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Jerry Wang, Week 5, Failure and Success at the same time

Week 5:                 My P.I. took me to a Japanese restaurant called “Pod” to have a lunch with one of our teachers from the alumni office! We had a great time talking about the progress my lab and I were able to make over summer. Apparently, we got a 3 million-dollar grants for one of our cross-nation clinical trial project. And this is the first time they had ever give so much money to a canine cancer research lab before! So, we are making histories right here. The food there was good too, I ordered something called “Teriyaki beef burger”, I know it sounds like some sort of weird Americanized Japanese food, but it is actually one of the best burger I had ever had. The meat was cooked just right and the sauce they put in the burger was not too salty but had just the right amount of sugar and salt. I had to admit, even though this is the first time I have been to that restaurant, it already became one of my favorite Japanese restaurant.                 On the other hand, I had
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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
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Jerry Wang, Week 3, PCR, PCR, PCR and more PCR

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Week3:                 This week was really exciting since my primer finally showed up at the doorstep right when I entered the lab on Monday. The first step of processing such primer is to reconstitute it. I was really confused by the word “reconstitution” since I have never heard of such word in my entire life. This is actually a common experience since research labs often use very advanced word for very simple idea. And in this case, reconstituting a primer literally means adding water to dissolve the DNA piece that was laying at the bottom of the test tube. I “reconstitute” the primer in the fancy fume hood we got in tissue culture lab. A fume hood is basically a sterile environment that would prevent particles from entering or exiting the hood. Here, since the primer is very delicate and we would not want any contamination to it, we performed the reconstitution process with molecular biology grade water (just extremely pure water) inside the fume hood.                 After t
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Jerry Wang, Week 2, Starting my own project: molecular cloning of CD3 epsilon

Week 2:                 My P.I. has arrived this week, and she is one of the nicest people I have ever known in my entire life. During the lab meeting on Monday, she even brought us chocolate from London (the best chocolate in the world, according to my P.I.). Together, my P.I. and I had discussed my personal project of the summer: molecular cloning of CD3 epsilon protein. Obviously, our lab’s main goal is to find an effective way to achieve full relapse-free remission in our patients that are suffering from cancer and the instruments we chose to achieve this goal is one of the hottest area currently in immunotherapy: CAR-T cell. The general mechanism behind CAR-T cell is fairly simple. Through electrophoresis or retrovirus, scientists are able to transfer large quantity of mRNA that encodes for CAR receptor into ordinary T cells. Through CAR, we are able to redirect T cell’s specificity against the antigen that will activate the CAR receptor. In other word, through CAR, we are able
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Jerry Wang, Week 1, Finally starting my summer at UPenn

Week1:                 After a few weeks, I have finally arrived Philadelphia. Things went a bit side track since my kitty scratched me on accident back at home and I need to get vaccinated which would not allow me to go to US till July 18 th . One thing led to another and the result is that I arrived at my lab two weeks later than the plan. But anyways, after the long wait I was really excited to meet my lab member and P.I. My P.I. is currently on a personal vocation in Europe right now and will be back next Monday. Therefore, this week, I worked alongside of Dr. Gunan, the staff member of my lab. First day was always the toughest one. But with the help of Apple map and Upenn’s website, I successfully located Dr. Mason’s lab. The first “task” I had for the lab was making a 0.5 percent agarose gel. It may doesn’t sound hard to all of you who just finished biology but my last biology-related experience was almost a year and a half ago. Thankfully, my lab members were very helpful and
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Scott Higgins Week 10- Presenting and saying farewell!

Well everyone, here we are. The last post. Week 10! I just finished my last day at the lab and am writing this in a word document on the train home. I was so nervous during the past week because this coding project actually ended up being quite difficult with the skills I have. My post-doc and the PI were eager to help on our lab messaging platform, Slack, but it was intimidating at first to send a question in a group chat with the actual head of this computational science lab when I had just started coding a few weeks ago. But once I was eventually pushed off the ledge, I realized that they didn’t think I was some coding prodigy and they knew my skillset, which was extremely comforting. It takes a lot of trial and error, or at least it did for me, and researching what exactly to type to produce your result. At first, I was under the impression that everyone at this lab has the entire Python coding language memorized inside out and backwards, which made me feel a little weird when I ha
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Scott Higgins, Weeks 7/8/9- New Project

Hey everyone! The next three weeks in my EXP experience take a really interesting turn. I had initially planned to be done with my EXP on July 29th, but in case you haven’t read my last blog post, I decided to extend it to further my understanding and get my hands on some more projects. I chatted with my post-doc Kayla on the 29th and she advised me to operate remotely and do things from home for two weeks, work on the coding course and the proposals, while her and the PI, Nick, craft a project for me to do with some of the knowledge I’ve picked up on coding. The lab uses this great interface called Slack to communicate with each other, there are group chats, individual direct messages, and you are also able to send snippets of code! So that’s what I did for that 7th week, continued editing and revising the medical documents and made sure that they were all ready to be sent off the IRB. I worked on my online coding course, which was really interesting, but a learning curve is definitel
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