Scientists find a virus that infects other viruses.

This is the first documented case of a virus infecting another virus. It was found in a cooling tower in Paris (how random is that?). And, it may restart the debate of whether or not viruses are alive.

So freaking cool!

I officially accepted the job at Leeds.

This job is becoming like a new boyfriend. "This is my new job! Isn't it dreamy? It's so smart! And funny! And fantastic!" Feel free to smack me if I start talking about it too much.

(Props to Brad for the new name)

Scientist with a job offer: We want to pay you one million dollars a year to work with Ebola and/ or smallpox!
Kat: Alllll right!

I had my telephone interview with the University of Leeds jobs this morning. That went okay, considering it was 5 British men yammering at me. They told me they would let me know if I got a job in a couple days, which means I'll know in 4 years.

I have been getting these sharp, painful headaches the past couple days. I can mostly function with them, but it's difficult. So if I seem spacey at times, that's why.

Scene: The hairdresser. Specifically, Supercuts. I am sitting in the chair, hair wet and hanging in my face as the hairdresser (let's call her Sandy) is trimming my bangs.

Sandy: So, what do you do?
Me: I'm a scientist.
Sandy: Really?!? Awesome! I have a question.
Me (thinks to myself *Oh boy*): Okay...
Sandy: Did you see I Am Legend?
Me: Uh, no. No, I didn't.
Sandy: Well, can I tell you the plot?
Me: ... Sure. *tries to blow wet bangs out of my eyes*
Sandy: Okay, so in the movie, they come up with a cure for some horrible disease, but it turns everyone into mutants. Could that really happen?
Me (thinks about it for a moment): Well, technically, yes.
Sandy: REALLY?!? So I could get a cool mutation like invisibility?
Me: No. More mundane, like cancer.
Sandy: Oh. (she's disappointed). How about zombies?
Me: Zombies?
Sandy: Yeah. Could scientists make a cure for a disease that makes people into ZOMBIES?
Me: No. Out of the realm of possibility.

* My thesis is FINALLY completely edited/ re-written. I'm handing it to my committee chair to officially sign off on it tomorrow.

* I have a phone interview for two jobs at the University of Leeds at the end of the month. Did you know the University of Leeds has over 30,000 students? Having gone to small schools my whole life, this boggles my mind.

* I have a date on Sunday. I hope it doesn't rain.

* I'm having a pretty good week overall so far.

*London job: Professor STILL has not made a decision.

*Glasgow job: Professor has decided to switch from endogenous retroviruses in sheep, to reoviruses that infect cattle and sheep (and therefore, decimate the agricultural industry in Europe). This boils down to him ALSO not making a decision.

*NY State Department of Health: My application is currently being reviewed by the search committee.

*Whitehead Institute/ MIT: Haven't heard anything, must send e-mail making sure they got my application.

*Going out today: One to University of Oxford, two to University of Leeds.

*Working on today: Making a pared down resume, and looking for local industry jobs because I need a) a paycheck, and b) health insurance.

Right now, I'd appreciate any extra good vibes you could send my way.

I'm still alive. I've been a bit busy with graduating, job hunting, and thesis edits. In fact, right now my thesis is staring at me, begging for edits. Shut up, slut thesis!

Anyway, lots of thoughts on graduating, family, friends, etc, etc. I don't have time to go into them now. I'm not entirely sure I want to, actually. It's a morass of happy, sad, proud, feeling like a sham, panic, hope, excitement.

Ganked from lucasthegray: If I were to die tomorrow, what would you wish you had said to me while I was still alive?Comments screened.

*bangs head on desk*

Defense might eat me.

7 days. Dun dun DUN.

For those in the know: The wiki has some updates.

Stick a fork in me, cause I'M DONE.

Well, my thesis is done. Still need to defend the damn thing. But no more writing for a couple weeks!

Thank you to everyone for all the encouragement the past few posts. *smooches*

While y'all are off buying houses, getting married, and being pregnant, I have almost finished a rough draft of my thesis. I have to finish the second half of my materials and methods. Not nearly as exciting, I know, but exciting to me. I may register at Target as "Kat Marries Phillip H. Descartes" just to get back at everyone I had to buy wedding/ baby presents for.

Just over one month until my actual defense. I have a practice run of the seminar portion on the 23rd. My thesis needs to be delivered to my committee on May 1st. It's all rushing up so fast. I know on May 13th, I'm going to feel like "wow, that was a total wham!bam!thankyouma'am!". The last 7 years of my life, all wrapped up on a Monday afternoon.

My boss told me he wants me in his office after my defense to have a glass of scotch. I think he knows of the Dr. Drunky McDrunkpants celebration taking place, and wants to start it off right. Any scotch recommendations?

I'm applying for two jobs this week. One is in London, working on poxvirus immunology, specifically for an HIV vaccine. The other is in Glasgow, on how endogenous/ exogenous retroviruses affect the host. Neither is as out of my field as I would like, but the offerings in virology are so bleak at the moment, I'll take what I can get. I'm contemplating jumping ship for bacterial disease research to broaden my prospects.

Thank the Lyndon B. Johnson I only have to worry about getting myself a job. I'd be a total disaster if I was in a relationship, and had to worry about uprooting someone else as well. I'm only half a disaster at the moment.

Preface: A former graduate student named Mike sometimes picks me up from the bus stop in the mornings. He did his thesis work on the strain of E.coli that causes food poisoning. We were talking about infectious diseases this morning.

Kat: We're due for a major flu pandemic. I mean, the last one was sometime in the 60s. And with air travel nowadays, it's almost too easy for the virus.
Mike: Isn't it? "Hey, yeah, i hitched a ride in this AWESOME pair of lungs! Yeah, yesterday I was in Brazil, now I'm in New York City! And they're great here, sneezing all over each other!"
Kat: Viruses amaze me in their ability to take us out so easily.
Mike: Most bacteria aren't pathogenic until they get infected with phages [viruses that infect bacteria]. Then the bacteria pick up these genes from the phage, and all hell breaks loose.
Kat: Usually bacteria are all like "dort dort dort, oh look! Dirt!" Until the phage comes along and says "Hey I got some nice endotoxin genes for you."
Mike: "Yeah, you want some? Just a little? C'mere little bacterium."
Kat: Phages are the drug dealers of the microbial world.

Science teacher conference was fun, overall. I went to the exhibitor workshops and played with their kits for experiments to do in the classroom. I did an "HIV ELISA" (really, an ELISA using chicken proteins), a DNA extraction, and a bacterial transformation.

I went to an intro to protozoans workshop, and now I have pets! Volvox, paramecium, stentor, euglena, and a few others are currently living in glasses on my windowsill. I have to look up how to keep care of them all.

Mom still drives me nuts. She's deaf in one ear, so half the time she doesn't hear me. The other half of the time she's not paying attention, which adds up to me repeating myself 100% of the time. Very loudly.

How are y'all doing? Lay it on me. I'm screening my comments.

Suggested by elenuial. No, I didn't forget, I've just been busy with noble pursuits like writing my thesis and being drunk.

I've never thought about whether writing would supplant my career as a scientist, mainly because everyone tells you not to quit your day job if you want to be a writer. On those few occasions when I daydream about my future, I always imagine I'm a scientist and a writer.

I already know I don't want my own lab- it's a whole level of responsibility I don't want. Plus, I like doing bench work an awful lot. I imagine myself bouncing around from postdoc position to postdoc position for a few years, then becoming a perma-postdoc at some point. The difficult part about being a scientist is that it's not a job- it's a vocation. It can suck up a lot more of your life than you planned, and you have to really, really love it to stick with it. It can be hard to keep some part of yourself away from the science.

I've thought about becoming a science writer/ editor. I'm applying for an editing job at Cell in Boston. I think it would be interesting to combine the science and the writing. However, I am afraid that doing writing as my regular job would put me off writing fiction, that at the end of the day I would be so sick of writing that I wouldn't want to do it.

Striking that balance between being a scientist and being a writer will be difficult. One is going to eclipse the other at different points in my life. I suppose I'll just have to keep an open mind, and see what life throws at me. Writing as a career option isn't something I would have imagined 10 years ago, so already life is surprising me. Just gotta go with the flow, I suppose.

For ddrpolaris:
-80 degrees C= -112 degrees F
-152 degrees C= -214 degrees F
-196 (liquid nitrogen)= -321 degrees F

Two weeks of lab work left. Yeehaw. *throws up*

I read Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr over the weekend. Oh. My. God. Smart female protagonist? Check. Rock-and-a-hard-place problem, clever solution? Check and check. Wickedness, evil, and darkness? Check, check, and check. A conversation about safe sex that wasn't embarrassingly stupid? Check. One of the male leads was a bit Mary Sue to me, but that was more than made up for by another male lead being a total ass.

Grade: 8/10. Kick-ass book, highly recommended.

If I didn't have my head up my butt, I would have known that last Thursday (Valentine's Day) was Zombie Idol Day. Take a piece of literature, and add a zombie. Here are a few examples:
Maureen Johnson wonders what Pride and Prejudice would have been like with zombies.
Libba Bray gives Goodnight Moon the zombie treatment.
Holly Black revamps William Carlos Williams.
Scott Westerfeld tackles Dickens.

And I just wrote cheesy vampire (vampires are soooo five minutes ago) smut.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I have an announcement to make.

I will be defending my PhD thesis on Monday, May 12th, in the afternoon.

On July 26th, 2007, I began a project to make 10 new mutations in a virus construct. The purpose of this project was to find amino acids that would increase this virus' ability to infect cells.

As of today, January 16, 2008, I finally have all 10 mutations. Nearly 6 months for 10 mutations is painful. Now I can finish that third of my thesis up.

To celebrate, tonight I am drinking spiked hot chocolate, and reading as much as I want of The Sweet Far Thing.

It's Infect the Planet Day.

51 viruses. 4 dilutions each. On two cell lines.

Can she do it?

*dramatic pause*

You bet your bottom dollar she can. She just did. :-P

What I like (love) about you- fashionably late edition:
shadowravyn
1. You are witty and sarcastic. You make me laugh like an idiot all the time.
2. A vast portion of your books are not science fiction/ fantasy. It's good to know another geek who reads lots of books outside the genre.
3. Your tolerance for stupidity is just as low as mine.

rainbowsbright
1. You are a survivor. I only know an inkling of what you've been through, but I do know that you're still a great person despite it all.
2. You bravely came to my potluck picnic even though we haven't seen each other in 10 years, and you wouldn't know anyone other than me.
3. You are very forgiving.