Chapter 12. My First Scientific Meeting

 The physiology graduate students and I formed a nice little study group to relate our trials and tribulations to each other concerning classes and the physiology faculty. We could compare notes on classes, make suggestions as to classes or faculty advisors and just listen when things were going wrong. Senior graduate students would give warnings as to classes or difficult patches to avoid and we all tried to help keep one another going and survive the program.

Ann was a great confidant for me when I needed a boost in general, but other than moral support she could not really help with suggestions or related experiences of graduate school or research. I did, however, find comfort in two friends who were doing similar research in the NMR lab. Mark Delano and Jay Beauchamp were medical students who did NMR research on the brain. So we did similar experiments but on different tissues and this research overlap gave us some common ground to talk about. The radiology department had generously made available some desks that the three of us shared as a common workspace when doing NMR experiments. Being students we pushed that to the limit and used the space for studying and holding impromptu bitch sessions. It was important to vent about the research but also to do that with people who understood it because opportunities to solve problems or improve methods would arise.

The three of us had different educational backgrounds and different research interests, so when we would talk about the difficulties we were having with life, research, supervisors and classes, the diversity of opinions helped produce unique answers to questions. For example, I was trying to understand some issues related to vascular pathologies and doing my NMR experiments on pig arteries. Mark and Jay jointly suggested that I could get a better understanding of some of those pathologies by using images from the clinical imager; the MRI. With their help, I was able to get the “films” I needed to help better understand my research. The films were of patients whose arteries had diseases and the results of those diseases. Some patients had big bulges in their arteries, other arteries made strange twists and turns, while others could be seen as having diseased walls. Being able to see what was happening in a living patient using the MRIs was a great help for me to better appreciate what my research was doing. Fortunately with my experience working in emergency medicine as well as athletic training, I was able to pick up the things occurring in the patients’ films quite easily. It was good to chat with Mark and Jay because we understood each other’s research and could reinforce the things we were doing right and help find alternate directions for things that were going wrong.

As part of the griping one must always do in life, I was letting off steam with Ann on one occasion. The subject was Dr. Dillon. What I was complaining about was trivial, but I was complaining nonetheless. Ann suggested that I quit working for Dr. Dillon and work for someone else, because she knew lots of the faculty would like me as a student. I fully realized that Ann was giving me a compliment, and responded, “Oh no, I don’t want to leave Dr. Dillon’s lab. I just need to get some stresses off my chest.”

This conversation helped make me realize that I had a nice circle of friends and supporters with whom I could talk or gripe about the different aspects of my life and work. Different people or groups of people are appropriate for certain types of venting and having these avenues for release can be useful for relieving stress as well as for clearing the head to produce answers to problems. I was able to talk to John and Laura concerning medical issues and with their background in emergency medicine we had similar perspectives to draw upon. I had my family and especially my brother Jim, with whom I am very close, so we could confide in each other about many things. Obviously Ann was a big part of my life and we could communicate about anything and offer support at any time. My fellow graduate students in physiology: Dave, Vivian, Nancy, Glenna, etc. helped in surviving classes and dealing with faculty. Mark and Jay were good resources to talk about NMR specific research issues and troubleshooting, which is extremely important in a high-tech research project. I was fortunate and privileged to have a lot of intellectual resources available to me to help survive the years of work needed to obtain a Ph.D. So I have come to believe that bitching has its place as long as you use it to try to solve a problem as opposed to just stating it.

For my NMR experiments I was always reading the latest papers and scientific publications related to my work. There are no textbooks that are up to date enough to help form and write the science in a Ph.D. thesis. All the published information is in periodicals and presented at conferences. In this way I learned about a new technique that required multiple things to be done at one time during the NMR experiment. It was looking like this method would be important for my Ph.D. thesis work. Other scientists and labs would just buy extra equipment or upgrade their machines to do the experiments, but we couldn’t do that. Our NMR machine could do one of these things (called continuous wave), but it couldn’t do the two things I needed simultaneously. I read about another technique (called DANTE) that was able to behave like continuous wave. Unfortunately the two had not been done together, so if I wanted to do it, I would have to make up the process all by myself. Doing new things is part of what research is all about, so I decided to try.

I wrote some computer programs and did some experiments that showed that the two techniques could be done at the same time during my experiments. But there was some doubt in my mind if I could call them the same as what other scientists had done in their publications. To put my mind at rest, I did a series of mathematical computations of what I was doing and compared those computations to what other scientists had done. This process is called a mathematical proof because I was proving that my work was doing what I claimed it to be doing. I mathematically proved that my techniques and the techniques of others were identical and this conclusion was supported by the experiments. So, by writing a computer program and doing a mathematical proof, I was able to do an experiment with the NMR without the need to purchase additional hardware (a cost savings of tens of thousands of dollars). Dr. Dillon was happy with that, I was able to do the experiments needed for my thesis, and in addition I was able to add a couple of pages of math to my Ph.D. thesis justifying my methods.

My experiments and I were producing great data and Dr. Dillon said that it was time for me to present my research at a scientific meeting. He suggested that I attend the Biophysics meeting that was coming up in New Orleans. This was before Hurricane Katrina and it would be my first trip to New Orleans and my first big scientific meeting. I thought it was kind of humorous that he was suggesting that I attend The Biophysics meeting because that is what my Masters degree was supposed to have been in.