In living color

Hey, when did blogger start letting you post pics from your computer? The last I checked, you had to upload them from the web. I gotta get me a digital camera before I go to med school.

Yesterday I traded in my pipettes & test tubes for a hammer & nails. We had a "team building" project w/Habitat for Humanity in Paterson. 15 ppl from my department went & helped put down the walls on a multi-family housing unit. Let me introduce you to some of the ppl I work with.

This is Phil. He's our VP & he organized the event. He plays a lot of golf. He also had the most construction experience since his dad was a builder.

This is Dave & Linda. They purify the proteins I use in my assays. Dave has been with Roche since the early '70s, about the same time as Phil. Linda knows Paterson & gave us a tour on the way over to Habitat. Did you know Paterson used to be the capital of the world's silk production in the 1800's? They've since renovated the old silk mills into artists' lofts, law offices, & such in the "revitalized" downtown. A lot of Paterson still looks crummy to me.

The Aglione brothers. Tony (left) does cell-based assays, and J.P. works in compound inventory. Tony is also our safety officer. He's always hounding me to wear my safety glasses. J.P. is the only person younger than me in our department, except for the interns. He graduated from Rutgers a year or two ago.

Yang and Yingsi. They are my counterparts in low-throughput assays. They're being good & wearing their safety glasses.

Here's the "before" picture of us putting up a wall.
And after. We put up a half dozen of these in one apartment of the 3-family unit. Linda said Habitat has a crew of professional carpenters on hand to come in after the volunteers & fix what they did. :-/ But I think we only had one screw-up, where we hammered the side of a door down in the wrong position. The Habitat guy (who btw was tanned to a chocolate brown from working outdoors) saw it & shook his head, saying "Why am I not surprised?" Then he took out his cat's claw & began pulling up the nails. Oops.

Wei & Xiaolei. Wei puts DNA into cells to express the proteins that Dave & Linda purify for our assays. Xiaolei was the only other person from my group. She does high-throughput assays like me. She has a very talented daughter who's a junior in the 8-year med program at NYU. It got really hot after lunch & Xiaolei almost passed out from heat stroke.
This is us putting down "toenails" for another wall. I picked up some hammering skillz yesterday.
We also helped put up gypsum boards for fireproofing. I don't know if this is the same thing as sheetrock. The guys on the other side of the wall were from Goldman Sachs. Some of them looked really young, like they were in high school. I didn't realize Goldman needed to start flouting child labor laws.