Freezer Diving

So here’s what I did last week while M was at the conference:



That’s a -86 degree freezer that I have my head in. I actually got my entire upper body in it at one point. I also managed to freeze off my fingerprints because I was too eager to grab all the boxes I needed and didn’t wear the required ski gloves. I could have waited for one of the Kenyans to come back and help me but patience is not a virtue I possess.

So, what was I freezer diving for you might be thinking? Samples for M’s research. So, in laymen’s terms, the goal of M’s project is to link maternal infection (or lack thereof) while pregnant with the immune response of the babies after they are born. The working hypothesis is that women who were infected with malaria, schistosomiasis, hookworm, etc. while pregnant will have babies who are less able to mount a proper immune response to illness. It seems obvious but no one has proved this point yet; doing so would mean that women in the developing world will actually get treated while pregnant because there’s a cost-benefit in terms of the child’s health and (mostly foreign) aid agencies will pay for it.

So, the project involves testing samples of the babies blood for response childhood vaccinations (hepatitis, H. flu, tetanus, diphtheria) at 6 month intervals from birth to 36 months. All of the babies were born between 2006 and 2008 and they have been collecting blood samples from these babies ever since.

Since the project agreement requires that samples be taken in duplicate, there should be one test tube from each visit in Cleveland and one in Kenya. We were told that the ~3,000 samples M needed were in Kenya; this was not the case. No one is quite sure what happened but somehow all the samples were shipped to Cleveland about 2 weeks before we arrived. Like ships passing in the night, we just missed them.

So, I’m sure you’re thinking this isn’t a big deal, just send them back!!! No can do. There are several people in the lab running different tests on the samples and they were not happy with the idea that they would disappear back to Kenya for a year. So, a plan was developed to take a small amount from each sample and send them back to us. These samples could arrive in waves as people came from the lab every few months. As you can imagine, it’s rather annoying to pipette a small amount from 3,000 tubes into other tubes but it was really the only option. Also, the term for pipetting a small amount is “aliquoting”. Fun fact.

M and his samples:


Unfortunately as the months have gone by, only about 1,200 samples have arrived. Academic research is actually a pretty competitive environment and since very few other people in M’s lab would receive any direct benefit from getting him the samples, they haven’t arrived at quite the pace we had hoped. M has used his time very well, setting up the UTI project, shadowing in the hospital, and doing whatever lab tests he could while he waited but it was looking a bit dire last week.

As we previously mentioned, this week the primary investigators on M’s study were in Kenya and we all sat down to discuss these issues. Our main concern was that M have some publishable research completed by the time we leave so that he can apply to residency programs. After several long meetings, a plan has been devised that involves us running a lot more tests on the samples we have here and hopefully M will get some publishable data from that. We’ve calculated that it’s about 12ish weeks of work for both of us full-time in the lab but obviously I’m happy to help.

His and hers pipetting:


So, why was I freezer diving? Well M’s advisor pointed out that there were 600 follow-ups done last September that hadn’t been sent to Cleveland yet and that if we wanted to go through them to pull out the relevant 50 of them, we could do that. It was all the incentive I needed while he was away! Fifty more is a big increase when you only have 1,200 and I actually netted about 65 so it was a big win.