02/13/13

       On February 13, rather than my normal prepare-sample-weekly routine, my mentor gave me a one-on-one lesson on chemistry. Because next week, she wanted me to not only just measure the pH level of the buffers, but actually prepare them all by myself, I had to be sure that I knew how much of one substance I had to mix with another and the likes.

     To begin with, my mentor first gave the the molecular weight, density, and w/w of the compound HDTMP. In addition to this, she gave me the concentration measurements of the chemical tris and DETA: 200mM and 20 mM respectively. Informing me that we wanted our end product to have a volume of 6mL with Tris being 15mM, DETA: 0.2mM, and HDTMP each at 0.06 & 0.08, she asked me how much of each substance I would have to allot and mix together to produce the two final 6mL product. Being bombarded with all this chemistry all at once, I immediately felt lost and like that of my first internship day, I felt like my mentor was once again, speaking in another language. It had been more than a year that I had last learned or thought this heavily about chemistry and this painful (and embarrassing) experience had me realize that science is not only just biology, or just only chemistry, but a combination of all the subfields merged together to create a whole. 

      However, after a while, I eventually caught on and the things learned last year in chem class started to come back to me little by little. Using the C1V1 = C2V2 formula, (aka V1= C2V2/ C1), I was able to plug-and-chug the numbers and figure out (to my great relief) the proportions for the amount of volume needed for Tris and DETA chemicals. (This is a gross exaggeration of the mathematical process that I had to do. It's way harder than it sounds.) In addition to this, I had to pay heed to the units and change it from cm^3 to mols per liter to mL. 

    Although I had learned of the basics last year, the problem that I was tasked with was chemistry to another level. Math and chemistry not being my forte, I struggled majorly to keep up with my mentor's explanations, but by the end of our time together, I fully understood and new what to do the next time around when asked a similar problem as the one that we solved together. Despite this day being of a chemistry class, I was glad to have emphasized my lacking foundations as chemistry was/is an important part of any sub-field of science in the past, present, and in the ongoing future.

        This coming Wednesday, I will be *gulp* expected to first calculate the correct measurements and then be expected to, all by myself, create the needed buffers.