Last semester, I worked on a project with Heather Dickman, for my Mammalian Physiology class. We worked under Dr. Vener Cabana, without whom, I think we would have been completely lost. Except for the fact that we got started kind of late, and were unduly pressured by deadlines, it was actually pretty fun. First we grew cancer fighting cells from a rat. This was the hard part, trying to keep everything sterile, so that our cells didn't die. But with the help of a lot of 95% ethanol, we grew them without any bacterial or fungal invasions. Then we gave them doses of a Chinese medicinal herb Scutellaria barbata, and then we tried to kill them. And finally, we treated them with a staining agent to see if the herb had increased their survival rate. Well . . . our results were inconclusive, and a couple of our data points were inconsistent, so we think we messed up somewhere, but it was still fun to do, and we learned alot about cell culture and the process of scientific research.
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