Double-headed Microscope-- Fun, Fun, Fun!

Yesterday I asked my boss if we could play with two microscopes at once instead of having to share one (my labmate and I share, that is). She told me she needed hers for awhile then we could have it. She emerged from her office not that long after and announced, "You can have the microscope. Double-head it!"

I looked at her quizically (well that might be kind to myself, I am pretty certain I gave her a blank stare). Double-head it??? That's not part of my terminology.

Well, it turns out she was talking about her double-headed teaching microscope. I'd never seen one before. Way cool. Of course it makes sense if one is training residents and constantly reviewing slides with another person-- this way you don't have to keep passing the microscope in and back-- you both see the same view and one person has the controls, the other is along for the ride. Very fancy too. It has a handy red pointer that you can move around on the field. Back in San Jose the emergency clinic had a super fancy new microscope that was all the rage because you could take pictures with it and there was a viewfinder that popped up so that someone could see what you were looking at it. The ophthalmologist next door tested her resident using this scope because it enabled her to kind of see what the resident was looking at. But the double-headed one at Cornell is so much better even than that!

So, I got to spend the day looking at slides, with my very enthusiastic, knowledgeable labmate training me, pointing out areas of interest and quizzing me. It was fun! And beautiful! Histology is very aesthetically pleasing-- I wrote in a post on my old blog this fall:

Not since I first came across fractals in my high school math class have I been so astonished and pleased by the aesthetics of a subject in a scientific field. Just like fractals, there was a psychedelic quality to the images. I was just plain blown away by the beauty of the slides I saw. Who knew a cross-section of the trachea would be so stunning? All that detail-- the hot pink of the epithelial cells lining the trachea, the brilliant blue of the basement membrane (that's the stain binding to the carbohydrates FYI). A cross-section of the eye was a close second as my favorite. The lens a hot pink orb, the cornea even thinner than L and I had imagined (you can see why cats get such nasty corneal ulcers, there isn't much there to start with).