Good afternoon, everyone.
My name is Eleanor Demmons.
I'm a junior here at Mount Holyoke.
I'm a neuroscience major and an English minor.
And this summer, I got to go to Ireland.
It was really fun.
And I worked in a genetics laboratory in Dublin City
Center at Trinity College for a wonderful man named
Matthew Campbell.
And I also got to see a lot of Ireland.
And I traveled to a few other places
in Europe, which I'll talk about.
So it was a very unique and special experience for me.
And huge thanks to Lynn Cumming for allowing me to go.
So this is me in the lab.
[LAUGHTER]
I just wanted to start with this picture for a few reasons.
One of the most amazing things about my summer
was that I worked with some fabulous people.
Not only did I have an exceptional boss,
but my other coworkers were absolutely wonderful.
They were all quite a bit older than I was,
all PhD students and beyond.
So it was interesting for me to be kind of that,
like, goofy 19 year old trying to fit in with these very
well established adults.
However, I did work in a European country,
and everybody is pretty relaxed about life.
So they were happy to kind of have my energy.
And typically, in a bio lab like this,
you should probably having a lab coat and some serious attire
on, but we really didn't do that.
[LAUGHTER]
Not that that's a great idea, but that just kind of
shows how happy we were.
We were throwing away old computers this day,
and it was very exciting.
We were getting these print readers.
So I just wanted to talk a little bit
about what this lab focuses on.
So this is an ocular genetics lab
which deals with eyes, which is really cool.
So Trinity College is a really big university, very
different from Mount Holyoke.
And they have an entire genetics department, which we only
have a couple of different classes dedicated
to that field of study.
So that was really interesting for me
to be in a lab with only nine people,
but my department was, like, 150 people.
So that was very different.
And so our lab in particular was looking at age-related macular
degeneration.
And many of you may know someone in your life who is starting
to have symptoms of this.
A lot of our grandparents are experiencing partial AMD.
One really good thing to know is that AMD, wet or dry form,
does not completely blind a person
because your peripheral vision remains
intact throughout this disease.
There also is a large genetic component.
So you can imagine that in Ireland--
and I'll talk about this in a minute,
this can be a really serious problem.
So basically, what you're seeing in this picture
is a lot of cloudiness in the middle of the eye.
All of those lines are mostly just blood vessels, which
you don't need to worry about.
This kind of cloudiness makes it so that eventually, we almost
have a visual hole where it's just black
and kind of looking at nothing.
And that's a huge bummer, obviously.
And this is also caused by drusen buildup.
And I'll talk about what makes that happen a little bit.
And also, this happens in the macular region of our retina,
and our retina is in the back of our eye.
And the macula is really repsonsible for all
of the little things that we do.
And so once you can't do the little things,
the bigger things become harder as well.
So for someone who has lived their entire life
being able to see perfectly fine,
and then getting older and starting
to have a little bit of trouble seeing things,
that adjustment is really hard because you
haven't lived your life going about your daily activities
blind.
So it really takes elderly folk out of their homes
where they're independent and really happy and kind
of bombs out their quality of life
because they have to go into assisted living, which
in Ireland is not as good as it is in the United States,
and we don't even think it's very good here.
The other reason that it's important to study this
in Ireland and why this lab in particular
is so dedicated to the research of AMD
is that AMD accounts for 20% of all blindness in the world.
But its prevalence in Ireland is--
and actually, this is another world statistic--
is 7.2% of people who are affected.
And that's pretty large.
And over a million people in Ireland--
there are over a million people in Ireland-- so many of them
are also affected by AMD because it's a small gene pool.
So 700,000 people in Ireland eventually
have had AMD, and that was another statistic
that my boss told me about.
And also, just good to know that the life
expectancy has risen significantly,
and it's on the rise.
So it's important to start to figure this out and how can
we treat it.
Because it's becoming more of an issue.
So we were focused on a few different proteins that
have a circadian rhythm component to them, just meaning
that they come about in the morning and do different jobs,
and then maybe they do different jobs later at night.
So that was kind of interesting for us
because we were working with mice,
so we had to take different samples
at different times of the day.
And one of these proteins that the lab had already discovered,
was really involved, with this protein called claudin-5,
which is responsible for some of the cleaning that
happens of the eye.
So our eyes are exposed to toxins, wind, rain, heat, cold
on a daily basis, and our lenses need
to be cleaned and maintained in order for us
to see all the time.
So when these proteins that are responsible for this cleaning
stop working, the dead lipids and these different toxins
actually build up in the back of our retinas.
And that's what causes these drusen components to solidify
so that we have trouble seeing.
Also what can happen is geographic atrophy,
where we have nothing in the middle instead.
So that's where the wet and dry form of this disease--
that's the differentiation there.
So yeah, we were in lots of early mornings
and lots of late nights.
And this is just a teeny bit about the hypothesis.
We were looking into tight junction proteins, which
is what claudin-5 falls under.
So I was doing lots of different laboratory techniques
to just check out these proteins.
Lots of small, molecular work, lots of pipetting.
It was lot of stuff.
And then I just had these little mices
down at the bottom of the slide here
to show you that I did do a lot of stuff with mice.
And we did have to sacrifice them often.
And that was sort of sad.
However, they, you know-- for science.
[LAUGHTER]
So we had a really big mouse lab,
and the smell was for reals.
[LAUGHTER]
So just a few things that I learned--
and this is just the laundry list of scientific exercises
that I got to carry out, which was great.
But I just really wanted to highlight a couple of things
that I got to deal with.
Fluorescent angiography, listed down near the bottom--
that's a certain type of imaging of the eye which is really
complicated and hard to use.
And it sometimes takes technicians almost two years
to figure this out.
And I got to learn in the summer because my boss was like, you
need to know how to do this.
It's so cool, and it's really hard, and we're going to do it.
And I got to work with MRI machines, which
yeah, we make them for mice.
Weird, right?
They're still huge, but that was really interesting.
And then I also got to use a confocal microscope, which
is a massive microscope that would probably take up
a quarter of this entire room.
And its laser, which is crazy.
And if you break it, that's three million dollars that you
just--
so, my boss said to me, he was like,
Eleanor if you break this, I have
to send you back to the States.
[LAUGHTER]
And I was like, OK, I won't break it!
So just a couple of things to finish off that I really
learned about myself.
I was so independent this summer.
I really had one really close friend,
but a lot of buddies because I was young
and as much as I was friends with my older co-workers,
there's a little bit of a gap there.
I learned how to be a better science kid, which is great.
And I got to really take a lot of laboratory experience
that I've gotten out here at Mount Holyoke and apply it
and further it this summer.
I felt like I really got to understand
some of the techniques that I've been growing up knowing about.
And I also-- yeah.
So, you know, what to do when you're lonely?
I really ran a lot.
I watched some TV, but I also explored
and that was really great.
And just sort of a little outsider looking in component.
I was living in an English speaking country,
but I was still an outsider.
And I had to be careful about saying I was from the States.
[LAUGHTER]
I'd get made fun of.
It's just kind of interesting to be working so closely
with something that was really to do with a disease that
was not directly affecting the US as much as it was Ireland.
So that's my summer.
[APPLAUSE]