More Good Stuff

Since this about good stuff, lets get the bad stuff out of the way first. Chemistry practical was an utter disaster. I broke a glass rod thanks to the lousy design of the test tube holder. I need to redesign it. Its a metaphor for PCs actually. Then I got one drop of acidified potassium dichromate on my finger, because it dripped from the filter paper down the side of the test tube. Obviously, I did the whole "rinse vigorously with water". But it hurt like hell. Plus its a carcinogen, and causes chromium dermatitis. May be fatal by absorption through skin, inhalation and ingestion. Thank god its only one drop. I was lucky.

Now for the good stuff. Today we (Ms Ong Wei Ling, Frederick Wijaja, Jonta, me) went down to AIT Biotech, a commercial biotech firm which we were collaborating with for Life Sciences Symposium. It was extremely fascinating. They are mainly PCR oriented it seems. They have very advanced scientific equipment. Their PCR thermocyclers are absurdly fast, ability to change temperature by 5 deg. C per second. And tiny, at less than a quarter of the size of the one's in school. They have two DNA sequencers. I never thought I'd get to see one. They also have high performance liquid chromatography, mass spectrometers, and a micro-pipetting robot.

They use bleeding edge polymerase technology, that can act directly on a raw sample, without any purification. You can literally mush a sausage up and PCR it like that. Its specially designed to function even with impurities and inhibitors.  Also, they are trying to get a shipment of this agarose gel electrophoresis system, that's half the size of ours, completely sealed, utilizing blue light instead of UV and can output a real-time video feed to a computer. That effectively makes the overnight counter-staining procedure redundant, and means that UV protection is unnecessary.

The whole process, all in, including electrophoresis takes just an hour and a half.

So cool right?

Anyway, I almost messed up because I accidentally added only 0.4 microlitres of each primer. It was supposed to be 1 microliter. So thankfully I managed to spot the error and added 0.6 microlitres more of each primer. :) Did the agarose gel loading perfectly :)

I gotta thank Ms Ong Wei Ling for taking us there. I've never felt so amazed since primary 3?

On the way home, I found out that we won first place in the Life Sciences Symposium battery competition. Yay :) Thanks a million Arul and Saurabh :)

I got perfect experimental results for physics, and finished 15 min early, even though I was very tired, and just drifting along.

Oh yes, Lang Arts A got 22/25. I remember not daring to look at the paper when I got it back. Now I can breathe again. I hope I am top :)

I found something I wanna live by for the rest of my life:

Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.

Wish I could have been at NCDCC though. Its actually fun, if not for the footdrills.

Life is cool.