Everything is pink… - Wednesday 08-02-2017

After all the preparations it was now finally time to start the actual lab work! When I arrived at Imperial we had to wait a bit till we were allowed to enter the lab. During this time I helped doctor Tweedy with a small analysis of the results of an exam she had given to her students recently. When at last we were allowed in the lab, we started off by programming the equipment and making sure everything was working, which of course wasn’t the case. We had to get some more equipment and get some help to get the pumps working. We also heard that the laboratorists had found a substitute for the food colouring we were planning on using instead of the fluorescein (as that wasn’t available). So we went back to the other lab again to pick it up. We were now going to use rhodamine, which is a very strong pink colorant, as we would notice just fine later on. Around 1pm, doctor Tweedy, Karla and Maryam took me out for lunch to a crêpe restaurant in the neighbourhood. The food was delicious and we had a good time talking about various interesting scientific subjects, which attracted some puzzled looks from people sitting close by. After lunch we went back to the lab and started preparing the solutions which we would use for the calibration. This should not have been a very long taking task, but we encountered some problems… When we had been working on the solutions for some time, we accidentally dropped part of one of the stronger solutions over the lab desk. As I had already said, the solution was made out a very strong colorant and in no time the entire desk was pink. The “fun thing” about this colorant is that it reacts with fluids to become even pinker. So while trying to clean up the mess we were only creating more and more pink… After a while we actually managed to clean everything up, using lots of ethanol. We finished the other solutions and did the calibration using the fluorometer. We would use this calibration to interpret the final results more accurately. When we were finished we covered the solutions up for the night (they were light sensitive). We returned all this to the lab and did some more cleaning. After that we called it a day and went home. We were now well prepared for the main experiment, though!