It has been a few days since I moved to Boston! I am doing my summer rotation in the lab of David Page, the director of the Whitehead Institute, where Y chromosome was sequenced as part of the Human Genome project. I am taking part in the sex differences initiative which is exciting and unsurprisingly related to the process of aging as well.
Within the first three days of my rotation, I attended the Whitehead orientation that was the longest in my life, two lab meetings and a thesis defense. The lab orientation made evident distinctions between Russian labs I’ve seen and labs here in Cambridge. While students in Russia got distracted from science itself by routine work, for example, they prepare all media themselves, and they often have to order some reagents on their own, here media of all kinds in different sizes just stand on both sides of the corridor in abundant quantities and are prepared by technicians so that student only need to take them and bring them to their lab bench. The IT department at the Whitehead is also very helpful by creating a cluster account and giving all sorts of necessary ids on the first day of work. They even have a separate department specifically for bioinformaticians in case they have questions that are more related to biology than IT.
The lab meetings were very useful to me since I could grasp what kinds of projects the lab has in different directions right from the start. Even though technical details were usually omitted, the suggestions from lab members that were related to biology seemed very helpful. But most of all, I was impressed by how the speakers presented their projects. Their competence was obvious, but they also made the subject of their research appear very interesting and attractive. David mentioned that even if you conduct the most basic research, you still have to sell it every time you present, and I would definitely agree with that.
The thesis defense of the graduate student that so far sits at the opposite bench impressed me even further. Her research is, of course, of high quality. She investigated the role of a protein STRA8 in meiosis. This role was elegantly compared to the role of the conductor during the orchestra performance. Her defense showed how much collaboration with other labs is possible to have. But it also demonstrated how much of diverse expertise she acquired in the course of her PhD studies. She developed an antibody for the protein, was involved in creation of transgenic mice, performed meiosis synchronization, obtained the ChIP-Seq data for STRA8 herself and then analyzed it. I would want to have a project like that where I could get the data myself and then analyze it.
Interestingly, acknowledgements of all people who contributed to the project as well as friends, family, lab members and students from the same program whose support helped this project advance took approximately the same amount of time as the presentation of the project itself. And that is great cause now I can clearly see that the lab is very supportive and close, and graduate students at MIT really can have a work-life balance. All of that makes me feel more enthusiastic about my own path to graduation.
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