Day one of The Project

My year in London has been split more or less in half. Up until April's wonderful wonderful 90%-not-working break, I'd been in the taught half. I went to lectures and wrote essays and did practicals. Today was the first day of the research half.

I arrived at the library by 07:30 as usual (peak trains are just sooo much more expensive) and checked my emails. Turns out my supervisor starts his day at 08:30, so my morning internet trawl will be cut a little short. This is probably for the best. I went down the road to the museum and got rather lost because the routes around the whale installation building site had changed since I was last here, but arrived with a couple of minutes to spare outside his office.

I waited by looking over a big shelving unit, mostly groaning under the weight of parasitological books and journals, but with one space dedicated to taxidermied anurans enjoying Australian beer. I didn't ask.

Trying to get a spare computer in the office to work for me was a comedy of errors. Apart from anything else, today was an exercise in IT. I've barely used Macs before. I still haven't quite accepted that " is @ and the scroll goes upside down. The mouse makes a loud scraping noise over the desk as I wave my arm around, arcing the cursor from one end of the excessively gigantic screen to the other. It took me ages to realise that Photoshop did actually use layers because the layer box was nearly half a metre away from my image. Anyway.

This project is about finding remains of human intestinal parasites in soil. An archaeologist has sent the museum some samples from Russian graves, a few centuries old. The samples were taken from the pelvic regions, so if the people had any worms living in their intestines, we might be able to find some eggs. We're also going to try and extract some DNA, but there's a fair chance that the only thing that will prove is that soil contains bacteria. As a second angle, we'd also like to try and sequence some DNA from museum specimens of these worms too. Those animals will be intact, but preservatives can degrade DNA too. It's tricky stuff.

Today was mostly reading papers. I read a good textbook on palaeoparasitology over the break, but the DNA side is quite recent and not much has transferred to secondary sources yet. Also, textbooks are generally written clearly and explain their jargon. Papers can be impenetrable. I shall be ploughing through for some time yet.