One of the many good things about not going to work is not having to get up in the dark for six months a year. As Christmas approaches this has been particularly pleasant. However there are occasions when you just have to get up because something so special and exciting is going to happen that you can't wait to get there. So Christopher and I set off last Friday at 5.30am to catch the coach to London and our 'Behind the Scenes' trip to the Natural History Museum. This was something we had been looking forward to for months. Our enthusiasm was a little bit dampened by the fact that our walk to the bus station coincided with the weather-bomb from the United States, and by the time we got to the bus we were absolutely soaked to the skin with no chance of getting dry.
Still, this was our Old Horts outing with Christmas dinner afterwards and we were determined to enjoy it; so we shivered for three hours on the coach, and squelched our way through a variety of tube stations and arrived in time to have breakfast
Still, this was our Old Horts outing with Christmas dinner afterwards and we were determined to enjoy it; so we shivered for three hours on the coach, and squelched our way through a variety of tube stations and arrived in time to have breakfast
The Old Horts organisation has many members with a variety of very interesting backgrounds. One of our members is Jackie Mackenzie-Dodds, who is the Collections Manager, Molecular and Frozen Tissues, Life Sciences Department, Genomics and Microbial Biodiversity Division of the Natural History Museum!! This means she is responsible for the Collections of Frozen Tissue and Genetic Resources at the museum. Jackie welcomed us at the visitors entrance, organised us into groups, and off we went to the cryogenics area. Here there are a variety of freezers all at different temperatures where DNA and tissue samples are stored. This was very exciting as we had to put on protective clothing so that we didn't contaminate the samples.
The freezers can all look a bit similar, so Jackie has named them so that if there is an emergency she can direct her helpers to the Arctic Wolf or Penguin Alley rather than white freezer second on the left. They try to have as small samples as possible so that more material can be stored, and all the samples are identified by a bar code so they can't get muddled up.
As the visit wore on Christopher and I could gauge the time by how dry we were getting. At this stage the water level was just above our knees. We now moved on to the liquid Nitrogen area. Jackie became even more enthusiastic, if that could have been possible, as she donned the very gloves worn by David Attenborough when he placed Indian elephant samples in the cryopreservation unit as part of the Frozen Ark Project. Liquid Nitrogen is great fun, and we were duly impressed by the gloves.
Storing samples at -80 degrees or in liquid Nitrogen is not exactly environmentally friendly, so there is an area where samples are stored at ambient temperature, and the team are looking at a simple way of collecting DNA on a treated filter paper. However at present liquid Nitrogen is the way to keep samples in the best condition, especially if they can be frozen in the field straight away.. Jackie showed us some equipment for doing this.
And so with the time just below knee level we were ready to move from the most high tech methods of preservation to one of the simplest and most well known ways of keeping once-living material. We were off to the herbarium......................