Today wasn't spectatular, but it was a productive day. I finally did my calculations for the ratio of ERCC5 to ACTB for both the RNA extraction methods. They were 6 and 4 per thousand for the Trizol and Qaigen methods respectively. Multiple people will then do this test and someone will take all our data to draw a conclusion (hopefully giving me some credit). So now, instead of measuring one gene at time, I'm measuring seven genes at time. Tom trust my data (enough) to do this, which is reaffirming.
I PCR'ed the 9 total samples (7 genes, an internal standard, and a negative control H2O) and that's all of my office work.
Tom and I spent a lot of time just talking about life paths and dealing with cancer. He said that we will probably never "cure" cancer. We will get to the point where we can manage it where we can greatly prolong length of lives, but not completely kill every single cancer cell at later (3rd and 4th) stages. Kind of a downer, but still, Tom said that there are two big reasons to do this job: one because it's massive problem solving at a molecular level (something I like) and because you're making people's lives better. You're helping others while truly fulfilling yourself, which is something I want to.
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