Parlez-vous Scientist?

The other day I was eating lunch with my supervisor and his friend when three scientists sat down with us and started talking about cells. I listened silently while five men in glasses talked in highly technical terms about the pros and cons of harvesting inter- vs. intra-pancreatic ducts from mice and which method they should use to grow and feed the cells they've harvested and which acronym-test to use to analyze the data.

I understood maybe every fourth word, which is exactly how I'd felt when I was learning French. Back then I'd think: "Ok, she's asking me a question, what . . . what . . . day is it? No, that's not it because she already said 'Sunday.' Something about dinner . . . something about my host family. Hmm, maybe she's asking what my host family made for dinner last Sunday." Then I'd answer, "Soup!" and find out that "Soup" was definitely not the right answer.

This time, however, I managed to figure out enough of what they were saying so I could ask my supervisor questions about it while we walked back to the lab after lunch: "So, is it hard to harvest pancreatic ducts in mice?" Not the most intelligent question, but at least I got the animal and the organ down. It was my way of saying, "I speak scientist too! At least un petit peu."

And I do speak scientist! Rather, I speak psychology, which I'm learning is more different from biology than I'd assumed. Later that day my supervisor was showing me how to perform reverse transcription on dog gallbladder cells. Even though he was mostly concerned with making sure I knew how to pipette properly, I kept asking questions about the experimental design. Pipetting's great and all, but I wanted to know more. When I asked if the different cells we were working with were from different dogs, he seemed confused and told me that they were all from the same cell line. I explained to him that I was used to psychology experiments, where it's crucial to have a huge sample of people who are representative of the population under study. The idea that you can make the animal you're studying a control was remarkable to me. You didn't have to ask the dog what its income is, what its education level is, how many siblings it has, or what it's political leanings are because it's a dog. Who cares?

My parents instilled in me a great sense of curiosity about the world. My mom described to me how to a normal person a bridge is just a bridge, but to a physicist it's equations about arches and gravity and force. Looking at a bridge and seeing equations sounds a little too "A Beautiful Mind" for me. Instead I look at people and see monkeys. Monkeys reacting to their environments, monkeys interacting with other monkeys, and monkeys trying to survive and reproduce. But monkeys are complicated, especially human monkeys. It's so much easier to take a cell from a monkey and look at it instead of dealing with the monkey as a whole. You can't pipette a whole monkey.

I just need to figure out how to study a whole monkey by breaking it down to its cells. And just like I eventually became fluent in French, I'll eventually become fluent in scientist and be able to hold my own against a bunch of scientists in glasses talking about pancreases at lunch.