Am I ever going to get out of here?

In science one little mistake can cost you a lot of work.

Case study. Wednesday I sac. 6 mice and take their lymph nodes and spleens. I mush it all up to get the cells out. I kill all the red blood cells, leaving the white blood cells. I then count the cells Not all of them, just enough to let me guess about how many I have. I had about 400 million of the little buggers. Next I stick Antibodies to all the cell I don't want. Stick another antibody to that antibody and then little magnets to that. In Short, I stick little tiny magnets to all the cells I don't want. I then stick the tube in a big magnet, wait a bit, and pour out the cells with no magnets on them. In theory I should a tube full of just the right kind of cells (80-90% CD4+ T cells). Now these cells have had it rough for the past few hour, so I let them rest overnight.

End Day one
After a sound nights sleep, I take the cells stimulate them for 15-45 min. Then I put them on Ice and lyse them (I kill them with soap to get all the innards out) spin out all the junk. Then I measure how much protein is in each of my 10 samples

Takes about half a day but we had lab meeting too
End Day 2

Next day I very carefully measure out each sample so they all have the right amount of protein in them. boil the samples for five min. put them into a gel and seperate the proteins by size. (takes 1.5 hours). I take the gel put on a special nitrocellulose membrane, and transfer the proteins on to the membrane. . . well that was the plan. I put the lid on backwards so the electric current was going the wrong way. Instead of the protein moving onto the membrane from the gel it went the other way, lost and never to be seen again. . .

End Day III
Needless to say I was a little mad.