One of my favorite teachers is Mrs. Parks. I had her for Honors Biology Freshman year, and then proceeded to take Microbiology and Genetics with her. She is a former researcher with the CDC, and teaches those classes in a very lab-based, profesional manner. They are considered on par with college courses. Her students walk out of her classroom into college labratories, not to sweep or clean mice cages, but to prepare and conduct experiments...freshman year. Her labs are very in-depth and require strict following of scientific principle, especially in write-up.
While prepping a fish tank in her classroom, I found a very interesting colony of bacteria or fungus. I showed this to her, and asked to culture the sample. I used 13 nutrient agarose plates (Control, Four plates in room temp, four in the dark, and four in an incubator (The four consisted of a normal plate, sugar plate, X-gal plate, and a plate with penicillium spores to test resistance)). I did the experiment professionally in a sterile environment, by the book.
This is where it gets strange...she said, "Please don't do a formal lab write-up; jot some notes if you want, but not in full. Please don't ask why."
I have an immense amount of trust in this teacher, so I (hesitantly) agreed. However, I am naturally suspicious, and doing a lab without recording observations daily from the beginning and without a formal write-up just seems...wrong...
What do I do? Do I record it without telling her? Do I demand an explanation? Do I just trust her on this one?
Posts: 515 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
If a teacher had said that to me in high school, I would have gotten several of my sneakier friends involved, and would have tried to sleuth my way to an answer of what was going on. Of course, if she caught you spying on her I expect that that would completely mess up the student-teacher relationship you've got going on.
I guess what 32 year old Jake would do would be to go in and talk to her at some point when there aren't any other students or teachers around, and talk to her about it. Tell her why you agreed, why you felt troubled by it, and why you decided to talk to her about it even though you'd promised that you wouldn't. Be upfront, but pay particular attention to her body language as she's talking to you, so that you have a better chance of picking up on it if she tries to be evasive or lie for some reason.
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Take notes and document them here so that your thoughts are date stamped as well. Just don't work on it in the lab.
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Not a clue...species is very hard to identify in bacteria, and usually requires a bio-chem analysis, which we don't have the ability to do in my school. Once I grow it, I'll be able to gram-stain it and observe it, and do tests to narrow it down a bit.
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She said take notes, so take all the notes you would need to do a formal writeup. Anything else, do at home. If you find something dangerous, you can reevaluate then. If not, respect her decision, but tell her you want to know what this is about when it's appropriate.
posted
And for god's sake don't post your notes here. Curious as I am, I can't imagine a greater violation of her trust. Well, I could, but that's beside the point.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Once you're done high school you'll probably never write another formal lab report again anyway
Anyway, take all the notes you want to and don't write a lab report. It's not like need to practice of writing another report and you can gather all the data you'd be interested in without one. You almost never write them in the real world, rather just keep very detailed notes in your lab book.
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After I took a sample from the tank, I cleaned it and put three catfish in it. One at a time, they each developed similar symptoms:
- Disorientation - Apparent suffocation (they were sipping oxygen directly from the top in a well-aerated tank) - Apparent degeneration of flesh; the skin puffed up and broke open and dissolved, as did fins (leaving the bones behind) and exposed muscle tissue. The lesions grew from the size of a bb to full-body in under 4 hours. - Death
There was apparentley no way to stop the disease, so I took a sample from one of the bodies and began growing it. Today I gram stained both samples; they are the same. They appear to be motile gram negative bacilli, and are extremely small. Under 400X magnification, they still appeared half as small as a comma viewed by the eyes alone.
It appears that I have on my hands a virulent strain of E. coli. I think I'll be doing antibiotic tests this week.
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I'm impressed you could see them under 400x, not everybody can make them out at that size. They're a lot clearer under oil immersion. If your teacher has the right plasmids on hand (or is willing to buy them, they're not prohibitively expensive) it's actually not that hard to calcium shock your non-antibiotic resistant E. coli and get them to uptake the plasmid. It's a neat little biotech experiment that I'm partial to because it was my senior project in grade 12 Posts: 3243 | Registered: Apr 2002
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I agree with BtL. In gradschool no one does "writeups" like the lab reports you do in highschool or (sometimes)undergrad. You just have a well organized lab notebook. The only writeup you'll ever do is when you publish. Therefore, your teacher's reason for not having you do a formal lab report could simply be that it is not a regular class project for a grade, since lab reports are just for grades and not really for science at all.
I'm also suprised you could see anything at 400x. Usually you need 1000x oil immersion to get a decent look at anything.
How did you observe the motility? Did you look at a wetmount without staining, in addition to the gram stain? (since fixing the bugs for a gram stain should kill them) Can you describe the motility in more detail? Was it a swimming, or more of a tumbling? Also, I'm curious how your growth experiments on the plates worked out. :-)
Since you cleaned the tank before putting the fish in, how do you know that your bacteria is what killed them? Trying to show that it is, in fact, your bug that is killing them by using Koch's postulates would be a nice little experiment.
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Or maybe she just doesn't want any official record of E Coli at the school and a student handling it.
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It's hard to find a more ubiquitous or (usually) innocuous bacteria than E. coli , or one used more often as a basic model organism in microbiology. Given that this school has a microbiology class, I'm absolutely certain they already have students handeling it.
BTW, since we are all colonized by E. coli , we all handle it every day anyway.
I kind of doubt that E. coli could have that effect on fish, especially that quickly. I suspect that either a)the organism that was cultured did kill the fish but was not E. coli, or b)The cultured organism is E. coli, or a relative, but is not what killed the fish and was simply found in the fish by coincidence due to it's ubiquity. That is why I suggested the Koch's postulates experiment to clarify this point. :-)
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Well to be honest, I know almost know almost nothing and I know I know almost nothing about molecular biology. That the science teacher didn't want school officials to know a student was working with E Coli just appeared to be common sense to me, especially if they were to have the same uneducated reaction as me, which is ironically very likely. In my experience teachers always hid things from the administration when they thought they were justified in doing so, for example showing rated R movies without parental notification.
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Newfoundlogic, that is perfectly understandable. The general public doesn't understand just how common and harmless E. coli really is because of the occasional serious illnesses caused by incredibly rare strains that are sensationalized in the media. And sometimes teachers do things to cover their a$$. I just doubt that could apply here since working with E. colimust be in the official curiculum of any microbiology class.
It has just occured to me that you could be partially right about the reason, though. The class probably has an approved list of organisms they work with, and maybe the teacher was concerned that an unknown organism could turn out to be something not on the approved list. Maybe she was more worried that it would turn out not to be E. coli.
I still think the real reason is just that the teacher didn't see the need for strict formality in a little unofficial side project.
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BtL, I did a typical gram stain (at least, it is the only kind I know of). If I'm careful in the heat-fixing process, the bacteria can still be alive long enough for me to observe motion. It was definitely tumbling and not directionally-oriented.
And I made a typo...It was 1000X under an oil-immersion...I've been using only up to 400X recently, so I typed that without thinking about it.
I've done transformations of all types before. I might try to do a transfer to other strains later, but for now I want to use a minimum of materials.
I know the Koch Postulates (I've experimented with them multiple times in the past), but my teacher won't let me purposefully infect an animal in a school lab. Unfortunate, but those are actually the county rules.
But I really want to...
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Please do not. If the animal is not saving someone's life, they do not need to be played with in this manner. Would you like it if aliens kidnapped you and infected you with a disease?
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I think you meant to address some of that to Vera. But anyway.
I'd be leery of using heat-fixed organisms to determine motility. Much better to do something like a hanging drop. But I suppose you've got to work with what your school has on hand, eh?
Ah transformation, *sniff* the first time I felt like a real scientist.
As an aside, I'm quite glad you're not allowed to inject any animals. North America really needs to get on the ball with its animal cruelty laws, there's no way animal tests should be allowed as a primary screen like they currently are. To be honest I was a little upset to hear that you killed the fish in the beginning for no real reason other than to satisfy curiosity. The mentality of inflicting harm on something out of curiosity rather than necessity is, in my opinion, an unhealthy one.
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Not even fish? I mean, you've already killed some fish, so why not figure out how?
quote: Please do not. If the animal is not saving someone's life, they do not need to be played with in this manner.
If everyone thought that way there would be no basic research, since the benefit is usually so far down the road that you can't see it.
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Depends on what you mean by basic research. If you can't justify why this experiment can't be done in any other manner and explain in detail what you hope to learn and contribute to the scientific community than no, you have no business killing animals.
HRE is having fun, he's instilling in himself a love of science and that's wonderful. Do animals need to die to do that?
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I'm also leery of using heat killed bacteria to determine motility. But you don't need a hanging drop, you can simply do a wet mount.
BtL, I don't think he killed the fish the first time on purpose. It just happened, after he cleaned the tank, right?
I'm the one suggesting infecting more fish (though not necessarily by injecting them), so I'm the one you should be worried about.
I guess I just don't see the problem with "killing for curiosity." Without it, no basic research pathogenesis would be done. I infect mice sometimes, and my work certainly won't save anyone's life. But 10 or 20 years down the line, in someone else's hands, who knows how my discoveries will be applied?
Edit because we posted at the same time: I don't know. I think sometimes animals do have to die for students to learn. Didn't you ever kill a frog? Or breed fruit flies and kill them when you were done? Maybe in this case infecting the fish would be going too far for a highschool student, but I reject the idea that you have to be able to see a direct benefit before using animals, if that's the best way to do the experiment.
[ September 02, 2004, 05:02 PM: Message edited by: Vera ]
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Vera, I didn't say that someone's life had to be on the line. Rather that you had to be contributing something to the scientific community that couldn't be realized in any other fashion. Trust me, more than my fair share of animals have died by my hand but I've convinced myself that it's necessary. But let's be honest here, HRE isn't going to doing anything publishable. Nor is he going to be learning an essential technique that will serve him for his entire career (a la med students). As a high school student it's probably too early to say just what his career is even going to be. (Sorry to invoke your name here, HRE, but this is between me and Vera now )
The thing is, between school and where a work I've seen a hell of a lot of animals die needlessly either through poor experimental design or because it was the easiest way to get the data -- All needless and upsetting. Europe is light-years ahead of us in this regard (not because they're inherently better but when people are blowing up your labs you go out of your way to assure the public that what you're doing is necessary).
Edit for much the same reasons: Yes, I dissected a frog, worm, pig fetus and killed fruit flies when I was in high school. The fruit flies I'm going to have a hard time defending so I'll leave them alone but the others were all a waste. Was it interesting? Sure. Was it also cruel? Yes. And useless for the vast majority of students in the lab.
If by "best" you mean "only" then go to it. If you mean "most convenient" I'm going to start having problems.
[ September 02, 2004, 05:12 PM: Message edited by: Bob the Lawyer ]
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Whoa, whoa, whoa. I did not kill any of the animals on purpose. The fish were fine in the tank for two days, and then they all died in the course of a day. The tank had been thoroughly, completely cleaned.
I said I wanted to infect the fish to observe if it is indeed the bacteria, but I don't for the reasons Bob mentioned. It would serve no purpose other than to satisfy my juvenile curiosity, and that is not worth it.
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Animals are so damned expensive and difficult to work with that I can't imagine anyone using them if they could get the same information another way. I can't imagine using an animal ever being the easiest way to get an answer, unless the question is "How does this act in vivo?" in which case using an animal would be the only way to get an answer. If I make a mutant and I want to know whether it's still virulent or not, there's really only one way to find out.
I'm trying to think of a situation in which I would use an animal where it was the most convenient way of getting information, but not necessary, and I'm drawing a blank. Maybe because we have different backgrounds-- you're in drug design, right?
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I agree with aspectre and Vera. The symptoms you describe don't sound like E.coli infection to me, and I would be very surprised if any type of E.coli had that effect on the fish. My guess would be that it is some type of dinoflagellate. Did the water turn brown/red rather than cloudy? That would further indicate a toxic algal bloom.
Good luck with your research, and my advice is to have a candid talk with your teacher, especially if you feel you are working with something toxic.
Posts: 107 | Registered: Jan 2004
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Permit me to point out that if something goes wrong with this unauthorized experiment, your teacher will be the first one in front of the firing squad.
Especially if someone gets hurt - and no matter what you have to say on the subject, she will be held responsible.
So I will echo the tales of caution and suggest you talk with your instructor before anything happens.
posted
Ugh. In semi-related news I've relearned that writing a report is like picking a scab. I need my boss to just take the thing away from me so I can stop mangling it.
Vera, I think a lot of it does have to do with our different fields. Clearly, money really isn't an issue in Big Pharma -- the cost of animal studies is minimal. I frequently see them being used as first line testing for hits and leads. You can skip the process of developing in vitro assays if you just inject anything that looks interesting in an animal. It can save a ton of time (designing assays isn't simple) but is completely unnecessary. This is especially true of companies that aren't mass producing drug potentials but doing a more careful (and slower) design process. Obviously if you have 100000 drugs to test it isn't practical to use animals. If you have 5 or 10 it can be. Although still ethically unsound.
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