Today went by quickly! I first worked on some last minute details for stuff I left unfinished in Boston. At 10:30 I met with Dr. Kevin Gartland, who lead the charge from the Scotland side for this exchange. He is an extremely friendly fellow who had loads to suggest as far as things to do. He is very helpful and apparently soon to be on the way to Boston! I then, after grabbing a quick bit of food, met with some other graduate students in the "PhD room" and chatted up a bit.
Afterwards, I attended a student talk. Retrovirus gene transplants into pig genome? Needless to say, this chemist was a bit lost on purpose, but it was explained later. Apparently pig organs are being considered (or maybe are already being used) for human xenotransplantation and having these viruses encoded in the pig genome may have detrimental effects if the genes were switch on. Makes sense! Afterwards, I worked for a while on the talk I will give to the department next week. I intend to discuss all of my research experience starting from my lowly undergraduate days of TLC plates, etc.
Later on in the day Rakesh helped to explain and then helped to design primers for zebrafish work. Needless to say, it has been a long time since freshman biology and tangentially applicable organic chemistry. I remembered some of it from seminars at Arkansas State University when I went to a lot of molecular biology talks, but recalling and then using to design something was... difficult! Thanks to Rakesh for helping! We managed to finish up before 5:30, so Rakesh, Sri, and I went to the movie theatre where I used my pay-as-you-go phone to take advantage of a buy 1 get 1 free deal that is on every Wednesday. Rakesh has a pass to go to unlimited movies for the month, so between the three of us, we only paid £5.70. Quite a good deal for three to go. We saw John Carter...... Because this isn't intended to be a movie review forum, I won't go into details other than the following:
At least the pod racer scene was cool. No wait.
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