Paris and I are finally getting to do some lab work… well sort of.  Over the weekend we received an e-mail from Xian, our supervising graduate student, that said we should practice making the hydrogel we watch him make on Friday afternoon and he would catch up with us after lunch.  However, when we arrived at the lab Monday morning–no experiments were being performed.

Over the weekend a pair of graduate students had left a vacuum hose insecurely attached and on.  The result was an ear-piercing screaming sound that could be heard throughout the second floor of DuPont Hall.  This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for safety issues.  The entire lab group was ordered to, essentially, clean-up or get out.

Later in the afternoon we did meet with Xian and got to do a little bit of practice with the hydrogels.  Tuesday we will meet at 10 AM and begin making a number of batches of hydrogel.

Things learned today:

• Safety is paramount.  It was refreshing to see the authorities of the lab stress this point.  Whenever it is stressed in my classroom students heed it for a short while before it must be stressed again.  It appears to be the same at the university level.
• It has been a long time since I’ve used an Eppendorf pipette.  Remember, there are two click points–click to the first to withdraw fluids and click all the way to the second to expel them.  Oops.  This simple fact forgotten led to too much 1-heptanol and hyaluronic acid (HA) solution in starting phases of a would-be hydrogel.

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