Our main activity for today was visiting the NTP archives in Keystone, a facility a small drive from campus. However, since I didn’t know that the facility was off campus, I didn’t grab my government ID when we left our cubicle in the morning. Once we were leaving the building and I had turned in my visitor badge (which you have to return every time you leave the building), I realized that I probably should have gotten it. However, I couldn’t run upstairs and grab it considering I needed my ID to get into the building at all. I was in a real pickle, but we decided to figure it out when we got back from the archives later. We drove a few minutes to a building labeled the NTP archives in the keystone area of RTP. We were welcomed by a lady named Callie who welcomed us and gave us a tour around the office. Although the offices looked small, we would begin to realize that this facility was actually quite large, storing all of the data and samples from NTP research over the years. We first walked into a two floor storage facility of paper project files, with an incredible amount of boxes stacked one on top of another. Next, we were shown the film room and CD storage room which had filing cabinets lining the walls. In each shelf of the filing cabinet there were thousands of thin pieces of film, each with five or more pages of documents on them. In the center of the room was a small projector, which you could use to read the information on each of the film strips. After, we went to see another two leveled storage room of tissue blocks, the waxed blocks with tissue inside of them. Our tour guide explained to us how this room was actually full, so they were requesting to their supervisor to throw the samples of more than seven years out. We then saw the room storing histological glass slides (another two story room), which had an incredible amount of green storage compartments filled with hundreds of slides. Then we went to see the wet tissue storage room, also two-leveled, and also piled high with brown boxes. After out tour was finished, we met with an employee at the NTP archives who mans the database and digital imaging of the slides. She explained to us how the database works and how scientists are able to receive specific pictures for a specific study, usually using the images as aids to research articles. We then were given a tour of the frozen tissue storage room, which was basically three huge rooms combined. There were multiple refrigerators at -80 degrees Celsius and -20 degrees Celsius along with liquid nitrogen refrigerators and -20 walk-in freezers. All of these refrigerators held and enormous amount of samples, dating back to 1970.
Our tour had finished and we now met up with Dr. Malarkey to review some slides from the cell phone radio frequency radiation study. We looked at a number of slides, all of different rats in the study. We were able to locate a few lesions, characterized by the clumping of blue nucleus’ in one area to fight a disease or infection. After a few minutes we were able to categorize this lesion as a meningioma brain tumor.
We eventually returned back to the main NIEHS complex to eat lunch and sit in on the Dr. Malarkey’s gross review. Every Tuesday, Dr. Malarkey meets with students from 1-3 to help them review for their pathology exams. He told us that in order to become a pathologist, you have to know every disease of every animal. The review consisted of him putting nasty pictures of animals on the board and having the students name the disease present and describe it. Of course, the incredibly scientific and confusing words went straight over our heads, and we instead looked (or tried not to) at the bloody pictures of the animals.
I am so excited for tomorrow and all the fun activities to come!
histological glass slides
tissue blocks
wet tissue
frozen tissue
digital images