IAVI currently rents research lab space from a graduate medical facility in Brooklyn, though by the end of next week, we will be moving into bright, shiny new quarters at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, which was the largest military supply center during WWII, and is also the place Elvis shipped out from. (As a side note, in the wake of the financial crisis and subsequent loss of income to the city, the powers that be have begun to invest significant political capital in the BAT, in hopes of making it a leading bio tech hub, and a new major source of revenue for NYC. ) My lab, unlike most of the other IAVI labs, is housed in the main research building, and as a result my coworkers and I have become friends with some really nice dudes who work in orthopaedic/rehabilitation research dept. Their lab is filled with extensive and gorgeous collection of tools, including an electric saw that “cuts through bone like butter,” and a couple of the craziest/scariest machines designed to test fatigue and stress points in artificial bones and joints, one of which makes the entire lab shake while it’s being used.

As part of their research, they often go down to the basement of the building to retrieve bones, right out of the cadavers. And yesterday, I was invited along. The desired bone was quickly retrieved from the body (as medical students had already done a standard autopsy, and other researchers had taken various parts as well, leaving the body’s extremities in multiple pieces, although the upper body was still largely intact) I was permitted to poke around for awhile. The body belonged to an elderly, white, man, in his mid-sixties perhaps. One of the strangest things to me was examining the man’s thigh and seeing all the layers of fat and muscle and the cold, discolored skin, but looking at the hair on his thighs appear just as normal as can be, as if someone had forgotten to give them the memo. The insides of the body looked just like the inside of any other animal a few days after death, which I should have expected, but when you’re cooking and dressing a turkey (for example), observing the light meat and dark meat, the tendons and cartilage, the thought, “This is what I look like inside.” just doesn’t occur to you. His skin was fairly inflexible, except for his face, and (thankfully), his eyes were closed.

Beforehand, I was slightly worried about passing out or getting faint or nauseous, as I often experience a vasovagal reaction when I have blood drawn, but surprisingly I was fine, (about half an hour afterwards, I became very nauseous while describing it, though that could be attributed to the the hangover I was working through at the time). Any anxiety I was experienced was very much overshadowed by curiosity. I have to confess, it’s a slight relief to know that during a gross anatomy lab, I wouldn’t be the first person with my head between my knees (not that I would be ashamed if I was, it would just be an incredible inconvenience).

So…yesterday, I had the privilege of exploring the insides of another human being. Pretty overwhelming, pretty crazy.

*Please not that the lack of specifics is out of my desire to prevent anyone from getting in trouble as a result of this blog post.

i am steadfast in my belief that there is an appropriate beatles song for (almost) every moment in which one has need of a song.

in other news, i have learned how to knit! which i’m extremely excited about. i don’t know why i never learned how to knit before, it’s far easier than i imagined! after making the obligatory hat and scarf as my first knitting projets, i am currently working on a birthday present for a certain girl, who goes by the alias HJAngel15. in addition to being the first real garment i’ve ever knit, i’m also doing a simple eyelet pattern – not so complicated, but a step up from the seed stitch and garter stitch stuff i did when i was first learning. pictures to follow soon.

on sunday i visited my future home in red hook, brooklyn. despite the lack of subway, i am extremely excited about moving there (in august) and hope you will come visit, as there will be lots of room! and free parking!

this process uses 96 well plates – and each well represents cells from a different person. the advantage to this is that studies can be conducted across a very diverse population at a drastically reduced cost compared to what conducting an equivalent study using actual human immune systems would cost. the downside is that this artificial environment doesn’t make allowances for any variables that might have an effect on an individual’s immune response.

regardless of the pros and cons, simply learning this system existed blew me away. or maybe freaked me out slightly. i don’t know if this is the wave of the future or not but it’s certainly taking one more step down a strange and bizarre path in the world of research.

the impact of this is…mind-blowing. first all the fact that circumcision is by far the most effective preventative ever? and that no one really looked into it (or came up with anything better) in twenty five years of money being thrown at this problem. all right, the first few were a little rough but once people (sort of) got over that whole gay disease thing, the situation improved. which brings me to another problem – most of the money allocated to aids right now is for vaccines and drugs. i’m not certain how much money bill gates has given to circumcision training services recently…and then there’s the obvious problem of trying to convince adult men (of the populations that are most at risk for hiv) to let someone cut part of their penis off. i sure as hell wouldn’t want to. and there is a very strong anti-circumcision sentiment in the world these days. there’s also the problem of how and where are people going to get circumcised. sub-suharan africa isn’t exactly rife with medical facilities. which is where mohels without borders would come into the picture. i’m not kidding, it’s been seriously discussed. and on a less urgent level, i wonder how this factors into the way data has been analyzed in previous vaccine or drug trials for any std?

so this is going to be a large part of my job for the next few months. there are very mixed in my office about what iavi’s role should be in this. to me, it seems pretty clear – every possible resource should be put to addressing the problems stated above. finally something has been found that works, far better than anything else to date. but how do you balance that with continuing vaccine research work? especially when an efficacious vaccine still seems pretty far off? i’m not entirely certain there will ever be a vaccine. right now, microbicides seem far more promising.

*i’m not certain about other types of clinical resarch but in typical hiv drug or vaccine related trials in humans the standard is one interim analysis. because of the ethical issues involved with withholding this strong of a correlate of protection, multiple analyes were part of the protocol for all three trials)