"Nobody does biology JUST to do biology."

Next lab rotation is set in place; I'll be working on mouse pituitary development in the med school. In the meantime, I'm still trying to find more zebrafish carriers before the end of the summer.

I'm somewhat surprised at the sheer amount of reagents that this lab uses as compared to my former lab downstairs. It seems like we did much more PCR downstairs, so it could account for why we needed use smaller amounts of everything, especially enzymes, which cost about $100 a tube (not even half a mL). One of the grad students was running through how to set up a PCR involving animal DNA, and I didn't realize that the total reaction volume was 2.5 times larger than those used in my old lab. I'm wondering if it's really necessary to use that large of a reaction; I remember two summers ago when Susana (lab manager #1 downstairs) showed us this booklet sent by one of the supply companies. It called for a reaction volume of 100 microL: 10 times larger than what we used, which means 10 times more than what was necessary.

And then there's Hope (aka lab manager #2 downstairs), who had all sorts of ways to "cut corners" (or "be efficient," as she says). She used three times less then what we were accustomed to when Susana was in lab, and somehow the experiment still worked.

Obviously, everything is about saving money. Which brings me to the next point.

So much modern science research is human-centric. The more relevant it is to human health and prolonging the human lifespan, the more grant money set aside for it (even though there is also greater competition). How long ago did we transform our thinking from "I want to understand how nature works" or "I want to know where this came from" to "I want to study this because it helps people"?

And how many scientists out there are really trying to get a better understanding of something....simply because it's interesting and not because it can be applied to people one day?

The title is a reply from a person I met freshman year. They found out that I was a bio major and NOT pre-med.