The Down and Dirty – STEM success

Marie Curie once said “I was taught that the way of progress is neither swift nor easy.”

This week has been a week of tough breaks for Jake. Jake is a senior BIMS student working on his Honors thesis project and he is in the middle of generating stable cell lines in which he is using CRISPR to knock out a specific collagen in our breast cancer cell lines. The first week of classes he spent an immense amount of time getting ready to start his experiment. After starting, he came in on Saturday to see that some of his cells were contaminated (see video link above). His entire experiment had to be bleached out. I expected to need to restart on Monday and just be a week a week behind schedule. However, Jake asked to instead restart on Sunday. He spent his entire weekend in the lab (after spending many hours this week in lab). This is just one (of many) examples of the dedication it takes to be successful at what we do!