For the Genetics class I’m taking to finish off my sciences requirement, there’s this ass-early (that’s Eastern Standard Time) weekly lab that occasionally involves actually getting down and dirty with microscopy and karyotyping and all that jazz, unlike my Einstein class last term in which we just sat around doing math problems in one of the laboratories.

Now, this lab I’m in at the moment - the class is Human Gentetics, so naturally enough we sometimes work with human samples. The first week, we did that introduction to microscopy thing everyone did in high school bio, where you scrape some cheek cells and identify all those wacky membranes and such. Because this involved actual human tissue, a big deal was made about safety precautions and disposing of slides in the relevant Biohazard containers and everything like that.

This morning, our lab involved taking blood samples from each student and examining them in groups, meaning we were working with our own and other people’s blood. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m thinking that if you get twenty or thirty promiscuous, experimental college kids in a room and have them bleeding everywhere, it’s slightly riskier than some cheek cells - yet we didn’t so much as wear gloves. But it gets better: in order to collect these blood samples, we pricked our fingertips with those not-very-sharp sharps you sometimes come across, meaning we each had deliberately exposed wounds on the same unprotected hands with which we were messing around with other people’s blood. I don’t think I’m that paranoid about things like this in general, but is this not maybe just a little bit risky? We consulted our TA about maybe getting some hot live latex action going on, but were advised not to worry about it.

However: on the bright side, those of us brave enough to stab ourselves with these glorified paperclips were rewarded with the awe and terror of those who were too squeamish and sat at the very edge of the room going “EWWWWWWWW” for an hour and forty minutes.