When: Summers of '98 and '99
Company/Organization: Dept. of Pharmacology, East Tennessee State University
Duties: Scrubbing volumetric flasks, researching and copying journal articles, renouncing my naive views on animal testing

When a guinea pig is happy, it coos like a pigeon; when scared, it whistles like a prairie dog. When it's injected with 75 mg/kg of sodium pentobarbital, it falls into a silent stupor, but its warm body still stiffens as if electrocuted when you decapitate it, and its blood still spurts frenetically across the stainless steel sink.*


Shiny happy small animal guillotine

After the decapitation, you had to work quickly to cut down from the throat and detangle the still-beating heart from a web of arteries and veins. Yingzi - a tiny, lovely post-doctoral student - had been using a heart a day for approximately three years by the time I got there, and the irony of her pointing up at me and crying accusingly, "Guinea pig killah!" every time I was scalpel deep in the chest cavity was pretty funny (at least it was after the first few times, during which it made me want to cry).

In Yingzi's case, her heart would then be popped into into a perfusion chamber where it would steadfastly pump away for hours afterward, a tiny silk suture connecting it to a machine that would measure its contractions altering in response to various drugs. In my case, it was chop off the upper half of my heart and glue it onto a little brass plate before freezing on dry ice.


A microtome cryostat, not the one I used but no doubt just as bone-numbingly cold

The cryocutter was a glorified bologna-slicer approximately the size of a mini-fridge and much colder; you would stick your hands into the -4 degree compartment and fasten the brass plate into a clamp that would advance it micrometer by micrometer towards a razor blade. Any breeze or warmth that entered the equipment would heat the heart slice instantly, causing it to gracefully curl up and become impossible to place on a slide, so there was a lot of breath-holding and the occasional dizzy spell.

A couple centimeters of cardiac atria later, your neat little rows of heart tissue slides were ready for a medley of dips in various chemicals. The key ingredient was a radioactively-labeled neuropeptide; wherever that drug and its magical markers ended up indicated the location of a nerve center that played a role in transmitting information in the heart. After their bath, the slides were loaded into a cartridge with radioactive-sensitive film and left to sit in a freezer for four to five weeks, because God in his infinite schadenfreude forbade scientific research to ever provide instant gratification.


¹²⁵I-labeled NKA binding to intrinsic cardiac ganglia and coronary arteries

Looking back, it was a pretty good job: the people were cool and I learned a lot. Also, I was saving the world through science and eventually there would be tangible results - a journal article and maybe a discovery significant enough to forward the field. But aside from all that, there was the death and destruction aspect: killing things, harvesting organs, and playing around with radioactive stuff. Nowadays, I sit and type and decapitate gummi bears and my accomplishments are ephemeral and unquantifiable in comparison. But I make a lot more now, so that's cool, too.

*If you're feeling squeamish right about now, consider that a large portion of the advances in biological science, from making sure a new Diet Coke sweetener won't give you cancer to the vaccines your pets and children receive, would never be accomplished without a whole host of completely stomach-turning protocols performed on small, cute, fuzzy, helpless animals, so sack up and deal. Ok, back to the story.

Listmaking dude: "Hmm, we've got to put some women on this list of the 50 most influential individuals in Silicon Valley/San Francisco, but how can we subtly undermine their presence on it?"

"Perfect!"

A small but constant sorrow in my life is the fact that my boyfriend doesn't adore the internet like I do. I can send him two, maybe three, really good hand-picked links a day, and if I'm lucky he'll respond to one of them (inevitably, it's the architecturally or environmentally themed one that I specifically ferreted out to get his attention). I showed him this site, but I know he'll never read it.

Of course, on the plus side, this means I can totally post pictures of him without recrimination, like this one:
The taming of the wafro

Sometimes your job is like this bicycle

The other night I was reminded by one of my bosses (I have like eight) that there are people out there who may hate their job but irregardlessly consider themselves lucky to have one.* He emphasized his point with a fascinating rant about his worst job ever at the dinosaur warehouse, where each person had one Sisyphean, mind-numbing task in the Ford-esque dinosaur shipping process, all in the name of getting a dinosaur to your doorstep as efficiently as possible.

To his credit, I was duly chagrined that I hadn't been enjoying my blessed life of high fructose corn syrup here in the nerdery, and I decided perhaps a review of my past jobs for comparison purposes was in order. Reports will focus on past boss temperament, job benefits and drawbacks, and the always valid question: "Did the position requirements include 'guinea pig decapitation'?"

*And so would I please stop whining about how he won't let me check in broken, duplicate, or egregiously hacked code, and just do my damn job, and was that too much to ask?**

** Um, yes.