By Julia Wynn
New York, New York
Biology
Tape and Post-it® notes. That's what comes to mind when people hear the name 3M. Although I did use a lot of those items at my internship, only once in my four months there did I actually meet a guy who designed tape.
I spent the summer of 2003 and the January term of 2004 working with Dr. Patrick Coleman and Dr. Masa Nakamura in the 3M BioEngineering Laboratory. I participated in the development of a protein microarray. Our goal was to develop an assay that could be used in a clinical setting to quickly and accurately measure the type and quantity of proteins in a small sample of a patient's blood. This type of assay is of interest to the medical community as both a diagnostic tool and a treatment assessment method. In a disease state the concentration and type of proteins a body produces are altered from the normal state, and medications are prescribed to treat the problem. Current techniques analyze just one protein at a time and require a large sample. A protein microarray is able to bind many proteins in a small sample.
During that summer I became a scientist.
— Julia Wynn
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At 3M, I worked on the preliminary steps of designing a protein microarray. We attempted to create an assay able to detect and identify concentrations of protein as accurate as or more accurate than the current single-protein assays. The cooperation of multiple research groups across different fields at 3M was very helpful in our research. We worked in conjunction with 3M Pharmaceuticals and were able to compare the results of our protein microarrays to their single-protein assay results to determine the quality of our assay. I also experienced the benefits of the integration of 3M research fields when I needed water-resistant double-stick tape for a particular experiment. Upon making this request, I was taken to a walk-in closet filled with any type and strength of double-stick tape one could imagine.
During that summer I became a scientist. I was no longer conducting experiments that had been recreated for years by freshman biology or chemistry students, but rather I was designing my own, performing them and presenting the results. I also experienced the true scientific pain of having an assay work beautifully one day and then not at all the next (it turned out the humidity of the lab was very important). But along with the pain, I experienced the ultimate pleasure of having an experiment be successful after weeks of work on a single assay.
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