so It's official, everybody - I think I have missed my calling. Or at least arrived at it a little late, having not taken the proverbial left turn at Albuquerque. As always, first a bit of background: It's been almost 2 years ago since my beautiful camera arrived (interestingly, or perhaps not, just on 11 months since I lost it and got it back again). I have discovered a growing interest in the art of photography over the last few years, and I finally was able to get on my bike and act on it. Got the camera, got some accessories, got some more accessories, and attempted to art it up, as it were. American Beauty - there were concepts in the multiple award-winning film which resonate in me today more than they did when I saw the film back in very early 2000, fresh after its Oscar triumphs. One of the driving forces in the Ricky Fitts character - to a point, I suppose - is how he managed to see beauty all around him almost all the time. At least, that's how I recall it; I will of course stand open to correction by anyone out there. I found this tenet intriguing at the time, and realised that I believed in that, too. I find that more and more each day. Cue today, in the lab. Our sterile unit, the tissue culture laboratory, or TC as it is commonly known. Yes, one might at this point think of TC as in the guy who flew the helicopter in Magnum, but I don't think anybody left in the lab these days would make the connection. It's a generations thing - the old guard from one, and the young rakes from another. This is one of those things. Nevertheless, there I was, sitting in TC, slaving away to save the world from the scourge of malaria on Bench 1 (cunningly named, for it is the first workspace of three which you encounter once you breach the door from the antechamber and enter the cool, sterile, air-conditioned climes of TC proper) when I got a dicky pipette. Dicky in that it had a warped end, like the plastic had been melted somewhat and had piched itself so that the liquid flowing through it no longer ejected itself in a clean line of pale fluid but shot out the end at a funny angle, high-pressured, twisting and tumbling. Any dude out there who is uncircumcised will know precisely what I'm on about, here. Ladies perhaps not quite as much, alas. Er... assume you take a packet of milk and puncture it badly and then milk sprays all over the table when you try to pour it into your coffee. And circumcised guys... um... how do I put this politely? It's like that first pee the morning after a night of passion - we all on the same page now?? I hope so. Nevertheless, I am hard at work reconstituting my children. Three lethal isolates of human malaria, drug-resistant variants of the most pathogenic of the four common human-infecting species. It's very cosmopolitan - one of the strains was isolated in Kwazulu-Natal on the south-eastern extreme of South Africa; one is a clone of an isolate from Indonesia and the third a strain isolated from a patient in Thailand. There is a biological difference between an isolate or strain and a clone, but let's not get too Tarantino unnecessarily at this point. For the sake of laymen, they are just different pathovars of the same species, okay? Point is, they are all horribly antibiotic-resistant, so don't inadvertantly skewer yourself with a syringeful or anything stupid like that, because you will have such a sucky time with it. Okay okay, not entirely true necessarily, but that's not the point. I fill the pinched pipette with 35ml of finest complete medium and aim it into the flask which is due to hold K1, the Thai strain, and eject the medium against the inside of the container. The fluid builds up to a bit of pressure inside the neck of the pipette since the dispenser just ejects come hell or high water, regardless of the pinch in the mouth, so the fluid sprays out, piss-like, through the pinch into the wall of the flask. The immensely high pressure causes the cow-blood protein extract we use as a supplement to foam up something proper, basically causing the medium now in the flask to come to rest looking not too far removed from a pint of lager - it's roughly the same colour, and the froth on top of it makes something approaching a head. For those not au fait with the complexities of a good head on nice cold beer, it looks like an Irish coffee, or perhaps a cappuccino or latte. In short, liquid at the bottom, frothy foam all bubbles and excitement up top. Next comes the addition of the parasites. There are too many of them to keep the culture in good shape - it all gets a bit overcrowded, one, and two, they tend to not grow that well wallowing in each others' waste (but then again, who would?), and three, they then tend to starve if there are too many, so I need to dilute my parasites to a point with fresh human blood. Calculations indicate that current parasitaemia (that's the ratio of parasitised red-blood cells to non-parasitised ones, since the malaria parasite lives inside the red cells, you see) is about 14%, so I am going to dilute them about 7-fold; which amounts to me taking out 82µl (that's microlitres, or one-millionths of a litre. For those who are non-metric, a can of Coke is usually 340ml, which is of course 340 million microlitres. Obviously, 82µl is somewhat tiny by comparison and needs a specialised micropipette to measure it accurately, called a Gilson Pipetman. This is different to the big 35ml pipette - the dicky pipette mentioned first - which has a pinched end in this story) and mixing it up with a further 518µl of fresh human blood, type O positive, which we get by the jugful from the local blood bank at the hospital UCT Medical School is attached to when they throw it out. I suck up 82µl of pRBC (that's parasitised red blood cells. I hope you're all paying attention - there will be a test later) with my Gilson and gently eject it onto the froth from above, where it sticks. Slowly, the bubbles around the insertion site run red as the blood seeps through, spreading in width through the foam until the now-multiple fronts reach the froth-medium interface where they hang, suspended, for a few seconds, frozen in time. Then slowly, very slowly, a slow rain of fine miniscule red droplets begins, each falling gently to rest with a little puff of red haze at the bottom of the flask. Even finer red and pale pink contrails mark their passage through the medium under the curse and blessing of gravity, tracer fire under the frothy clouds against the sterile steel backdrop and harsh fluorescent lights of Bench 1 in TC. Good lord, it was beautiful. I took a picture with my cellphone's camera, but the resolution is not that good on it and so it barely does it justice. I wished fervently I had a video camera on me, or my fantastic Canon mentioned above and repeatedly previously. Science is a wondrous thing. And yes, filled with items of such great and unexpected beauty that it must be seen to be believed. I think Ricky Fitts would approve. And I think this would piss all over his floating pastic bag, too. If the Apocalypse is coming as the cults all say it is, and this what the skies will rain with, bring on Revelation. I'll get my camera. -d-