Today I had my site visit for Capstone at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. I got a tour of fascinating things I had never seen before that had to do with my topic. 

The first tour that I experienced was at the lab where they research about DNA and cells. A really smart woman told me everything I needed to know about Genetics and it was amazing! The woman showed me all the machines they use to collect all of the information and the machines they use to discover new things they find from cells and DNA. One assistant that works there studies human cells that are in our body right now! There is something that looks like a freezer and they keep the cells in there at a specific temperature and when they need to examine something about it they take it out and put it under a special microscope so you could see clearly what the cells look like. The cells are too small to see with just your eyes. In fact, you can’t even see anything when you look at the cells. All it looks like is liquid. 

The second tour I experienced was with the same woman and she took us down to the basement where they have a whole room full of mice! When we got down there I didn’t realize there was a whole process to go into the room to see the rats and neither did my mom. But the process didn’t take a long time which was good. All we had to do was put booties on our feet, put a hair net around our hair, put a mouth mask on, put gloves on and put a cover/suit around us. (The cover almost looked like what scientist would wear). The process itself wasn’t weird, but the way we had to do the process was a bit weird but after they told me why we had to do it like that I understood.

The reason why we had to put all of that stuff on us was because since they were doing an experiment, they had a room full of mice for their experiment. The experiment is that they are taking the cells out of the rats and studying them. Because they are doing an experiment with mice, we had to cover ourselves because we didn’t want to get dirt anywhere and maybe we had dirt on us. Dirt and germs can mess up the experiment. In others words, it could make the rats sick and the rats are the main focus of the experiment. The process we had to do to put the stuff on us was in a room where there is a dirty spot where everybody walks, and on the other side it wasn’t dirty. There was yellow tape there so we knew what side was clean and what side was dirty. When we put the booties on, we had to put one booty on and step on the clean side of the room, then put the other booty on our other foot and step on the clean side of the room.

Then, we walked to the room where the rats were…they were sooo cute (but I wasn’t allowed to take pictures of them)!!!

I hope to learn more about his topic and come to this college again to get the experience I saw today!