I hurried to the lab early to warn my students. But Professor H was already distributing test tubes around the lab when I got there. The early students sat around, chatting, not aware what was waiting for them.

I waited. Finally, he went out of the lab to grab his coffee cup from his office next door. I told the students:" You know there's a quiz today, don't you?"

They were agitated immediately and started reading handouts and notes. Some of them looked up at me with gratitude. That was the look I wanted to see. I felt I was a hero, a savior.

A few minutes later, he came back, closed the door, and started the lab. Everybody looked at him with a we-all-knew-your-dirty-trick-so-bring-it-on smile, and waited him to produce a stack of paper from his big white envelope he brought in with him.

He looked around the lab and opened the envelope. From it he took out a piece of paper, the "attendance sheet", and made a note of who were late for the lab. Then he inserted it back into the envelope, put it aside, and said:"Today what we are going to do is very simple..."

What? No quiz?

Students looked at me in puzzlement. I looked back at them in greater puzzlement.

The lab ended with a lot of usual yelling but no quiz.

Sorry, guys, false alarm.

Later I talked to his former TA about today's incident. She smiled, nodded, and said:"He never gave two succesive quizzes. He always gives a quiz to one class but not the other. And several weeks later, he gives a different quiz to the other class."

Ah. That was why. I was fooled.

The take-home lesson: espionage is a risky career.

Good Fear

The Genetics Lab is split into two parts. My boss teaches the first half. Dr. H the second.

My boss is ultra nice. Professor H is the opposite.

After he took over the lab, you often hear him yelling:

"This class is ridiculous! Do you have the foggist idea of what you are doing?"

Sometimes even I feel a little embarrassed.

Today, I came in the lab a little bit earlier than usual. As I was wiping the rain drops off my glasses with a Kimwipe, the girl, who thought I was an idiot, rushed to me and said:

"OK. I just wanna make sure what we are doing today before Dr. H comes in. I am so scared of asking him any question."

I looked at other students. They all looked at me, solemnly but eagerly nodding their heads.

I suddently became popular!

Who says fear is a bad thing?

Creativity Credits

You can tell the personalities of the students just by looking through their exams. When they don't know the answer to a question, they can be regretful, resentful or playful.

For example, in the second exam of my boss's Genetics lecture, the answer to one question should be "ligase", which is a kind of enzyme (suffix "-ase" = "enzyme") that "ligate" two DNA pieces together.

One student knew what this question was asking for, but didn't remember the name of the enzyme. So he wrote down: Nano duct tapase.

My boss gave him extra credits for his creativity.

Get Ready!

Today, after discussing my work progress, my boss says:"You can graduate next year."

That's good news.

Then he asks:"What do you want to do after this?"

"Postdoc, I guess."

"What areas are you interested in?"

My mind goes blank.

I don't know. I've never thought of it.

I once thought that knowledge increases automatically with age. After 4 or 5 years, I thought when I first got here, I would think as a genetics veteran. I was wrong. I still think as an undergraduate.

I am like a new student driver who is just starting to feel comfortable driving on a quiet local road but this road suddently merges onto a crowded L.A. highway.

So many cars. So fast. So many lanes, leading to unknown places.

His hands are shaking. His eyes are overwhelmed. He sees the signs but doesn't know which way to follow, because he doesn't know where he wants to go. Maybe he just wants to go back to his relaxing local road. But stuck in this traffic, he has to drive on.

"Let me get off!"he cries.

But traffic listens to no man.

Do You Vote?

My boss is eager to see Bush got kicked out of his office. That's why the first thing he did this morning was to vote.

Later this afternoon, a student came by to ask about her already late lab report. Her extended deadline was today.

"If I hand it in tonight, like nine, would you consider it today or tomorrow?"she asked my boss.

He considered it for 5 seconds and asked:"do you vote?"

"Yes."

"Today."