February 27, 2004

I am very glad this week is over. There was crappy weather that just made me want to call in sick and stay in bed drinking tea all day. And work was full of tedious and time-consuming projects that all seemed to turn out wrong for one reason or another.

The acme of my work ennui occurred this morning. I had spent most of yesterday and all of the morning carrying out something called a radioimmunoassay. It's a way of measuring protein in a sample (in my case the protein was insulin) using antibodies to that protein and radioactive iodine. It involves a lot of really tiresome pipetting of small amounts of reagents into small tubes over and over again and then vortexing and centrifuging over and over again and having to be really careful about everything all the time because it is radioactive. Mind-numbing and dangerous is a really bad combination.

So anyway, this was the first time I'd done this assay, but another guy in my lab had done it before several times and he was showing me how to do it--which tubes to use, which centrifuge to use, how to handle the radioactive iodine so that I didn't wind up with an irradiated thyroid...stuff like that.

All was going pretty well until I finally reached the very end of the assay--the part where you actually put your samples in a gamma radiation counter and measure the protein. I knew that we didn't have the right kind of radiation counter in our lab, but that people had gone and done it in another lab in the past. But unfortunately, S., the guy who was showing me how to do the assay, couldn't remember what lab it was in. I made a few desperate phone calls to other people who I thought might know, but nobody was answering their phones. Finally, S. remembered the name of the woman who had shown him how to use the counter, and a google search of her name told me whose lab she was in.

Unfortunately, I had a suspicion that that lab had moved to our new campus all the way on the other side of town. But seemingly lacking an alternative, S. and I decided to head over to their labspace on the second floor of the Research Towers and hope that the counter was still there.

And of course it wasn't. I asked some of the new people in that labspace if they knew anyone who might have a gamma counter. They told me that the Anesthesia Research Lab down the hall had one, but that it was really old. Then someone remembered that the Coughlin Lab on the 13th floor had one, so S. and I decided to head up there.

All this was happening while I was actually carrying my radioactive samples around in my hand, so I was starting to feel a sense of urgency. So, when we walked in the door of the Coughlin lab, I asked the first person I saw if they had a gamma counter in the lab. "Hmmm, I think so," he said, "but nobody has used it for a long time. We might have given it away. But if we still have it, it'll be down there," he said, waving his hand vaguely down the corridor. We followed the direction of his hand and found a radiation counter, but not the kind that measures gamma radiation. Desperately, I asked a woman sitting nearby if she knew of a gamma counter anywhere. "I don't know," she told me, "I don't do that stuff, but the guys in the front of the lab will know." She told me to follow her and she brought me back up to the same guy I had talked to in the first place. "Hmmm, I guess we must have given it away" he said. But nobody really seemed sure who they had given it to. Someone thought that it might have been given to a guy down the hall, but nobody seemed to know exactly where his lab was or what his name was. Finally, someone was able to give us a name, and we wandered off down the hall in search of him.

The lab area where this guy's lab was supposed to be was actually inside the UCSF hospital. I always feel weird and out of place wandering around the wards, passing half-naked people on gurneys and whatnot. And I feel especially self-conscious when I am wandering around in a bloodstained labcoat, holding a rack full of radioactive tubes and not really having any idea where I am going. S. and I looked for the lab for about 5 minutes with no success, and then we decided to try the other lead we had--the old machine in the Anesthesia Research lab back on the second floor.

We took the elevator down and wandered around a bit again looking for the lab (all we knew of its whereabouts was the floor the lab was on). We actually found the lab without too much trouble and approached the front door, which was locked. However, the door had a window and we could see an older woman sitting at a table, eating something and looking at us suspiciously. I knocked on the door tentatively and she just stared at us. "I don't think she trusts us," said S. Finally, another woman came over to her and after they conferred for a few seconds, the first woman opened the door a crack and asked us what we wanted.

Her English wasn't very good and she didn't seem to understand what we wanted, but the other woman seemed to understand us at least somewhat and told us that they did, indeed, have a gamma counter. Success! She led us around the corner and showed us the machine, which looked to be easily fifty years old, and was unplugged and covered in dust. After looking at it, even she, with her broken English, suggested that perhaps their machine was not really usable and that we should perhaps go elsewhere. I asked her if she knew of another lab that might have a gamma counter, and she led me over to the desk of someone else in the lab.

He appeared to be a studious man wearing an extremely puffy, glossy and fake-looking wig. His eyes were heavily bloodshot and he didn't appear to have any eyebrows, so I figure he probably had alopecia. However, the wig he was wearing made him look sort of like a character in a David Lynch movie. The man in the wig also had a very thick accent and spoke in broken english, but he told me that there was a lab on the eighth floor of the research towers that had one. "Do you know the name of the lab?" I asked. He muttered something inaudible and I asked him to repeat himself. It was still inaudible, so I had to ask him to repeat himself again. This time he said something that sounded like "Maffay," but it was hard to be sure because of his accent. Unsure but desperate, S. and I headed to the 8th floor.

"What was that guy's name?" S. asked me. "I'm not sure," I told him, "it sounded like he said 'Maffay" but it might be Massey or Maffey or something."

The 8th floor of the towers has a lot of labs in it. I walked down the corridor with low expectations, and then suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it--the Matthay lab! We strolled in and I asked the first person I saw if they had a gamma counter. She led me to another man in the back of the lab. "Um, what lab are you from?" he asked us. We told him, and then he led us to the counter. Finally, a real, functioning gamma counter! "The only problem is that the printer is broken, so you have to stand here and write the results down. How many samples do you have?" "Forty-eight," I told him. He raised an eyebrow. "And how long do you need to count them for?" "Um, one minute," I replied. He raised his other eyebrow. "So you're going to stand here for forty eight minutes and write the values down?"

"Absolutely," I told him. "I'm desperate." I didn't want all my hours of work to go to waste, not to mention all my reagents and samples. "But, um, can I borrow some paper?" The man left to fetch me a pad of paper.

S. and I moved over to take a look at the machine. S. looked at the racks that held the samples and then looked at me dubiously. "Um, this counter can't take the kind of tubes we have." "What? No way!"

But alas, it was true. We asked the guy in the lab, who had by now returned with a pad of paper for me, if there were any other sorts of racks we could use, and he told us that there weren't. We would have to use this other type of tube. I briefly considered going back to my lab and transferring the samples into the new tubes, but the samples were stuck to the side of the tube, and I realized that it would be impossible to transfer them without messing up my readings. Plus, I didn't really want to impose on these people any further, not to mention the fact that I wasn't too psyched about spending a mind-numbing hour transcribing numbers. I asked the guy in the lab if he knew of anyone who had a counter that could read our tubes, and he said no.

So we went back to the lab, defeated. As a last-ditch effort, I tried calling some other people who I knew had done the assay, but none of them were around. I even briefly thought of taking the samples over to the new location of the lab whose counter we used to use, but I didn't really have any way to get them over there. There's a campus shuttle, but I don't think you're supposed to take radioactive materials on it. Ditto for public transit. And you know, I've done some pretty crazy things for my job, but transporting radioactive materials across the city in my car is where I draw the line.

Anyway, that's pretty much where the story ends, at least for now. I guess I'm going to have to repeat the whole thing in the right kind of tubes sometime next week. But it's Friday night and I'm having dinner at Millennium in a little while, and I'm not going to think about any of this stuff again until the weekend is over. Except, dammit, I have to go to work on Sunday. So I'm not going to think about it for the next 36 hours, at least. That's something.