Taiwan - The end is nigh pt. 1

2012 or some crap, right?

Soon to be back in the States blog.

There's a couple of things on my mind right now. I'll spare you my worries about getting hired anywhere anytime soon, as well as all the other weird and wonderful rites of leaving never-never land.

Right now, the group is Taipei again after spending the first portion of the week in Taizhong. We're in the process of scrambling to squeeze in as many last minute research projects, touring, and pictures as possible. This may or may not be because of the -20 degree weather that we get to look forward to if our flight somehow lands on the ice rink that is the MSP airstrip.

Our time in Taizhong was a bit of a mixed bag. We arrived on Sunday and mostly rested the rest of that day. Monday and Tuesday were spent doing more surveys of the TCM compounds we received from Drs. Cheng and the coral extracts from the NMMBA. It's a four day protocol, and because we had to leave for Taipei today, I got to try and carry three 96-well plates wrapped in tin foil and whatever else I could find to keep them from spilling in taxis, buses, and subways. It was worth it though, as the extra time allowed the embryos to be perfectly treated by most of the chemicals and we found a few new effective compounds to look at. Considering that Dr. Huang's model has been used to survey several hundreds of chemicals and only found two or three really promising drugs, this is pretty exciting.

We also took another stab at using the anti-AA antibodies we got from Dr. Yu at the Zhongshan Medical University. Unlike the survey, this has yet to really come to fruition. We've got a few kinks to work out still, some of which are quite interesting. One example of this is our use of the optical equipment at Tunghai University. In order to get better resolution and clarity, we've been using something called a confocal microscope. Basically, it builds a topographical map of a sample. By taking away layers and isolating certain areas, a confocal microscope allows us to see things that would be hidden when using a normal light microscope. In layman's terms, it's like looking through batman's microscope. I really like seeing all that those things can do, although it's good to keep in mind that we still have a small laundry list of other experiments to do with the anti-AA antibodies. Once we're back at our own lab, I plan to take full advantage of the very generous supply of antibodies from Dr. Yu.

Taiwan - PHOTO DUMP

I finally got around to captioning these suckers. Check out the links to see my hard work and play.

TCM College/Clinic/Museum visit

Academia Sinica Visit

Kenting (more to come)

Taiwan - Downtime-er?

Here's the promised pictures from the last post. I'm sorry if they're tinted with jealousy. The UWRF research facilities are only enough to get work done and not much more than that.

You know you're in Taiwan when you're almost too tall to use the emergency showers.

This is like the door that urine samples get passed through, only instead of a toilet, there's fish on the other side.

This is an air shower here, although I was sad to see that the researchers don't really use it. I don't care if it isn't need for working with zebrafish, I want to be re-pressurized.

Zebrafish room at THU, which is basically a carbon copy of every fish lab in Taiwan. It turns out that Dr. Huang's set up at UWRF is unique in it's use of normal fish tanks.

Mice!

The sole inhabitant of the rabbit lab.

Taiwan - Down time

Not much to say right now, but I'll be posting later tonight with more.

I just wanted to nerd out a little bit. The facilities here at Tunghai U include a clean room for their zebrafish, mice, and rabbit labs. Pictures in the next ten minute break I get.

Taiwan - Last day in Taizhong (pt. 2)

Sorry about that last post's tangent. This one will be more succinct, if only because it's almost three AM here and I was up much later last night. My pineal gland must be taking a vacation, but normal circadian rhythms are over-rated anyways.

My favorite part about our last day in Taizhong had to be the museum's section dedicated to medicine. As with the other exhibits, I was surprised by how extremely thorough and they were. Pretty much every kind of treatment mankind has devised was on display. There was clinical medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, and even some folk remedies from Africa. Apparently, there are some African tribes that basically practice acupuncture, except they do it with nails on a wooden doll that is meant to act as a decoy for diseases. The things look like sad porcupines. Another interesting aspect of the exhibit was how traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) was given almost as much space as the clinical medicine is, in fact most of the exhibits on human aging and disease included the perspectives of both clinical and TCM. It was a good reflection of how traditional Chinese medicine is regarded by the majority of the Chinese, although most go to a clinical doctor for much of their troubles. Granted, the line between clinical medicine and TCM really blurred for me while I was in Taizhong - especially at the Chinese medicine college with Dr. Cheng. While they were most definitely working with TCM, the were also testing it with macrophages and using genetic engineering to make better remedies - not to mention the work my group did with extracting active compounds from plants.

(It may sounds strange to those who here Naturopathy and guess the meaning to be "over-privileged hippie quackery" but as an aspiring ND, I was ecstatic to experience firsthand the blending of clinical and traditional medicine.)

After the museum our group explored the surrounding area, which included what I first thought was children's play equipment and later learned were public exercise machines. We also checked out a 16-story department store. Including everything you could find at Ikea for roughly the same amount, I wasn't a fan. I did like the massive arcade on the top floor, but the hounding by sales people (who make American door to door salesmen look completely apathetic) really ruined it for me. For one, I didn't understand a thing they said, and they seemed to think that it didn't matter. In truth, it didn't, because I was just window shopping. Explaining this was almost impossible. We were able to escape into the restaurant on one of the upper floors, only to be greeted by an equally menacing terror.

Actually, it was just really bad steak.

A general rule of thumb:  Whenever a restaurant serves food endogenous of a certain country, unless said restaurant is in said country, the food is almost always bad. Chinese restaurants in the states are NOTHING like restaurants in Taiwan or China. The food is faster, better, and cheaper here, unless you go to a steakhouse. Then the inverse is true. While this is pretty much common sense, we still make adventures to places with Western food once in a while. 

Taiwan - Last day in Taizhong (pt. 1)

I just found out I had been misspelling almost all of the Chinese words on this blog. As a result, I've probably been pronouncing many of them wrong as well. That's just swell. American tourists look bad enough as it is.

One of my rare gripes about the language in Taiwan is their non-use of the pinyin system. I'm not a fan of their total adherence to traditional characters either. Otherwise, the language is really interesting and fun except for those two details. Some days, those two details can really wreck a day. You can say a lot of things about China, but they were REALLY smart to make the switch to simplified characters.

Anyways, the last day of week two went as follows:

After finishing up the last of our week's work in Dr. Cheng's lab, we went to lunch somewhere nearby the science-museum. Dr. Huang, in one of his more and more prevalent moments of dry humor, had the girls and I thinking that the restaurants around the museum where all pretty upscale and that we would have to eat at McDonalds. The look on Kathryn's face was too delightful for words. We ended up eating at pretty fancy italian place instead, and I actually enjoyed it a lot. Throughout the trip, I've made it my goal to try as much as is safe to do so. Accordingly, I've been a little irritated when Dr. Huang or the others have suggested getting food that we could get back home. It just seems ridiculous to me to travel halfway around the world just to do the same stuff you can do at home. I did manage to get over my frustration though, as it is very interesting to see how other places portray different cultures, almost as much as it is to see the differences between how wrong the common American perceptions of Chinese culture are.

The science museum was definitely the highlight of the day, though the main chocolate exhibit was strangely disappointing. For all the people jostling around trying to see it, the only interesting things on display were the various scultures made out of chocolate, though they were pretty sweet. HaHaHaPUN. Actually, I was sad to find that we were only a llowed to look at the chocolate renditions of the terra cotta warriors or the Taipei 101. Neither were we allowed to eat the dim sum meal that was sculpted out of chocolate. It was very conflicting because the whole place smelled delicious but there was despicably solid plate glass between the displays and my mouth. Adding insult to injury, everything in the gift shop was apparently priced by Persian princes, so I couldn't go the legal route to fulfill the cocoa monkey that had been strapped to my back.

In all seriousness, the chocolate displays were really impressive and inspired. I saw some stuff done with food that I would never have the creativity nor the patience to complete, although that may be because that thought train would go something like: "Hey, I bet I can carve this into something INMYFACE!" ~insert the sound of starving raptors eating birthday cake~

The rest of the museum was much more interesting, partly because the legends on the permanent exhibits were both in English and Chinese, and partly because the displays were six kinds of awesome. I was pretty much floored by the animatronic dinosaurs that greeted me upon entering the main museum. Rating them on my scale of fantasticness, they had a score of three crying children.

It's like the metric system, but understood in the U.S.

I think they should have done better, but I'm not sure the youngsters in the room realized that the robots seemed to react to those around them. I was really expecting one to ask me if I was John Connor. I really like them. My inner nine year-old very much wanted to spend the entire time taunting playing with the dinosaurobots, but I decided that asserting dominants over robotic placeholders of extinct deathdealers was probably not the best example to set for the children that were already scared and confused by my lack of exposure to sunlight and blonde hair.

After glaring menacingly at some uppity velociraptors for next year's christmas card, I moved on to the exhibit of the human body. I'm not sure exhibit is the right word, as the majority of the museum's two top levels were dedicated to explain one aspect of Homo sapiens or another. Whether it was about human development, birth, and even death, the exhibit was astoundingly thorough. It's interesting, because in my use of the word "development", I mean it in the broadest sense possible. For example, the aforementioned T2000's could be seen as part of the human exhibit, as they were part of the evolutionary process that resulted in Neanderthaland and my more distant cousins. I think the one word that really described the exhibit was "thorough." You could start at a display about the origins of life and make your way up the Darwinian path to displays of Egyptian mummification and even cryo-preservation.

That last display scared me a little, mostly because I was under the impression that the only people who were crazy enough to pursue cold storage-based immortality died sometime after World War II. While I can see the benefits of cold-storage for things like space travel, I am a firm believer in death. It's not an issue that really bothers me at all until people try to cheat the system.

For a while I wanted to be a mortician because I thought I would be a good fit for the work given my comfort level. Part of the reason I'm no longer engaged in mortuary science was the realization that many people are vehemently opposed to accepting death as innevitable. It really surprises me how many people go about their lives as if there will always be another day to get their lives in order. Worse yet, just as many people spend enormous amounts of money to prolong the suffering and consequences of a life lived under the impression that tomorrow was soon enough. In a nutshell, my problem was that working as a funeral director would ensure that I eventually had to deal with everyone of those individuals. I couldn't stomach it, and switched.

Another thing that found strange, although not for the reasons you might expect, was the thermal imaging video of a recently deceased person cooling off. As I've said, death is something that bothers me, but I am very aware of how much it bothers others. I was simply surprised to see the cooling video and the artifacts that accompanied it in an otherwise family-friendly museum. 1000 year old mummies (out of their sarcophagi) and Incan burial masks (silver with red paint to symbolize blood – used to try and revive the recently deceased) are not things that would be on pedestals in an American museum. I'm not sure where I stand on the issue.

Too be continued. In the meantime, feel free to let me know what you think about shielding children from things like death.