Hairytales from the lab

I have started a new project at the Institute of Forensic Medicine. It’s about hair analyses, and it’s horrible. Not the project itself, which is pretty interesting and can even, with a bit of luck, be published quite well. I am comparing washing cycles and solvents for forensic hair samples to differentiate between compounds that have been integrated into the hair from the bloodstream and those adhering to the hair due to external contamination (e.g. passive smoking, sweat). And no, I am not spending the whole day smoking opium or crack or kneading hair with my cocaine powdered hands... :-)
Instead this past month I have been trying to bundle, contaminate, weigh, wash, dry, mill, weigh again and then somehow extract standard hair in the beautiful colors medium blonde, light brown, red, Japanese-black and Chinese-bleached. To the day it’s a mystery to me how my boss could give a nervous clumsy person with two left hands like me a project that is based on handling objects sized less than 0.1 mm in diameter (that is about 1/16 of 1/16 of an inch :-).

Ok, she felt sorry and wanted to help after my boss at the other lab I have been working sent me an email at the beginning of November that he wouldn’t be paying me in 2009 and I suddenly lost 1/3 of my full-time position. Ok, she still had a project and some funding in her drawer and was ready to upgrade me from 66% to 81.58% for 6 months. And ok, I was not really amused by the whole situation and just wanted to work full-time again, period. So I agreed. And I really don’t want to complain about the great opportunity of increasing my knowledge and experience with a new project.

5 months to go. The mill for shredding the hair makes an unbearable noise, as does the ultrasound bath during the extraction (fortunately one milling cycle takes only 8 minutes and manages 2 samples at a time, but then there’s still the 2-3 hour extraction). Everywhere – on my desk, on my clothes, at home on my laptop, in my shoes, in my tea mug at breakfast – I keep on finding hair that doesn’t belong to me. The times where one could whistle in the lab to a song on the radio are over, and it somehow reminds me of my PhD: “Oh, nice song – wait a minute, where are the 50 anesthetized drosophilas I was just sorting?! Shoot! … Oh, hi boss, nah, everything’s alright, I was just counting some drosophilas and somehow spread them all over the bench. No, no problem, I’ll just gather them quickly before they wake up.” Unfortunately, milled hair is much smaller in size than anesthetized drosophilas – the advantage is merely that hair doesn’t wake up and fly off after a while…

Furthermore, my judo colleague Lucie gave me a book for Christmas (Haruki Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) where one of the characters works for a wig factory and her job consists of sitting in public places and classifying the decreasing scalp hair of her fellow male citizens into three categories: A “those with a bald head”, B “those who have lost a lot of hair” and C “those whose hair has thinned out a bit”. Since reading this book I catch myself sometimes categorizing my fellow citizens into “those whose hair is too short”, “those whose hair structure and color are too irregular” and “those whose hair color already is in my collection”.

My colleagues in the lab usually start laughing when they see me fight this almost invisible opponent who cannot be thrown, arm-barred, choked, much less defeated. I admit that it often looks as if I was taming a bag full of fleas. To compensate the endless patience and fine motor skills one needs to work all day long with one inch long and 300 mg heavy bundles of hair I defrosted one of the lab freezers. Voluntarily. On my own (or mostly on my own). With the help of a thick monkey-wrench, making a whole lot of noise and with what must have been a very determined not to say slightly aggressive look on my face – “Regine, I really don’t want to know whom you’re thinking of right now…” – one lab sink full of ice was beaten out of the freezer. That really felt good!

As a second part of the project I am supposed to bleach or treat my standard hairs to a perm, again followed by weighing, washing, drying, milling, weighing, and extracting. Fortunately, we do have some more freezers left in the lab which urgently need to be defrosted.

In order to use a hair analysis in court (e.g. to prove drug abstinence during a certain period of time) the analyzed hair needs to be at least 3 inches long. After this month I swore to myself to spare my colleagues from a lot of miserable work by never letting my hair grow that long. Two inches is a really nice length for hair. And maybe I could throw in some bleach and a perm for a change. :-)

Take care and “give me a head with hair, long beautiful hair. Shining, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen. Give me down to there hair, shoulder length or longer. Here, baby, there, mama, everywhere, daddy, daddy – haaaaaaaair!”