Everyday Experiments

I've written zilch in the last 3 months. 3 months of sleepless nights, drowning in report after report, spewing out graph after figure after paper. I guess this is how my brain should feel like right now:



I think I'm going on a loooong needed (and deserved!) vacation right now. Preferably in a cold, dark cave where I can sleep undisturbed until Christmas :-p

A few decades (or perhaps years) from now, lab rats (at least of the murine kind) will cease to skitter, scamper, and be probed and tested in most research labs. A paper published in Tissue Engineering Methods just this quarter details how Dr. Amit Gefen of Tel Aviv University and his team were able to deduce, using fat cells, that stem cells are sufficient in creating the tissue required for most current animal tests. Once other scientists (including Dr. Gefen himself) take up this promising lead and conduct more experiments to verify this claim, this may lead to the elimination of the need to sacrifice so many mice for just one experiment on one tiny organ or system. No more cute furry little white critters to feed, grow, clean, and experiment on...