Tuesday 30 July 2013

IT Girl - Graduation, guided tours and the generation gap

Pity the poor IT Girl, she is nobly cracking on with composing a witty blog entry despite the temperature outside passing the 30°C mark. Being trapped in a powerfully air conditioned office for most of the day has prevented me from enjoying the weather, as river swimming and BBQ-ing opportunities are few and far between on the site.
Good news, I am now officially wise and knowledgeable; I can probably put letters after my name. I even have an A4 piece of cream(ish) paper to prove so. On the 10th I took some holiday time off and toddled up to York again. Kitted out in a rather dashing grey gown and stylish hat, I trotted up on stage in front of many friends, acquaintances and course-mates who I'd never seen before to have my hand shaken with alarming vigor. The (thankfully quite brief) ceremony was followed swiftly by a party in the department and many, many attempts to take jumping-in-the-air photos. I ruined most of them. I fly like a caterpillar.
Monday morning, however, I was back at work looking up coffee machines and wondering if I can put one on my desk. Preferably with an IV drip directly into my artery. However I perked up when I got an email inviting me and the other summer students on a guided tour of Vulcan. Hoping to either meet a Roman deity or see a far distant planet with a striking resemblance to a 1970s film set, I wandered around the site til I found the starting point.

The CLF’s Vulcan Petawatt laser is one of the most powerful in the world and produces pulses of super intense light that are fired at tiny solid targets.
Vulcan, it turns out, is a massive laser. A really massive laser. Several rooms worth of really massive laser.
The Vulcan Petawatt laser is one of five laser systems within The Central Laser Facility, at the STFC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. After the requisite physics explanations (which I bravely endeavored to follow) we all trouped around the systems, peering in through very thick coloured glass, and entered a massive lead-lined concrete bunker. This contained the chamber where the laser is used to make things explode. Which is pretty cool. The laser is used mostly for studying the behavior of plasma - the fourth state (after solid, liquid and gas) - but conversation soon turned to how effective the bunker would be as a last resort location in a zombie apocalypse. Vulcan and the other laser systems on site are used for a wide range of science, from studying organic samples to investigating nuclear fission.
I have now met quite a few summer and sandwich year students on the site, with lunchtimes now spent sitting in large circles under trees and contemplating forming a rounders team to take on the grad students. It is nice to spend time with other people younger than Microsoft, even if explaining my job and what I am doing on site is a wee bit embarrassing. It seems that "bio" degrees are really the bottom of the technology ladder.
people younger than Microsoft
That being said, I am pretty lucky. The people I am working with have the patience of saints. They happily explain what I am meant to be doing, and how to do it, without any jargon and are very forgiving when it takes me twenty minutes to find a room that is actually just down the corridor. I am now generally self-sufficient on some tasks (mainly printer repair and Windows 7 upgrades) and have got paperwork filing down pat. Over the next few weeks I'll hopefully get to see more of the site, including the Diamond Synchrotron, and actually figure out what one can do with cmd.exe.

Published on The Yorker

Friday 19 July 2013

Bugs on the brain

Pity poor Rochelle Harris who recently returned from Peru with a mild headache that turned out to be caused by 10 maggots residing in her ear canal, grown from eggs deposited there by a rather intrepid New World screwworm fly. The maggots burrowed a hole of 12mm into her inner ear, but managed to be removed by doctors who smothered the bugs with olive oil, forcing them to come to the surface. Her story has now been reported with rather macabre glee by all branches of the online media and Harris has featured on a Discovery Channel documentary series called ‘Bugs, Bites and Parasites’.
The New World screwworm fly, or Cochliomyia, are a genus of blowflies, the most common two species being species Cochliomyia hominivorax andCochliomyia macellariaCochliomyia hominivorax is rather an unpleasant customer. With a preference for living flesh and the ability to dig itself in deep into humans and livestock alike, the United States Department of Agriculture led a very focused campaign to eliminate the fly from the USA. Beginning in the 1950s, huge numbers of sterlie male flies were released in Florida. This exploited the nature of female hominivorax , which are only capable of mating and reproducing once in their lifetimes. Thus reproduction rates plummeted and now Cochliomyia hominivorax could be considered to be eliminated from the USA and Mexico, though regular checks of livestock must be carried out, to prevent the species from reestablishing itself.
In general, C. macellaria are of little threat to healthy humans and livestock as they are only capable of consuming already necrotic tissue.The species had a brief career in surgical maggot therapy, however the stigma of being part of the screwworm family proved too much (that and their annoying tendency to reinfect healing wounds) and they were replaced by the more easily controlled blowfly Lucilia sericata.
stigma of being part of the screwworm family proved too much
The activity of maggots has been used to treat wounds for thousands of years, as they eat away infected and necrotic tissue, leaving the healthy flesh to heal. Although it lost popularity during the second world war due to the rise of penicillin, some hospitals still used the technique, specifically using specially sterilized Lucilia sericata maggots, to heal deep burns and abscesses right up to the 1990s before it was phased out completely.
In recent years however, maggot therapy has come back into play. As of 2005, any doctor in the USA or most of western Europe can prescribe maggot therapy to treat a patient. This is due to the massive rise in antibiotic resistant bacterial infections occurring in hospitals throughout the western world.
Lucilia sericata
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) causes the formation of abscesses, wide-spread sepsis and necrosis of infected tissues. Early treatment with an arsenal of new generation antibiotics (often with terrible side-effects) can prevent the spread of the bacteria,especially protecting the patient's lungs from deep infections. However, once necrotic sores have formed and the bacteria have colonised the surrounding tissues, necrotizing fasciitis (aka "flesh-eating" skin infection) or pyomyositis (skeletal bone infection) can set in.
This is where Lucilia sericata maggots shine. Not only do they consume all rotting tissue, thus reducing further bacterial spread, research from Swansea University has identified two antibacterial compounds excreted by L. sericatawhich are effective in the disruption of growth of several species of bacteria, including 12 MRSA strains. Maggot slime extracted and tested in the lab was shown to powerful enough to exhibit strong antimicrobial properties whilst in clinical use they are capable of ridding up to 92% of Staphylococcus soft tissue infections.
Researchers are currently looking into refining larvae slime (hoping to achieve the same antimicrobial effect without the whole maggots-in-an-open-wound deal) to extract and purify the antimicrobial compounds to a clinical standard. Til then we must be grateful to our blowfly friend, not only have they treated battlefield wounds since the days of the Roman Empire, but their powerful drive not to share their lunch has meant that they have evolved to be what may become the next important species in medicine.
And please, do not self medicate with maggots at home.
@ImogenWrote

Published on The Yorker

Thursday 18 July 2013

IT Girl – Fashion, fitness and fixing things

headscarves, the whole lot. However, as a lowly IT girl, the only resemblance I have to my heroines of the silent movies is a (slightly lopsided) bob and a penchant for gin cocktails.
You see fashion, in the world of the IT girl, is rather less fun. There are no cigarette holders or strings of pearls and certainly no stockings rolled down to the knee. Clothing must be “practical” (shudder) in case desks need to be clambered over to access misbehaving printers and the like. My shoes must be comfortable and my makeup must not startle the engineers. Oh, and I am not allowed to wear my dungarees – not even my smart pair.
This has limited my wardrobe somewhat. My current working day ensembles tend to resemble pajamas (leggings, vests, baggy jumpers) which does little to improve my post-lunch napping tendencies. As for comfortable shoes, if I could get any closer to actually wearing slippers I would.
I am loath to admit it, but the comfortable shoe plays a vital, if unattractive, role in my day. My job involves rather a lot of walking about, the site is large and things must be carried from one end of it to the next. Quite often this necessitates the use of the IT girls’ natural enemy: The Yellow Trolley.
The Yellow Trolley, unloaded, appears to weigh almost as much as me, it has runners that stick out right at ankle height and four wheels, each of different sizes and each with a sense of free will rare to an inanimate object. Adventures with TYT often result in bruising and swearing and multiple sudden encounters with door-frames.
TYT and I travel around 5km a day around the site, with me doing at least another three without the sadistic thing. This is a horrific amount of exercise, but thankfully it is well balanced out by the unremitting supply of free food. Not only do I get jam doughnuts and chocolate biscuits on tap in the office, but I am frequently offered sweets, fruit and snacks on my travels to repair hardware. Unfortunately the continuous stream of junk food, combined with long distance marches in the hot sun and ridiculous levels of air con really do play havoc on an IT girl’s complexion.
Blending in with the IT crowd is turning out not to be so hard really, despite my lack of interest in Wimbledon limiting the conversation somewhat. People in the department are friendly, helpful and surprisingly forgiving of my general ineptitude. They are also very interested in what they do and incredibly keen on explaining it to me. So far I have found out what the Vulcan Laser does and have been promised a tour of the Diamond synchrotron - this is all very exciting to my little nerdy heart.
Now I have been an IT girl for a whole seven hardworking days and actually do appear to be capable of fixing things. This is quite reassuring to my line manager, who I feel was rather worried upon my arrival when I couldn't get my desktop PC to turn on. Things that I have been able to repair in one way or another include a CD drive that could no longer write CDs (I didn’t realise people still did that either) and a printer that had an annoying squeak to it (the squeaking ceased once I jammed a lolly stick between the two offending pieces of plastic).
My repair approach may be a little ad hoc, but it is effective. The greatest fix that I have managed though, is securing five days paid leave over the summer, along with a four day bank holiday weekend. This mean that they will pay me to go to my graduation. Really, being an IT girl could be much, much worse.

Published on The Yorker

Wednesday 3 July 2013

IT Girl – An introduction to the rest of my summer

don’t understand computers. I should make that clear now. Not only do I not understand them, but I distrust and slightly fear the bloody things too. I am pretty sure my laptop is running a vendetta against my coursework and any university desktop I approach seems to commit hara-kiri before I can complete the most simple of tasks.
With this is mind, I am spending my last ever long summer holiday working 9-5 for 11 weeks in an IT support service. But this is not just your bog-standard IT support service; this is one that runs in a technology department within a massive campus full of engineers and physicist. When they need IT help, you know something isvery wrong.
But Imogen, I hear you ask, you are a biochemist! What would possess you to take such a job? Well, like most things I do in life, it seemed like a good idea at the time. All my previous summer jobs (almost all summer, every summer, since I was in sixth form) have been in a biochemistry lab; it is time I saw some more of the world of science before I commit the next three years of my life to just one field. The theory is quite simple, I really must learn about computers to get on and this is the perfect opportunity to get hands on experience working with the wretched things. After all, one must know one’s enemy and all that.
And so, with this in mind, I was up and out of bed at the crack of 7:30am on Monday morning and was soon being driven out of the city by my (remarkably chipper for that time of morning) mother. No, she is not my personal taxi service, she just happens to work on the site too.
On arrival at the site, I was swiftly whisked through reception, given a yellow lanyard to make clear my status as “visitor” and “not to be trusted”, dragged through a maze of buildings and into a room that smelt of stale caffeine and nervous engineering students.
a room that smelt of stale caffeine and nervous engineering students
The source of the former turned out to be a free(!) coffee machine, which I quickly got myself acquainted with whilst I surveyed the crowd that was generating the latter.
After the standard round of introductions, it was clear that we were all here for summer placements or year-out courses. Networking opportunities were mostly overlooked in favour of trying to deconstruct the coffee machine to get a stronger espresso and comparing dissertation projects. I couldn’t be sure what went over worse, my placement in IT support or the “bio” in my degree title.
However, a riveting two and a half hour health and safety lecture soon took my mind off that. All clued up to what to go in case of asbestos (don’t touch it) and klaxons sounding (enter the nearest “substantial” building - scary) I headed up to my new office. It only took three wrong rooms until I found my new boss and was set up at my massive desk, with two windows and four monitors. Logging in barely took ten minutes and soon I was kitted out with my official ID card and administrative access to an alarming amount of computing power.
Thankfully I didn't have to deal with anything involving a server yet and instead I spent the next few hours pushing a trolley full of computer parts around seemingly unending corridors, fixing mechanical faults in printers and playing with the kit in the metrology lab – they have a photopolymer 3D printer and all sorts of exciting devices.
By the end of the working day I had walked 8km around the site, eaten my lunch alone as I couldn’t find the main canteen and driven the trolley into a small brick wall that I swear wasn’t there half a second before. I am still yet to interact with anyone within two decades of my age here; all the summer students appear to be kept individually trapped in small rooms where the damage that they can do is limited.
I was shattered and, for the first time in a while, extremely grateful to be spending the whole summer living at home. Nothing quite like a massive plate of homemade spaghetti Bolognese to perk up the end of the day.

Publish online at The Yorker 03/07/2013