And so it begins. We finally got all the chemostats up and running, except one (my condolences to Kano, Jude, and Sarah). Much of our day was spent worrying over our chemostats. Every minute we checked the graphs on our phones and laptops to make sure our bacteria hadn’t been eradicated. My team and I spent hours trying to fix the small remaining issues with our chemostat, but we were unsuccessful. After hours of putting random values into our parameters and hoping for some slight change we had to give up and prepare for our first guest speaker. We welcomed Dr. Nkrumah Grant and one lab group gave a speech about his background. Let me just tell you, this man had aura unlike anything I have ever seen. He was buff, he was cool, he cooked, he played pickleball, he was held hostage, and he had two PhDs. Dr. Grant gave our program a lecture about his recent experiments on Vibrio cholerae, a pathogenic bacteria that makes you poop a lot. His lecture went deep into the process of him developing a Transposon Library and making breakthroughs by connecting his research to his love of cooking. When Dr. Grant finished up his lecture, we moved into our study room to enjoy some oreos and interrogate him for the next hour. There were many questions of all types being thrown at Dr. Grant, but he always seemed to connect the questions back to two main ideas. Always be yourself in any situation, and work hard to leave your mark on this world. We invited Dr. Grant to dinner and had a great time asking him more questions about his workout routine and if we could follow him on Instagram (He followed me back). After we finished dinner and said our goodbyes to our first guest speaker, we went back to Foster Hall to work on our P-sets and eat more leftover oreos. Arthur also got a bug bite that did get a lot worse as the day went on, but it hasn’t stopped him from that chemostat grind.
