Night at the Laboratory

It was hard to not be a little suspicious when, with a grin on his face, Michael said “ I have a deal for you”.  A room in the basement of the hospital had recently become available, and together Michael and Liza had devised a plan to turn this room into a “student louge” area – a place where we could do weekly teaching groups and presentations, as well as study, hang out, and store our books and bags.  In return for helping to move some stuff around, Michael would give us a ride home.  At $5 a bus ticket home, and nothing else to do in our lives outside of work, this sounded like a fair deal to us!

So, the day came to a close, and here came Michael, grinning away about this room.  He was thrilled to get it completed, and was already looking forward to impressing Jenny when she comes out to see the hospital.  He handed us each a yellow gown, the ones we wear for exams involving communicable diseases or highly contagious pathogens. “It’s not a real dirty job” Michael says “But, just to make sure you’re clothes don’t get dirty”. At first I think he’s kidding.  He’s not.

We made our way down in the elevator to the basement – a cold concrete maze, lit with fluorescent bulbs.  He shows us “the cage”, a chain-link enclosed area where the stuff that no one really wants to deal with is stored.  And then he shows us the room we are to clean; the stuff that we need to move to the cage.

He told us that this was the same area that his CI had taught him years ago when he was a student, and that his new office was his old CI’s office – a sense of nostalgia about it.  What he had failed to tell us was that the soon-to-be student lounge was in fact an old research laboratory, whose occupant was – it appeared to be- a mad scientist who did research on rat brains and took off in a hurry, leaving all sorts of bizarre things behind.

After getting past the “gross” factor, we got to work, cleaning out this man’s life work.  It was like going through an old medical museum and you know what?  It was absolutely fascinating!!

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We found thousands of slides of rat kidneys, brains, and eyes – mainly brains.  We found a tissue sample, yellow and degrading in a jar of formaldehyde (What we came to find out was an ethmoid bone and pineal gland). We found thousands of pipettes, beakers, and old laboratory equipment. Ancient, yellowing bottles of contrast, a bizarre primitive respirator device, covered in – what else? – rat hair.  An old blood pressure gauge, and my favorite – old doctor headbands with the little round mirrors on them!!  A nuclear radiation containment device, an old scale, a prehistoric surgery light, and an ancient centrifuge.  A microscope that probably hasn’t seen specimens for 2 decades. 

It was quite difficult to stay on task – it was ridiculous to think that all that stuff was still in tact – to imagine that some of that stuff should honestly be in museums! 

Michael told us a bit about the man that had done the research there, and we deduced that the work we were seeing was what had led to some blood-brain barrier breakthrough he had made.  Bizarre, eerie, a bit disgusting, and fascinating.  We took so long that Michael threw in dinner before following through on his end of the bargain and giving us a lift home.  But at the end of it all it’s hard to say who got the better deal?  I’d say a Theo’s café chicken sandwich, a Solo, a lift home, and a journey into the crazy mind of a scientist’s life work was well worth it!!