Team:Cambridge/Blog/Week 11

Week 11 : 5th of September to 11th of September

Monday

Team members are taking occasional holidays (we probably need it, given the hours we're working). By chance, it's only the men of the team in this week, and coincidentally the lab reaches the pits of untidiness and there's a team curry-night on Thursday.

Tuesday

Wednesday

The team have sent out a questionnaire to past iGEMers, to have a look at the ways they think iGEM has affected their career, and all sorts of other interesting things. A fair few of our respondents told us that they'd be happy to be interviewed; the day is spent filming them in person (if they're sufficiently local) or recording skype conversations (for those who are not). iGEM seems not just to be changing peoples' career paths, but also altering peoples' scientific mindsets from a more traditional kind, to an interdisciplinary syn-bio variety. Given that iGEM was set up by some of the great syn-bio evangelists, this was perhaps - partly! - the purpose of the competion.

Thursday

Felix, the 'machine' of the team was either sufficiently crazy to begin with, or has been made so by iGEM that he's been working 15 hour lab shifts this week, even streamlining his lunch in an effort to squeeze more work out of the day.

Another scientific discovery emerges phoenix-like from the ashes of an amateurish blunder (perhaps we should screw up more often). A thin film is spun with less material than usual owing to a mess-up in protein purification, and gives a brighter colour.

Friday

The team (what few of us remain with the coincidence of holidays) are, with a little sadness, shelving most of the plans we had for doing wonderful things with our reflectin. On the plus side, we have all sorts of interesting things to talk about in our presentation at Amsterdam - squid are rarely boring.