It’s been a long time since I last update about my recent life. Okay, let’s start with after I’m coming back from the Europe trip. I moved back to last year’s student hall (Southwell) to stay for these 2 months while I am working. I am occupying the double-share room alone for 1 week for paying less than a single room. But, just this week, my roommate came. He is an Oxford student coming down to London to do his internship as well. He is British, and will be working for 2 full months too. Well, I guess I have to learn to adapt to living with others again. (last year’s experience with Jin Rong was wonderful). He is an early-sleeper, and you know I am the opposite. Sometimes he wants to sleep just after 11pm… very tough for me as I just gained momentum in doing work. He becomes ‘understanding’ later, by allowing me to switch on my desk light only while he’s sleeping. OK. Not so much of troubles. In fact, I have to change my sleeping habit too due to working. Everyday I have to wake up early at around 7.30am (record breaking early for non-studies time), work from 9 to 5 (sometimes could last until 7pm). When I am back to my room, I’m flatted. Tired. I formed a kitchen partnership with my roommate, where we cook for each other alternately. Save much of the troubles of eating the same food for 2 days or more, and save time. : )
I just started to work in the hospital for a week. So far, I have not done any lab work practically, but I was shown and demonstrated by my supervisor and several research teammates about the particular lab skills and technique I’m going to do in the coming weeks. Basically, I just jotted down all the details that they performed and explained. I was given a lab coat, a lab book and was given access to the building by providing me a swipe card (hehe, can get special rate of discount in the restaurant). Everything that I need can find there. I am allocated a computer and a seat too in the office. So far, I mix quite well with the people in office and in the lab. They are really friendly, kind and helpful. In the research team, we have people from Italy, Hungary, France, Brazil, and of course few British.
It’s really bloody to work in the lab in this department. Why? Hello, this department is called ‘Haematology’. We have to deal with lots of blood sample most of the time. My French supervisor told me honestly that I will be only given tasks like those steps of early stage of handling the sample (and usually not unique sample – it costs too much if I ever screw it up). What am I going to do most of the time is, separating the cells of crude raw blood sample into white blood cells layer and the rest (coz this department only is interested with white blood cells only)… I have to do some centrifugation, and with the help of some reagent, I could easily pipette out the cell layer that I am interested, into a new eppendorf tube (in various form), and later store it in -80 °C freezer (perhaps the next day someone will put them in liquid nitrogen, if they want). Next thing, i am also in charged to do PCR amplification and running electrophoresis gel … and all these things I found it boring and tedious. Actually after one week of exploring of lab life, it is not that interesting at all… many daily routine have to be done, and they are time-consuming. It is even worst if they are not satisfied with the outcome or the quality of the experiment, they need to redo… sien… Tell you this, each of the tasks takes more than 2 hours. It is no fun to redo things…
Ok, I do learn the seriousness of being a scientist at this level. Most of the time I’m having fun in my uni lab session, but this is not the case anymore in the research lab. Precision and caution are their main concern when performing experiment. No contamination is allowed, even no careless mistake of mis-pippette one well or mess up with others… nono…not especially at the last stage of experiment when someone relies on it to get the final result. (that’s why my supervisor doesn’t want me to handle those) I watched my supervisor doing Taqman PCR analysis. It is so easy …and sleepy. He took half an hour to set up all sample and reagent mix and standard dilution as well. And then pipette them one by one to 96 wells in that PCR plate. He discarded the pipette tip each time he pipetted, even when the same sample-mix solution is needed to put in two different holes. Ya, I observed also how careful are they sterile the fume hood and the equipment. When their pipette accidentally touched the neck of the reagent bottle, they will discard it as well straight away. Oh yes, of course the team can use few boxes of pipettes and tips each day. I must say that each scientific result that they obtained, is expensive. Cost of running the lab can never be underestimated. This is what they called investment in science and knowledge. If a government is reluctant to invest significant amount of money in research, this does not encourage the advancement in science, and the country will be lagging behind, far far away. It is not only about money, also about the culture and the determination for certain achievement.
I often heard about the research culture in M’sia local universities is seriously lacking. This is one of the essential parts of how to judge the quality of one university. We can’t hope too much on local university to become world class, if they don’t change their policy. How can they wasted so much money unproductively on targeting those anti-establishment students activities, instead of investing in ‘correct’ place for improving the academic standard? They must be kidding me. Again, returning the autonomy of the administration of university and the students, and stop political interference with the academic decision making, are something need to be done to push the agenda forward to become one of the academic excellent countries. I am afraid that next time I don’t have that much of money to send my children to study abroad too. It isn’t fair to us, the taxpayers too.
