2004
from left to right: Gary
Ratner, Sarah Lybrand, Marie Cross, Tracy Obertone,
Maureen Powers, Erica Phillips, Eric Griffis, Songli Xu
Current Construct Count:
Photo Gallery:
commentary courtesy of Erica Phillips
Every summer, Eric and his wife Kelli kindly host our lab's annual BBQ. Its become an opportunity to celebrate the return of sunny weather as well as welcome new members to the lab and say good-bye to departing members. It's also a chance to sample Eric and Maureen's excellent margaritas!
Moving Day (Winter 2001)
During Christmas Break of 2001, our lab moved from the old Anatomy and Cell Biology Building to the brand spanking Whitehead Biomedical Research Building. By chance, moving day happened to coincide with one of the biggest snowfalls we've had here in Atlanta in several years.
Cooking with Chemistry (Summer 2003)
Eric, Kyle, and Branch thought it would be great fun to try out a recipe for making vanilla ice cream using liquid nitrogen. Apparently this recipe has gotten some press from CNN and Scientific American. It was fun to make..... but was terrible to eat! It was gritty and tasteless and refused to melt. Spoons stood upright in it for hours. Truly dedicated lab members soldiered on and ate an entire bowl, without any adverse health consequences (as of yet). Those of you interested in trying out this recipe (and maybe you can do it better!) can find the recipe at www.polsci.wvu.edu/Henry/Icecream/Icecream.html.
Braves vs. Pirates Double Header (Summer 2003)
In September, 2003, the lab attended a double header Braves game at Turner Field. We had some nosebleed seats way out in right field.... and some great seats (courtesy of Gary Ratner, seasoned season ticket holder) directly behind the right-handed batters (and just outside of the television camera shots). We swapped seats between games so everyone got a chance to view our Braves' assets to their best advantage.
HeLa Day (Fall 2003)
October 11th is Atlanta's official HeLa Day, created to commemorate Henrietta Lacks' incredible contribution to modern medical research. Henrietta Lacks was an African-American mother of five who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Her amazingly prolific tumor cells were harvested at Johns Hopkins and have gradually spread from lab to lab across the world and even into space over the past fifty years. Her cells have been intergral in research in cancer, AIDS, the polio vaccine... and nup98 (of course!). Our lab celebrated the day with a chocolate HeLa cake baked by Kristen and Erica and decorated with an amazingly accurate depicition of GFP-98's localization in a HeLa cell (a dessert more than a hundred times better than the liquid nitrogen ice cream). For more information on Henrietta Lacks go to www.citypaper.com/2002-04-17/feature.html.
HeLa Day 2 (Fall 2004)
Due to the resounding success of last year's celebration, we decided to have a bigger (and better) second HeLa Day celebration this year. Thanks to kind sponsorship by the companies Fisher Scientific and MediaTech, we were able to invite the entire Cell Biology department to join us for more Hela cake. And ice cream! In addition to last year's GFP-98 cake, we also had GFP-98-HoxA9 fusion protein cake. Mmm... doesn't that just sound tasty?
Eric's Defense Party (Spring 2004)
On March 16th, graduate student Eric Griffis successfully (and some say brilliantly) defended his thesis "Nup98 and the transcription dependent mobility of the metazoan nuclear pore complex." After four years in our lab and numerous scientific contributions (see publications), Eric will be moving on to a post-doc in Ron Vale's lab at UCSF in June, 2004. We're sad to see him go though excited for his future and proud to know that he's finally learned how to keep a lab notebook.
Links Recommendations
Here are some amusing sites we recommend visiting:
watch Bunnies re-enact The Shining, The Exorcist, Titanic, and Alien in 30 seconds (Erica Phillips)
play Extreme Stick Death (Kyle Griffis)
observe conjoined quintuplet peep surgery (Melanie Blevins)
join Memestreams (Marie Cross)
pop bubble wrap (Tracy Obertone)
observe Atlanta air traffic (Gary Ratner)
view freighter traffic on the Detroit River (Gary Ratner)