After lunch, was something called “Collaboration exercises”, which I thought were silly games designed to encourage teamwork. At lunch a few POST-DOCS shared their past physiology retreat experiences. They were excited to see more Collaborative exercises on the schedule, because they got so much out of it last time—this said with absolutely no sense of sarcasm. That should have been my first clue that I should stop preparing myself to build a bridge with toothpicks and marshmallows.
The basis of the exercise consisted of choosing two partners from different specialties, who you wouldn’t normally meet, and share each other’s research and think of a possible joint research project which combines both specialties. I quickly began to panic. I mean what could I, as an undergraduate, working in their first lab, offer a graduate student who has been working years in their field. I began compiling a list of the most scientific sounding words in my head and practicing my head nodding skills AKA “Poker-FACE”—I would need them if I was going to hear words like “N-arachidonoylphosphatidylethanolamine” without flinching.
The conductors then announced, “We Pre-Selected the groups in Random Order”, which hovered above me like a dark cloud. However, just before it rained on my parade, I heard the first names, “Dr. Esser and Dr. Lee”. Apparently, I had amassed enough good Karma to be divided as laboratories and not individuals. I put away my Poker-face and stored that perpetual list of scientific terminology for later use, and moved to find my co-workers. We found an empty conference room and I met Dr. Karyn Esser and her lab.
The UK Physiology department is unique in that the entire department does not have a centralized theme. This means that a world renowned physiologist in circadian rhythm (Dr. Esser) could speak with a world renowned pulmonary physiologist (Dr. Lee), just by walking down the hall; or in this case, by driving two hours to a conference room in the middle of nowhere. Our goal was to come up with a possible project at the end of a 15 minute session, however just as we began fusing the two fields, time was called.
Our next round was with Dr. Steve Estus and his lab, which was twice the size of our lab. Dr. Estus’ lab is the resident “Alzheimer’s Disease/Genetics Lab” in the physiology department, how could that fit with the “Airway Inflammatory/Pulmonary Lab”. Finally at the end of fifteen minutes, we had decided that we wanted to sequence the genes of unique twins, where one had asthma and the other one didn’t. Could their genetic makeup lead us to the discovery of a novel diagnostic genetic test for asthma?
The following morning some labs shared their joint ventures, which may even lead to actual innovating research projects one day. It just goes to show that novel collaborations are the way of the future. If we want to cure diseases as quickly as possible, than that is the only way. For instance, take a disorder like asthma. When a patient has an asthma attack their airways become inflamed and narrow, this restricts the volume of air that can reach the lungs, which reduces the amount of oxygen in the blood. To survive in this hypoxic state, the heart begins to slow down, or bradycardia, which prevents all of the organs from receiving the needed amount of oxygen to maintain metabolic function. And so on and so forth. Suddenly a simple asthma attack has managed to affect every organ system and disrupt homeostasis. This is why I love Physiology. We study the mechanisms that help an organism achieve homeostasis at every level, noted we spend much time with a fine magnifying glass on a very specific mechanism—but that’s just why it’s so nice when we get to play silly games.