Science Hooker

Or if you're a fan of TrueBlood - science hooka.

I am an unapologetic science hooker.  I make my money by selling brain space.  I work every day in a lab with other equally obsessed ...er.....talented science pros.  Lots of these blogs have talked about my love of science and how I am just made to be a science chica.  Don't get me started.

Tonight as I was driving home it was raining and the sun was shining.  Perfect meteorological conditions for a rainbow - and there it was in the eastern sky.  Thank you Physics 101 for giving me the understanding of the proper angle of the sun to predict this.  The hundreds of hours we spent firing ball bearings at each other in lab are certainly much less useful.  But I digress.

Most of the things I learned are useful to me in my life somewhere.  One single thing I learned that I wish I could unlearn though is about the magic of fireflies and how they light up.  Until I learned that, these little bugs were totally magical to me.  Now they are made less by my understanding of luciferase.  Worse, luciferase has been engineered into all kinds of things in order to easily visualize complex patterns of gene expression and disease modeling.  The mice in the picture have been genetically modified to express luciferase.  Intellectually I understand the benefit.  But in my heart it still seems Frankensteinian.  When I started my new job, we began an experiment to look at the development of cancer in mice using cells that express luciferase.  This allows us to monitor tumor progression by whole body imaging of the mice - a non-invasive procedure.  In 25 years of lab work, I have never deliberately made an animal sick or caused it suffering - until now.

I have done a lot of things in the name of science and found it amazing.  But there will always be part of me that wishes that I didn't know this particular little piece, so that sitting on my porch in late summer fireflies would not remind me of the mice calmly growing big with tumors and would once again seem more magic than science.