The rest of the season went fairly well for us too. We had a better than 500 season and won our first game in the playoffs. Our inconsistent play was largely due to scattered attendance of the science people, many of whom had experiments going on at all hours of the day, night and weekend. I had to miss a few games too. But again the goal was to enjoy ourselves and we succeeded, while still doing some research.

Research is a lot of work and a lot of fun, and to be successful it needs a lot of luck, too. I designed a research program with Dr. Dillon to do a project that had never been done before, in order to make some real discoveries and also to help me to learn a bunch of relevant research skills. I learned how to do research on measuring muscle function, protein chemistry, enzyme kinetics and work the NMR machine. All these were done using arteries from pigs and the studies were focused on the enzyme creatine kinase. At least once a week I would go to the slaughterhouse to get the arteries. The workers there were used to people coming from the university to pick up samples, this was relatively simple. I found it easy going even though there would be pigs being shocked, their throats cut and bled, and their body hair shaved off in a big machine. After being shaved the pigs were hung by their back legs and the bodies passed along an assembly line of butchers and meat inspectors.

I was able to obtain the arteries from the neck, the carotid arteries, myself by sneaking in between people working on the assembly line. Most of the people who obtained tissue from the slaughterhouse would tell the line workers or butchers what they needed and wait for it to be brought to them. I didn’t know that so the first time I came I just asked if I could go get the tissue from the pig carcasses. With my experience dissecting cadavers (see Chapter 3) and working on the ambulance, I had little problem obtaining the arteries and working fast on the line. I quickly got to the point where I could procure the arteries by feeling in the neck, not even looking at what I was doing, and making a few simple cuts with surgical scissors. The guys on the line thought that was clever. When there was a new guy working on the line, the regular line workers would have me show off my little trick of picking an artery out of the neck of a pig without looking. It was kind of a party trick and I would try to do it faster and faster to make sure I did not slow down the line. If I slowed down the line, it meant longer hours for the workers, and I would be very unpopular. So I tried to stay on their good side. Any time there was down time, I would try to explain to the guys what I was doing and why. I got to know the line workers and butchers fairly well and the visits to the slaughterhouse became a relatively pleasant weekly event.

Once I had the arteries I would put them in a bucket with a special solution to keep them alive and take them back to the physiology lab. Some of my experiments, such as these, were done in the physiology lab and others in the NMR lab. People often seem surprised that the arteries are alive after the pigs have been killed and the arteries removed from their bodies, but yes the arteries live on. When a person dies their arteries live for hours and even days later. The muscle cells in your artery will be alive long after your heart has stopped. In fact they are some of the last cells to die. If they did not live on after the heart stopped, organ transplant would not work. Keeping arteries alive and healthy will improve the success of organ transplants. One of the leading causes of organ transplant failure is the transplanted organ not getting enough blood flow from defective arteries. Again, the more we know about arteries the more we can help people and save lives.

At the physiology lab the arteries would be divided up to be used for research in the different experiments I needed to do. Some arteries would go to protein chemistry, some to muscle function, and others to NMR studies. The protein chemistry arteries had to be frozen quickly. Freezing arteries for protein chemistry is more than just putting them in a freezer. It was essential to freeze the arteries completely and quickly. So we used liquid nitrogen, which has a temperature of –346° Fahrenheit. The pig arteries (which looked and felt like long pieces of elbow macaroni) were plunged into a bucket of liquid nitrogen, freezing them nearly instantly. They became hard white tubes as fragile as glass. It was actually kind of fun freezing the arteries. Well, it was fun at first. After I did this to a few hundred and then a few thousand arteries it eventually became routine.