This Friday, an absolute crazy week came to a close.
Starting last Thursday, when our Fraunhofer project partner Matthias from Darmstadt arrived here for a week of work, all available time was filled with projects, presentations, and food.
On Monday, the ERC-CISST lab where I am working was celebrating its 10 Year Graduation - meaning that the NSF had funded the
Sonderforschungsbereich-like structure for a decade with copious amounts of money, which now ran out. However, over the course of the lab's existence, this "seeding money" had been relegated to the status of peanuts, supplemented by proportionately larger other sources of funding. Still, this anniversary was a momentous day. Everybody had their demos, presentations, and posters prepared, and lots of big people had come for a day full of talks and (free) food. My (big) boss even changed from fishing into evening attire for the occasion. The whole lab was buzzing with discussion, plenary talks, and excitement. Here at the LCSR (the name that the ERC-CISST is migrating to) it is imperative to carry a lab notebook with you all the time to jot down the sparks of inspiration and the wealth of information that you keep getting any given day.
The day ended with a dinner reception full of laudatios for Taylor, some outrageously long speeches, and a truly prime dinner.
On Wednesday, Matthias and I went to JHMI to attend a laparoscopic partial nephrectomy (removing part of the kidney due to tumor invasion). For me, it was the first operation to have witnessed from beginning to end, and definitely an experience I won't forget anytime soon. The excitement and stress level during the time-critical parts of the operation were nerve-wrecking. The whole thing took much longer than expected - over five instead of less than three hours (including preparations over ten hours) - and was conducted by one very experienced and extremely professional young doctor. Eventually the local anatomy turned out worse than expected, and so the intervention unfortunately had to be converted to a radical nephrectomy. So it came that on Wednesday evening, between 10 and 11pm, I was able to put my hands on a freshly excised, still warm human kidney for the first time.
It was much bigger than expected, redder, and softer. The cancerous lesion was clearly palpable, and the whole kidney looked very disorganized. Anatomically it looked very similar to the pig kidneys I had dissected and prepared the weeks before, so it was absolutely awesome to compare all the features I already knew to this unexpected new specimen of a very different kind.
Afterwards, we trashed our scrubs, got our clothing back, and left the hospital excited and unbelievably hungry, tired, and freezing. Until well past midnight we stayed out in a small diner near Homewood which is famous for its trashy and very scary horror-movie-like ambience which draws its power exclusively from harmless children's toys and dolls arranged in frightening compositions.
On Thursday, Emad, Matthias, and I got the chance to present our respective ultrasound-related work to an international audience of students and faculty that had assembled at the LCSR for a week-long winter school on surgical robotics. As ours is a small world, I could recognize some of the faces from my visit to the summer school in Montpellier in 2003.
After his presentation, Matthias left for Germany, the winter school frenzy wound down, no more operations, so on Friday I was able to collect my thoughts for the first time in a week. I rummaged through some old data we collected earlier that needs some post-processing, received some overdue CT data information, got some calls from the JHMI regarding still other CT scans, continued working on a publication draft, and finally got to sneak into the final-day buffet dinner reception of the crazy week's winter school. Almost no students or faculty were left, so only a hard core of JHU members and some foreign students and professors were attending.
At my table, two senior research scientist staff from my office, a Japanese professor from Tokyo University, and myself got to sit right next to each other. We shared our experiences with Japan (the Romanian one of the two researchers had worked at this professor's lab some years earlier and considers returning, the Korean one would like to go there to work, and I would, too) and then continued ruminating on the power of China, the fall of the U.S., and where to go to sit through the economic downturn. The general consensus was that hightech medical engineering might always be in high demand (or so we hope), and that Australia is a good place to go. Sure, the consensus also said that for us, it is absolutely necessary to go to Japan for work once, too - but Australia is trying hard to attract top-notch science to edge itself into the first league of research and technology nations. At first we were surprised at this finding, but then we convinced ourselves that Australian universities command a prime set of researchers, have lots of money, pay generously, search top-tier faculty, and are in general an attractive offer. It is at the end of the world, but maybe the world might come to there.
In all probability, I have forgotten a fair amount of what happened this week, but hopefully the notes above will serve (me) well enough to retain some vague scaffolding of memory.
Labels: Conference, JHU, Work
