Student Blogs

This summer, I learned many new skills. But among pipetting, passaging, preparing media, programming cell culture robots, and PCR, one more covert skill that I had to master was problem solving. I was working in the Mattis Lab at UCSF Parnassus, studying iPSC and iHepatocyte behavior when introduced to fatty acids, and whether their lipid accumulation was faster when they were derived from patients with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, a fatty liver disease. I began my experience shadowing the everyday lab work and performing the simpler, lower-stake tasks. Culturing cells takes great caution and precision; one simple slip-up could cause contamination or differentiation or apoptosis.

Naturally, then, I managed to mess up. Many times. One time, I was preparing media for passaging cells. I was pipetting out 45mL of media, and absent mindedly added 50mL to the solution instead, messing up the ratio of reagents. Thankfully, this was an easy fix. I changed my total volume of solution and increased the amount for all the other reagents. Or another time, one of the lab’s more important cell lines– some of which another student and I had handled– became contaminated. Out of guilt and curiosity, we tried to salvage those cells by culturing them in media with extra antibiotic solutions which would hopefully eliminate the contaminants. And even though we were unfortunately unsuccessful in this mini experiment, it showed me that there can be ways to recover from mistakes, and that it’s valuable to try.

Sometimes, too, problems will arise that aren’t your fault. For instance, for my research project, another student in my lab and I were tasked with learning how to use the robot that our lab had to culture, add solutions to, and image our cells. Although incredible, this machine became the bane of our existence. Every time we tried to run an experiment with it, it would present us with a new roadblock. It was almost comical how many we encountered. Take some particularly frustrating ones: “Error: Focus Z calibrations needed,” “Error: Code 550E,” “Warning: O₂ levels too high,” or, one of its favorites: “Error: The reader is not communicating.” We tried everything to fix this problem, but we couldn’t figure out what was causing it or what exactly would solve it. It took us several hours of combing through user’s manuals, unplugging and replugging, and long phone calls with IT to finally figure out this error. (As it turns out, the solution to this problem is simply to restart the computer). But eventually, once all the possible issues had been cleared, the machine worked and I had practiced the crucial skill of problem solving.

Ultimately, that’s what science is: a series of trials and (lots of) errors. Working through these human and other inevitable errors not only makes the experiment possible, but also makes it that much more rewarding to finally see that “SUCCESS” message on the computer, or spot those beautifully crisp, uncontaminated iPSC colonies under the microscope. I am endlessly grateful for the opportunity that the CIRM and UCSF CHORI internship has given me, and for all of the lessons and skills that I took away from it.