The Dissertation

This is really starting to grate on me now. Nothing is going to plan, we have no significant data to use, and it's just going to make the write-up so much harder.

To explain this further (and the creepy picture), my dissertation consists of a lab project, where I'm basically looking at this guy (I'm not even 100% sure if it is a guy, all we've managed to find is that it's something to do with their eyes), C. vomitoria. No, I haven't stumbled into some zoology study by accident, what we're doing is slightly more interesting than that. The way the pharmaceutical industry works is before a drug can be put out there on the mass market, it has to go through tonnes of stages of pre-clinical testing to ensure it's safe and efficacious for human use. This starts out in computer simulations, then moves on to cell lines, then animal studies before it finally ends up in the clinical trials (more often than not the drugs fail at some point and it's back to the drawing board). Obviously, due to similarities to humans, mammals have to be used for the animal testing to be on the safe side. However, this brings up two problems in itself. Firstly, the economics of animal testing. To individually house one wistar rat for one day, it costs around £30. When you imagine the size of pharmaceutical companies and the amount of rats they test, you're looking at major ££££ being spent here. Secondly, with cranks like PETA hovering around, there's a major push to try and replace mammals in lab studies. Therefore, the proposed solution here is to try and bring invertebrates into the equation. They're cheap to breed (just throw in a carcass and collect the maggots), and don't require any form of regulation for use (it's largely believed they don't feel any pain). So, the plan is to produce a model of toxicity testing in bluebottles. The aim isn't to replace mammals altogether, but rather introduce an invertebrate stage of drug trials, if a drug fails at this point, ditch the drug, rats lives are spared (satisfying both the banks and PETA).

How we plan on doing this is testing teratogenicity in the flies (a teratogen is basically a chemical that causes birth defects, e.g. thalidomide) by injecting them with drugs, letting them pupate, and seeing what hatches out. We've used three drugs, diphenhydramine (Nytol, a known non-teratogen), fluoxetine (Prozac, a suspected minor teratogen) and valproic acid (used largely in epilepsy and sometimes in bipolar disorder, a known, quite nasty teratogen), and we're hoping to find some freaky shit when they hatch.

However, as is always the case with science, it hasn't worked. There's pretty much no difference whatsoever between the controls and the dosed flies. We managed to get one majorly deformed one, but that was with diphenhydramine, i.e. the one we weren't supposed to get any deformities with. All I can say is, WTF?!

So, it's going fan-fucking-tastic. We have no results to show, no conclusions to make (other than "we can't make any conclusions"), and to top it all, around 80% of the little fuckers didn't hatch, they just stayed as pupa, developed halfway and then seemed to give up. So I'm gonna have to find some way of blagging my way through the discussion in my dissertation knowing that our results are dog shit. Brilliant. Three years of university and it's ended with this heap of turd. Rant over.