I am the Scientist.

Today, I ventured out of the office, away from lists and carbohydrate pamphlet designing, and into the lab! The real lab, where they boil water for more than making just coffee and instead of mini-fridges with half-eaten, slightly rotten lunches in them, there are massive, -80 degrees Celsius freezers with live cell cultures in them (I think).

I got to run the High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) thinger, which is kinda like a big, ubber expensive sifter, except instead of panning for gold, you're trying to get a particular pure product out of a mix of other byproducts of your reaction. And instead of a pan it's a metal column with silica gel inside that separtates different things blah blah blah.... ok so it's really nothing like panning for gold, because panning for gold would be more interesting. At least there would be fish in the river. There are no fish in the HPLC. I hope.

[Click on the link for a description of HPLC that may or may not make more sense than the gibberish I just spouted]

So instead of starring at my computer screen in the office, I starred at the computer screen in the lab, watching the progression of the HPLC. Mesmerizing stuff, it really is. It is pretty much like watching a line graph slowly forming across the screen. Whenever the line formed a peek, I had to collect the solution coming out of it in a test tube. I dunno what it was.

When it was all collected, I got to FREEZE DRY it. Like astronaut food. Except if you ate whatever it was that I freeze dried, I'm not sure, but you might die.