Blind Rasputin posted:

many other organs (I’d say the only exception here is their kidney is a single large nephron unlike ours) is identical to ours.

Zzulu posted:

Platystemon posted:

To what extent does that matter?

People can lose a kidney with no ill effects and some people are born with horseshoe kidneys. You, the reader, might have one, if you’ve never had imaging or surgery in the area.

Randaconda posted:

"No ill effects" is an exaggeration, you can live with one kidney, but it's not ideal

Blind Rasputin posted:

Dissect out the organs, maybe a liver or in my case part of the brain. Flash freeze on liquid nitrogen. Then put the piece of tissue in a tube containing RNA extraction solution. It’s really just phenol/chloroform and some enzymes. Use that tissue blender to totally homogenize the tissue and cavitation breaks all the cells open releasing the DNA and RNA. It doesn’t foam up very much at all, and works amazingly well, actually.

Then you use a high speed centrifuge to separate the organic and aqueous phase, get the DNA/RNA by pipeting out the aqueous phase into a fresh tube. Clean the FNA/RNA with a few mixes of ethanol/isopropyl alcohol to clean away any proteins or phenol that may still linger, then precipitate the DNA/RNA into a pellet using ethanol and high speed centrifuge. DNA/RNA aren’t soluble in ethanol so it turns into a pellet at the bottom of the tube under 13,000g.

Then, submit the super pure genetic material to a DNAse reaction to destroy all the DNA and leave just RNA. Then, after all that, you can run quantitative PCR on the RNA to determine just how active your favorite certain genes were at the moment you lopped that mouses head off and cut out it’s brain!

As an aside, phenol is super weird tasting and smelling and it’s what is in chloroseptic throat spray, so every time I use that stuff I think of mouse brains.

Zzulu posted:

Randaconda posted:

"No ill effects" is an exaggeration, you can live with one kidney, but it's not ideal

Inceltown posted:

Living isn't ideal. If losing a kidney gets you in a grave a bit earlier what harm is that?

Railing Kill posted:

But if I'm donating one of my kidneys to prolong someone else's life, then I'm harming them so I should keep my kidney. But if I keep my kidney, I'm prolonging my own life.

BRB going to remove both of my kidneys.

Lady Disdain posted:

You don't have to donate it.

Railing Kill posted:

*Slowly slides knife out of own torso* Go onnn....?

Inceltown posted:

Living isn't ideal. If losing a kidney gets you in a grave a bit earlier what harm is that?

Amphigory posted:

What else did you put in there? Don't lie to us...

BlankIsBeautiful posted:

Well, there's the lab Christmas Party.

"Great news everyone! Professor Flanders-Dunbar has procured 750 milliliters of a fine distilled spirit called Patron!"

"We need to procure a device to allow us to compound a mixture known as a Margarita!"

"Do any of you young, knowing graduate students have any idea?"

Sam Faust posted:

Saying that only having one kidney can lead to health issues in itself provides an example of why the biological differences between mice and man can be important for research. If you wanted to investigate what exactly these health issues are, you couldn't use a mouse with an excised kidney as an animal model.

Sam Faust posted:

Saying that only having one kidney can lead to health issues in itself provides an example of why the biological differences between mice and man can be important for research. If you wanted to investigate what exactly these health issues are, you couldn't use a mouse with an excised kidney as an animal model.

Railing Kill posted:

But if I'm donating one of my kidneys to prolong someone else's life, then I'm harming them so I should keep my kidney. But if I keep my kidney, I'm prolonging my own life.

BRB going to remove both of my kidneys.

Railing Kill posted:

*Slowly slides knife out of own torso* Go onnn....?

Besesoth posted:

Throw them into the ocean. It's perfectly legal.

WrenP-Complete posted:

I take a fancy medication where the active part is made inside GMO hamster ovaries, and I've been figuring one of those devices (and then some other equipment) is how they get it out. The medicine makes me not in horrifying pain all the time and is supposed to prolong my lifespan ~15 years. Seems pretty metal to me.

WrenP-Complete posted:

I take a fancy medication where the active part is made inside GMO hamster ovaries, and I've been figuring one of those devices (and then some other equipment) is how they get it out. The medicine makes me not in horrifying pain all the time and is supposed to prolong my lifespan ~15 years. Seems pretty metal to me.

zoux posted:

Behold, the apotheosis of the "re-cover your book once the movie comes out"

Who What Now posted:

Is that Adam Driver?

bike tory posted:

Yes it was made into a movie with Adam Driver

jojoinnit posted:

Just two hours of him sitting at a computer, silently filling FOIA requests and sipping coffee

WrenP-Complete posted:

I take a fancy medication where the active part is made inside GMO hamster ovaries, and I've been figuring one of those devices (and then some other equipment) is how they get it out. The medicine makes me not in horrifying pain all the time and is supposed to prolong my lifespan ~15 years. Seems pretty metal to me.