Bloodletting

Newsflash: I'm easy. For a mere $30, I gave up 120 milliliters of Grade A, 100% disease-free, drug-free, human blood.

Every other month or so, Mitch goes on the prowl for destitute graduate students only too willing to give up their bodily fluids for his "research." Don't be fooled by his pleasant countenance - Mitch LOVES to dish out the pain. Every time I donate blood, he includes an extra little service where he violently pricks me with a thumbtack and sucks up the blood into a small tube. He calls it "measuring my hematocrit." I call it an "exercise in sadism."

Anyway, all is forgiven when I get the form to go pick up my $30 from the hospital.

As an aside: Blood certainly isn't the worst biological fluid a researcher works with. Here are some keywords from my very first job after college: bovine; reproductive; proteins. Luckily there were professional cowhands on hand to harvest said fluids. It's a little known fact, but although they're domesticated, bulls are amongst the most dangerous animals man comes into contact with.

Soon after tiring of that job, I moved on to the National Cancer Institute where I was a technician in a lab studying the pharmacokinetics of the anti-cancer agent 9-aminocamptothecin (9AC). Pharmacokinetics studies, in short, measure both the accumulation of drugs in the human body and how quickly they are eliminated from the system. How the drug is eliminated determines what bodily fluid the technician assays - I was fortunate that 9AC is merely filtered through the kidneys, so a urine sample was all I needed. Pity the poor technician that has to measure stuff coming out the other side.

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What I'm listening to now: Classic Yo-Yo, Yo-Yo Ma

You know, this Yo-Yo Ma fellow is pretty good.