Bleached out Trifoilate Orange tips.

While my ume has survived the arctic plunge (assuming we don't do it again) many of the parts of the Trifoliate oranges next to it that were above the snowline are now bleached white. I'm assuming these parts are probably dead.

Deep snow is a wonderful thing. People wondering how I grow mandragora and figs in Buffalo often don't realize that snow puts a blanket over the landscape that holds a steady 32 degrees F. It's a good thing.

We should get another 2 inches today.

Spam "Extreme Home Makeover" for Crash victims.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29129872/ On Friday, February 13th, the extreme home makeover people announced that they were looking for a worthy family in the Buffalo Area: Do you know a hometown hero who deserves a visit from Ty Pennington and the "Extreme Home Makeover" crew? If so, the show wants to hear from Western New Yorkers like you! Producers are looking for local families who make a difference in the community and the lives of others, families whose homes are in desperate need of renovation or rebuilding. All you have to do is email a short description of the family to: CASTNEWYORK@gmail.com The deadline is February 20th. Nominations must include a contact phone number. ____________________________
The Buffalo community is openly promoting nominating the family whose house was hit by a plane last week and destroyed. http://www.wgrz.com/news/breaking/story.aspx?storyid=64235&catid=298 I don't personally watch reality tv, but this seems like a wonderful idea to me. If you feel so compelled, please add your name to the chorus of voices nominating the Wielinskis for this television show.

Plane crash near Buffalo last night

Strangely enough, this brings out people I have not heard from in months going "are you okay."

Actually, I'm not okay, even though we're nowhere near it. Since Flight 103 over Lockerbie, which happened when I was a teen, I've had a fear of being hit by a plunging plane while in my house...before I got skilled at controlling my dreams, this and the plunging elevator dream competed for worst. (After 11 sept. 01, I got the only combined plane+elevator dream ever, for about a week, but eventually controlled my way out of that one, too. Drat my brain and it's ability to torture me!)

Flight 103 was a huge thing in my Westcott-Euclid neighborhood of Syracuse, and my family is from the Oswego area, so the whole mass of college students killed freaked me, as these folks weren't far from my age at the time, and they were from SU and SUNY Oswego...most of the people in my neighborhood were SU students...I still wonder if I sold grrlscout cookies to any of them.

Gosh, that's morose.

I've since told people who've asked me about such things that plane crashes don't bother me, even when I'm on a plane...you pays your money and you takes your chance...but no one should be killed by a plane while they are at home, or at work, ever. You should be safe at home...it's just not fair. I mean, take a guy terrifed of flying, right...so he never "pays his money..." He should never be considered to be "taking his chance" because a plane might smack him in the house.

So, yeah. I'll probably have the plane dream tonight. I wonder how I'll get out of it?

Local news reports that one of the people killed was a 9-11 widow. That's just wrong.

Shorttimer at the lab and stress-related hypertension.

My job expires in 12 working days. I began the slow goodbye last Summer, when my GP told me I had high blood pressure. I have better cholesterol than your average American teenager, and while I'm overweight (sort of hard to avoid when you have late stage Ord's disease) my weight had actually gone down as my blood pressure increased. I'd had a number of infections out of nowhere, and had a terrible immune system, and just felt terrible.
So my GP asked me about stress at my job while taking my blood pressure for a second time that appointment, she noticed it went from "slightly high" when I was seen by the nurse to "dangerously high" and promptly suggested I was looking at classical stress-related hypertension. Since I'd had normal blood pressure even a year before, this was something I needed to take seriously... or I was looking at heart disease and early death.
...and I'm not even 40 yet.
I'd associated stress-related hypertention with the kind of life-and-death jobs other people here at this Cancer Institute have. I associated it with being constantly on the move, and I'm often sitting here doing nothing. I spoke to one of our psychiatrists here and was actually told that doing nothing in an economic downturn, or my usual back and forth of crazy hours followed by downtime can be worse than constant motion, because I'm literally in a sea of chaos, doing one thing one day, and another thing another, with a constant blurr of ever changing duties and poorly scheduled activities...add to this my wife's last full semester as a college student, a teenage son who...lets just say a teenage son...and you're got a stress-burnout victim.

My "official resignation cause" was that my duties have increased exponentially over the last 6 months and cannot be accomplished by one person, and that attempting to fufill the duties is making me demonstrably and documentedly ill. Which makes me sad, as my boss is not a bad guy, he's just not properly supported by the institute, and after 3 years of making miracles, and doing experiments deemed "impossible" for so small a lab it's time to turn me over...I'm done.

I'd rather be unemployed in a depression than dead at 40.

My "dead" Ume is budding.

I planted an ume [picture of one of the same cultivar in bloom here: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3287/2304529662_6693d01d70.jpg ] late last summer and the top promptly died, probably due to being damaged in transport. The leaves were battered but hung around until fall, and the plant seemed somewhat alive before the big freeze hit.

We're zone six, and the Ume is growing against the Northern side of my house, in a well-sheltered area with a lot of morning sun but no harsh afternoon sun. The problem is that the Ume, as well as some figs in the backyard, mandrakes and trifoliate oranges are all just barely zone 6 plants, and this winter has been abnormally cold. We're officially listed as zone 6b, the same as most of the South, with our winters being 0 to -5 degrees at the maximum. (It is zone 5 10 miles from here, but being off of a river that is too swift to completely freeze over makes a huge difference.) Unfortunately, we've hit -6 twice this year, and I figured all of my zone 6 plants were toast. Low and behold after the 2nd day of above freezing temperatures my Ume has developed tiny baby buds along its trunk (if you can call a 3ft long stick a trunk.)

I'm desperate to have those gorgeous baby pink blossoms before the daffodils and crocus come out, as that's why I planted the thing....for a shot of color in the gray that is the melting snow.

If I was home, in Syracuse, it'd be the middle of the winter, but with the snow melting, the annual snowfall for the year reached and my tomatoes, in their light table, starting to get their first real leaves, I think it's time for winter to skedaddle.

If you handle cells like babies, they act like babies.

[In the interest of protecting research obligations, names and timepoints are changed in any of my lab anecdotes. Since I've already tendered my resignation from my current lab, I've no qualms about catching flack myself, but PIs can be silly, and I wouldn't want the Bobs of the world to get in trouble. Likewise, I've tried to remove the techspeak from this...If I haven't, yell at me, please.]

In theory, an immortalized cell line consists of genetically identical cells, just like a group of laboratory mice is essentially a group of identical twins...in theory.

The problem is that this is completely untrue. Most people who work with laboratory mice will tell you that they are very different critters. Our brains can operate on this assumption nicely, because we know humans who are identical twins are individuals. We can't seem to make the connection to the little spheres or blobs under the microscope, however, and as a result we spend a ridiculous amount of time pretending that the cells are the same.

Recently a lab at my institute went out of business. A grad student was lucky enough to inherit DOHH2 cells from this lab, as he'd been working with them before the lab went belly-up, and while his new lab had samples of this line, they were ancient (in terms of cryostorage) and he didn't want to rely on ancient frozen stocks.

DOHH2 cells are easy as heck to grow. In fact, they have a tendency to contaminate other cultures if you're not careful. While this has never happened to me, in three years of growing them and a few dozen other lines, I've never had a problem growing them...

This guy (we'll call him Bob) thawed his new lab's ancient stock and got nothing. He thawed the belly-up lab's stock and got a struggling, straggly culture of dying floaties.

Knowing DOHH2 was one of my most-grown lines, and that my anal retentive boss had had our cells analyzed to the Nth power to verify they were DOHH2, he begged me for a cryotube and the secret to growing these "hard cells."

When I started working here one of the better PIs, who recently passed away, described these cells as so very easy to grow that if you ran out of media you could probably spit in a dish and grow them on that....

At my request, Bob brought me the biggest vented cap flask he could find, and a bottle of RPMI1640 with 10% FBS and penn/strep. This was his lab's default media, and very similar to what I use every day.

Then, to Bob's amazement, I pulled a cryotube out of the LN2 (not with my bare hands, obviously) and held it in my gloved hand without a cryoglove for 3 minutes, rolling it back and forth. While I did this, I added 50mL of his media (fresh from the fridge) to the flask, sprayed and wiped everything down, then whacked the tube so that the pellet of ice and cells (and a tiny amount of DMSO) plunked into the flask.

And I plopped it into the incubator, at 37, 6%CO2, repeated it with another tube and flask and took off for a long weekend.

Don't get me wrong, there are cell lines that I would not DREAM of doing this with, because they'd all die.

So, come Tuesday, I've got two lovely non-overgrown flasks full of DOHH2, a cell line that this guy could not grow with all sorts of TLC.

I told the guy not to tell his PI this, because his PI (like my own) has a buttload of theoretical knowledge and knowledge learned while in grad school and being overseen by people with theoretical knowledge. Myself, I've got three years of working with this cell line and grew up around this stuff, listening to scientists who immortalized some of these lines in the first place talking about things like coming in after a snowstorm shut down the incubator for 30 hours and finding their immortalized cells still growing.... you know, the men and women (mostly women) who are, at best, mentioned in the footnotes of papers.

Cells that *aren't* primary lines, cells that you can grow for dozens of generations without them changing, cell lines immortalized early in our field's history... these cell lines usually have been so tortured by the time they get to Bob and I that the only thing you do when you coddle them is encourage the growth of yeast, mycoplasma and the less rigourous genetic sports that even these hardy cultures do throw off from time to time.

Fast forward a year and LOW and behold, Bob's got the DOHH2 I've given him, plus ten generations and several freezings and a flask from a third lab whose PI he's colabing with and guess what happens when the cultures get typed (because he's got bizarre results)?

You guessed it-mine are still DOHH2 and the coddled ones are a mess.

The moral of this anecdote: If you treat cells like they are precious snowflakes, they melt under the light of the microscope. Push the limit of what a hardy line can take and nothing else will grow in your dish.

This, by the way, is the other reason (other than sloppiness and sharing media amongst cultures) people find HeLa and DOHH2 and other things IN their cultures- if you're growing cells that are snowflakes and even one cell of these hardened lines gets in your culture then it, not your snowflake, is what you're going to grow.

The answer is not coddling cells, but abusing the heck out of them, taking them just to the brink of death and growing what survives... it's what the originators of these lines did to immortalize them. They are tough...they can take it....