A Whirlwind Week -- Parisian Style !

This week has been a whirlwind! We are now halfway done with our internships and more than halfway through our visit in Paris. Sitting on a bench on the Champs Elysées, enjoying a traditional Parisian delicacy, otherwise known to the entire world as Häagen-Dazs, Olivia and I bewilderedly attempted to remember what has happened in the last week.

In the lab at the Curie, I have been working with a PhD student Maddalena Nado, who is doing research with fruit flies. She has taught me namely how to separate the brain of a larva from the rest of it body (see photo below), how to prepare and use stains to help identify different organelles, parts of the cell, and how to make and analyze mini movies from images captured by a laser microscope. It has been so fun and engaging working with Madda and all of her colleagues in the lab.

Not only has work taught me new scientific knowledge this past week, but it has also given me practical advice. For example, what does one do during an hour long lunch break by themselves? How about, walk down the street to a Boulangerie, grab a sandwich, and then head to the Luxembourg Gardens to enjoy lunch while reading a book. How does one find the metro after confidently yet obliviously making the wrong turn? Consult your best friend, Paris Practique, complete with a map of each arrondissement, or neighborhood, a street directory, and the metro layout. Why does the taxi strike affect the metro trains? Who knows? Everyone wants a break I guess. Just remember, as Ms. de Horsey says, personal space and oxygen must be sacrificed for the sake of time.

Now that we are “working girls” as our host father puts it, we can partially grasp why our parents seem so dead and grouchy after arriving home from work.  After work, the main and sometimes only event of each day, we stumble home on foot or via metro and immediately crash after a delicious dinner, courtesy of our host mother.

Though the days can be exhausting, due to work or to clocking our new high of 15 miles in one day, everything has been worth the while! How much more can we fit in during this last week? Stay tuned to find out!

-Sophie 

"The photograph is a brain lobe taken from a fruit fly larvae that has been dissected and immunostained for centrosomes (the yellow dots), then Tubulin to see the microtubule cytoskeleton in red and then the DNA in blue. We look at fruit flies to understand the basic mechanisms that regulate cell proliferation during development. Since most important genes are conserved from fruit flies to men, we hope that our findings will contribute to understanding the basic principles underlying cell and tissue organisation."
Renata Basto, Group Leader of Biology of Centrosomes and Cilia, Institut Curie, Paris