Rice Protoplasts and a Speech Competition

The new cancer lab is under construction, so I've been spending the days preparing my research proposal and learning about animal cells. At a very basic level, molecular biology is all quite similar no matter what you study. But I've still got a lot of learning to do.
Plant science and cancer are both interesting to me, but I'm getting more intrigued by the inner workings of cancer cells.

I took this photo when I was working with plants. These are rice protoplasts that I made with Rakshya Singh at Sejong University. Plant cells are different to animal cells because they have rigid cell walls that make them strong. That's why plants are able to stand upright without any bones. But there are special enzymes that you can use to dissolve those walls. That will leave behind little bubbles of plant cells, floating around in solution. They're alive but so fragile that you can rupture them by stirring slowly with a spoon. You can transform the little critters just by adding DNA and increasing the concentration of macromolecules.

The photo above was taken straight down the eyepiece of a light microscope with my handheld camera. The cells are sitting on the gridlines of a hemocytometer, which is normally used to estimate the density of red blood cells.

And if you have a champion of a scientific partner like Rakshya to work with, this is what you should see under the confocal microscope the next morning. These are my protoplasts at 600X magnification, with the top one showing fluorescent reporter gene expression.
It's a nice result, but this is not an easy protocol. It will take you 13 hours straight, and if you make one mistake, you just end up with brown goo. If you're attempting it for the first time and needing some help, ping me an email. I've sent out our old biolistics protocol to quite a few biology students who stumbled on this blog. More than happy to help.

These photos are from the last SRTM speech competition, and have been sitting in my drafts folder for a while now. Nine competitors were up for the challenge and gave speeches on a variety of topics from Spanish love stories to passing interviews. Overall the speeches were quite good.

If you're up for a thrill, try entering a Toastmasters speech competition. I still haven't entered one, due to time and courage constraints. 

All in good time.

Here's our friend Robert Cha, giving a speech about perspiration. Robert used to run a blog called Korean 1.5, but it's gone into cryostasis. I've filed it under the appropriate heading in the column on the right of this blog.

And here's the kind of audience you'll find at SRTM. A wide range of working professionals, all contributing their free time to get better at public speaking. Heather was inducted just last week and is now a full member.

Ron won the competition with his distinct motivational style. He was once a USFK soldier here and now teaches management at Dongguk University. When he's on a roll, he's pretty much unbeatable. Now he's going to represent our club at the national speech competition in June.

If you want to watch one of Ron's award-winning speeches, you can see one here.

A few weeks back, we bought a cask of Hardy's wine from Costco. It was a nice 5 litre box, which we rationalized was worth buying because it would last a long time and save us money. Three nights later it was feeling remarkably light. One and a half weeks later and I found myself squeezing out the final remnants, before inflating the foil bag with air, much like my old man used to do when we were kids.

You know you're an expat in Korea when you're sitting down drinking cask wine while eating sundae. Sundae is blood sausage, but it doesn't taste like blood and only remotely reminds me of a sausage. In Busan, the locals prefer to eat it with gochujang (soybean chili paste), but in Seoul they eat it with salt and pepper. But the best thing I like about sundae in Seoul is that they sell it with sizeable chunks of boiled lung, complete with vascular tubes and observable alveoli. There's a whole anatomy lesson sitting on your plate, if you feel compelled to explain it to someone. Korean wife these days is learning a lot more than she cares to know. 

That's what happens when you marry a geek.

South River Toastmasters 10th Anniversary

A doctoral degree really demands your full and undivided attention, if you want to do it properly. Like a newborn child, it penetrates every aspect of your existence, even creeping into your dreams as an uninvited guest. After an extended period of time, it will eventually transform your personality into one probably less sociable and often preoccupied with thoughts other than those relevant for the immediate situation.


In an effort to counteract my slow transformation into a stereotypical proto-professor, I'm making mild efforts to reclaim the last remaining vestiges of my social skills. Luckily, the Toastmasters are here to help me. Recently, the South River Toastmasters celebrated their 10 year anniversary at Amorzio in the Posco building.


Heather has been an avid enthusiast of the Toastmasters experience since her arrival in Seoul. She's been going to both SRTM and the Neowiz clubs, but unfortunately her new job is starting next week so she'll have to cut back. She just landed a vice branch manager position at a private language academy near our house.


We arrived early on the day because James, Alice, Catherine and I were on the planning committee for the event. It takes a lot just to organise an evening at a nice place, but with the right team members, it all falls into place in the end.


The members and guests of SRTM started rocking up and it wasn't long before the bottles of wine were mysteriously opened. SRTM has a long history with members from all over the world. There are some that only come back to gatherings like this, because they're too busy with their work or families.


Because we're all about improving our communication skills, a Toastmasters event is probably the single best place in the world to strike up an interesting conversation with someone.


Here's Heather with some of her new SRTM friends. She's been attending so well that she quickly grew out of her old name of Lee's Wife, and people call her Heather now.

I actually preferred Lee's Wife, myself.


James ran the main part of the agenda for the evening which included messages from past presidents and the club awards. I was the MC and also ran a trivia session called "How well do you know SRTM?"
We gave out bottles of wine as prizes and I think it went fairly well.


These days I quite like public speaking, but it really is something that you need to keep up the practice with. If you speak on a regular basis, it becomes pretty easy. But because I'm busy, I get in about one speech every seven weeks. So I have to deal with a small but annoying amount of adrenaline. If only my primitive subconscious would realise the pointlessness of the fight-or-flight response in such situations. I believe it is the amygdala that is partially responsible.

Unfortunately a non-removable part of the brain.


Overall the night was pretty successful and we're looking forward to the next 10 years of SRTM. Thanks go out to the past presidents and officers who sent back congratulatory messages for the event. Hopefully next year I'll have a little more free time to finish my CC award at the club. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

See you soon!