Today was our first day in the lab. Pretty basic stuff so far, just getting oriented and setting up the experiments for the next days. I lit a Bunsen burner for the first time in years! And we got to see all the gleaming new equipment donated by manufacturers—a spectrophotometer, PCR machines, fancy light microscopes—to tempt the hundreds of scientists from across the US and around the world who come to MBL during the summers for courses and to do research.

I got a small taste for how painstaking and time-consuming live cell, light microscopy can be. We were trying to make a video of sea urchin eggs being fertilized and the zygote going through the first few divisions. After an hour (or two?), no luck. We watched eggs that we thought were fertilized sit and do nothing. Our patient instructors had to make adjustments to get clearer pictures. Then they added a dye to show off the chromatin.

Sea urchins: giving them a bit of a zap forces them to release eggs and sperm.

Still, the video we were striving for was beyond our reach today. Our instructors told us that sometimes they can image for weeks and not capture the key thing they’re looking for. So I guess I shouldn’t take those fancy videos I see in slide presentations for granted. Sounds a bit like wildlife photography to me..although this is a very different kind of wildlife!

But, along the way we learned about model organisms, mitosis, meiosis and some of the key discoveries in the 70s and 80s that broke open the field of cell biology.