9:50am. Developmental Biology. Today’s lecture is on how cells differentiate into different tissue types. How do cells become neurons, or muscle, or blood? The concluding message is that potency, what a cell can become, is greater than fate, what a cell will become. I find this very poetic, and moving for some reason, and it is so beautiful it makes me want to cry.
11am. I am sitting in the bio study space on the 3rd floor, trying to re-do the final problem on my biochem problem set before office hours, as the professor sent an email informing us of some crucial missing information last night… which has dramatically increased my likelihood of solving the problem.
11:38am. I am sitting on the floor of my biochem professor’s office, finally getting some insight into the jumps of thought we have yet to make thus far. He has chemistry puns as the titles of great works of literature around his office, and it makes me smile.
12.10pm. Bates. I am grabbing a quick lunch- pulled pork, broccoli, and lentil mac and cheese (onlyWellesley fresh would think of that one-it’s not bad) and listening to Gone with the Wind on audiobook. Plus, a cup of lemon black tea and a cookie to some Rihanna, because I need to pump myself up for lab.
12.45. Lab. We’re literally creating new life in lab today, fertilizing sea urchin eggs and watching the embryos develop over the next week. I see the fertilization event happen, see the calcium gradient send this thick balloon of a fertilization envelope around the egg cell in a matter of seconds. An event so stunning you have to see for yourself. Plus, the sea urchins are purple, and in my opinion, gorgeous.
A female sea urchin, releasing her eggs
3:45. Still lab. People are starting to file out, since all that’s left is to check the urchins once an hour for the rest of the evening. I am opening my excel files from last Friday’s protein quantification assay in the thesis lab so I can finally analyze the data.
The fertilized urchin embryo has divided in two
4:36. I am leaving the science center, again to Rihanna. There was an awful lot of nasty formatting to be done with the data, but the data itself looks good, with all concentrations calculated from absorbances from a linear regression. I need to lie down.
5:20. Eating a quick dinner in Stone D, fried chicken and salad before going back to check the urchins again, and meet with my biochem pset group.
6:00. The urchins are fine. They are happily dividing into four cells. I am happily working collaboratively on the pset with an impressive turnout from our class- there must be 20 people here and we are all helping each other figure out the last problem. It’s a relief to finally have some kind of consensus.
Three cell urchin, four cell urchin
7:17. The urchins have reached 8 cell and 16 cell configurations. I have reached the point in the evening where I am thankful to walk out into the cool night air and begin to unwind from the day.
Ever lovely yours,
Eleanor
An eight cell urchin (middle)
A 16 cell urchin