Jerry Wang, Week 4, More PCR

Week4:

                PCR, PCR, PCR, this week is just an endless loop of PCR. One big difference that I noticed between what I did in AP Chemistry or AP Biology and what I do in real-life research is that things are much more unpredictable in real life. In the labs made for those AP courses, there are standard protocols, standard instruments, thousands and thousands of other students and teachers had done these labs before, so what we are essentially doing is practicing our lab skill in a path that is already explored. When we do those experiments, we know they will work because that’s how they are supposed to behave. Things are much wilder and much more interesting in the real research field. First of all, you are doing what has never been done before or rarely has been done before by other people. You need to come up with your own protocol, and you need to read a lot of research papers to confirm the liability of the methods you chose. There be much less guidance and success is not guaranteed in the case. In the research field, I have to have the mindset to accept failure and learn from it. It may be frustrating at first but this is how science works. There will not be as many exciting moments as an outsider might expect. Behind one delicate paper, there will be thousands of hours of hard work of a science team. According to my P.I., a paper would usually take about 1 to even 5 years of hard work due to all the unexpected result and challenges researchers would have to conquer before they can release a paper. Now thinking about the question, which I had before coming to Dr. Mason’s lab: why haven’t we cured cancer yet, the answer is now clear to me: there are far more obstacles and unexpected incidences than I could ever imagine on the path of research. Science advances in a much slower pace and follows a more progressive model and thus even though there seems to be advancement made every day, the efforts and time it took behind the scene are much more than what people would expect.

                My research made a lot of progress this week, after a dozen of PCR cycles and gel extraction, at the end of the week, I have finally extracted enough pure DNA sample to advance to the next step of my experiment. So now, I have to use two different enzymes (Sal1 and Xbal) to modify the end of my DNA samples, and use the same enzyme to cut out the CD28-Zeta part of my insertion vector to make room for the DNA I want to insert into the vector. If everything does what they should do, then I will transform bacteria with this new vector I made, and culture them. After a day of incubation, there will be billions and billions of bacteria that contains this vector and thus I will be able to extract a large quantity of my CD3 epsilon DNA from them. We will see what will happen next week.