The people in my lab were great at helping me find the supplies needed to run the same kind of analysis techniques I learned at Eckerd’s sediment lab. Asking for a set of seive’s of different sizes was a particularly interesting adventure. The students in the lab usually use sediments for pollutants so they commonly grind them up into powder and extract things from them in various ways. The fact that I wanted to dry the sediments out without baking the muds together seemed like a foreign concept (which…if you think about the situation…it was), as well as my need for a whole stack of seives to separate out the grain sizes.

Eventually most of my needs were met. The only thing that was not available was full time use of a fume hood for adding the HCl. I initially mixed the HCl in a fume hood and then added it to the samples in a fume hood but eventually had to give up the space to other researchers and I was forced to leave the samples sitting in the open air. It seemed safe enough but I wouldn’t like to run too many samples like that.

They don’t use safety goggles here. You have to wear a lab coat at all times. 99% of the time students are wearing latex gloves. I haven’t seen a single pair of safety goggles since I’ve been here. This became most distressing to me when I was mixing concentrated HCl with water. ‘Always do what you outta, add the acid to the water’. The phrase never sounded so important.

Anyway, I’m pretty much finished with my studies in the lab and have to get ready to leave Hong Kong tomorrow. What an interesting adventure it has been. I have met some wonderful people on this trip, most notably a couple from the mainland called Xun Wen and In Ge (or Wen and GeGe as they are known around the lab). They have been extraordinarily kind to me, inviting me out the play baketball, badminton, go to the beach, and even invited me around to their apartment in kowloon city for a home cooked dinner by Wen! Wen is also a great guitarist and we have made a few trips to local music stores as well as having a couple jam sessions ourselves. Words cannot describe how grateful I am to them for making sure I had a friend or two in this massive city.

Farewell Hong Kong, you are a magnetic city that people of all nations are pulled to and I know I’ll be pulled back here again someday.

We also perform a test called the ames test which uses salmonella to determine the mutagenic potential of a chemical. The salmonella is a special strain that only grows on histidine. We make agar plates containing no histidine and then place the bacteria in the DBP and put it on the dish. If growth occurs then a mutation has taken place so the salmonella can grow without histidine. We count the number of colonies that form to determine how mutagenic the chemical is.

All of these tests don’t take long to explain but take quite a while to perform. We have three different amino acids which are split in to two groups. Bromination (use of bromide) is another form of water disinfection that is often used along with chlorination so we have three amino acids with bromide and three amino acids without bromide. We have 9 time slots we chlorinate the samples with- 30 seconds, 1min, 2min, 5min, 10min, 30min, 1hr, 2hr, and 120hr (though the 120hr is not used as much). We split the chlorinated amino acid into 9 small bottles to extract different DBPs- HAA, HAN, and THM (which have long, fancy sounding names that you can google to find if you want). So that makes 486 bottles we take DBPs from. Then for the Ames test we put different concentrations of the DBP at each time slot- 6%, 12%, 25%, 50%, and 100%. So with 9 time slots per amino acid and 6 amino acids with 5 concentrations per time slot that makes 270 agar plates…except we run three plates per concentration for accuracy so it’s actually 810 agar plates.

As of now we are finished with extractions and only have about three more amino acids to run ames test on so I’m confident that by next week the lab work will have reached its conclusion.

After the dives we were taken on a tour around the islands in South-East Hong Kong. The islands are granite formed during volcanic eruptions due to the subduction zone nearby. They have beautiful columnar joints that create cathedral like cave entrances and cliff faces that could be an ancient organ carved from the rock. Having only heard of columnar basalts it was very neat to see the lighter granite make these formations. The coasts are so beautiful here. Rocky beaches quickly turn into steep green hills that look like a scene from Jurassic Park.

So the beautiful scenery and the great diving combined for an absolutely fantastic day!