Up until now I've posted all the fun stuff, but I do actually work here on occasion.

What am I doing, do you ask? Frankly, you don't want to know.

Now this isn't because it's so terrible that it would destroy your psychological underpinnings, but because for a large part, it's boring. Now I get really cool results that mean a very great deal to me and my advisor, but the path taken to get those results is not especially glamorous.















To highlight this, I present the extruder. If you look at the first picture, you can see the guts of the thing. Now technically I'm extruding POPC:SM liposomes through a 100 nanometer filter to create vesicles of a uniform size. That sounded impressive, didn't it?

In reality it's two syringes connected in the middle. I push on the left till that syringe is empty. There's alot of resistance (remember the filter), so it takes anywhere from 1 to 4 minutes. Then I push on the right syringe until it's empty. Then I do it again. And again. And again. And again.















After that, I clean it and load up the next sample, 1 mililiter at a time. I've probably spent upwards of 25 hours of quality time with this thing, and it's what I did nearly all day last saturday.

Now as for sunday/sunday night/monday morning, that will have to wait for the next entry,,