The Mad Scientist

I saw on the sign board outside the elementary school as I was driving London to school this week that there is a science fair for the fifth graders and although Cannon isn't technically attending school, he can still participate.  So we recruited the help of our local experts (my dad who judges science fairs in SC and Stevie who has contacts at the hospital) and went to work.

From an extensive list of categories and topics on a great website (sciencebuddies.org), Cannon chose the "Death Ray" experiment.  Really, I think he just liked the name, but I thought it would be cool to do some microbiology.  Not that I really knew what I was doing as it's been a long, loooonnng time since I've been in a lab, but again, that's why I called in the experts.

Stevie was able to contact a pathologist who was really excited about helping Cannon with his experiment and in true doctor/military style assigned a lab tech to do the work with him!  HM1 Santiago has been an awesome help walking Cannon through the whole procedure and teaching him proper lab technique.  It's been really fun and I'm, as always, completely amazed with how fast Cannon catches on to complex ideas.  The basic experiment, for those of you interested, is to culture e-coli bacteria in petri dishes, expose one half of the dish to UV light at different time intervals, and see what length of time it takes to kill off most of the bacteria.

The first day...

Stevie, going over protocol with Cannon.

Culturing e-coli with HM1 Santiago.

Looks very intent, doesn't he?

Taking the samples into the UV room.

Sample one under the lights...

Looking at a slide of e-coli.

With his samples

My budding scientist!

So after we ran the experiment, the plates had to incubent for 24 hours.  The next day (Saturday), London came with us as we went back to check on them.

Bad news!  The concentration of e-coli was too much so he had to rerun the experiment...

Day 3 - Sunday - We headed back to the lab again to check the results and once again had failure :(  Turns out plastic and glass are impermeable to UV-C light so when he shot the agar plates with the lids on, nothing happened!  I took this as a good time to teach him about the reality of science experiments and then we re-did the experiment, again.  Tune in for part two of the Mad Scientist...