Cockatoos near the oval and tennis courts at ANU

One of Ray’s friends is a postgrad chemistry student at ANU, and I invited myself for a tour of the Chemistry Research labs!
Come on, when are mysterious liquids bubbling in test tubes not interesting?!

His research was mostly to do with proteins and proteins structures and identifying them … I think ^_^;;
Well let’s see how much of the tour I’ve remembered…

First they put some e. coli bacteria together with nutrients in a flask and put it in this machine which jiggles the stuff up and downreally quickly. E. coli is a very hardy bacteria and grows in almost anything. Human skin cells also produce protein but it’s a bit trickier and you have to be more exact. E. coli can also be manipulated rather easily.

It kind of looks like milk from the outside but that’s just the white forth on top. The liquid below is kind of amber-ish in colour. It smells like vegemite apparantly.

The mixture is then put through a centrifuge which spins the tubes round really fast. It separates out the liquids. After the protein bits are extracted it is put through a…

Pressure cell press. Liquid gets put in a thick 100% stainless steel tube thing and then into the machine. It is compressed to up to 800 times atmospheric pressure (where the red line is). After which it is put through a…

Purification process. It’s in a cold room to keep the mixture stable. The liquid is put through the top and it goes down, down, down through this liquid/solid thing (a jelly?). All the other crap is absorbed away and you get a purer protein mixture at the bottom.

After this process you can do lots of stuff with the protein. They are always inventing (expensive) new machines to prod the proteins with!

For example you can put them in a…

Note little colourless plastic boxes piled up on right side of photo on shelves

Little plastic box and try to get protein crystals. It’s apparently very difficult because only very certain proteins can crystallise. I asked Peter if I could have a look at the boxes through the microscope but he said it’d probably be very difficult to find a box that didn’t contain duds (he wasn’t involved in doing protein crystallisation at the time, having already done that in his Honours year). He did show me a chart with photos of protein crystals though, and they were pretteeee.

Another thing you can do is put them in this huge-ass magnet that has like 800 times the earth’s gravitational pull. The ?800 MHZ magnet is even housed in its own little building outside because otherwise it starts attracting keys and whatnot. You can’t go into the inner room with any metallic stuff and its serviced with plastic tools.

It’s like 30 million dollars AND frequently breaks down!

You go upstairs to the second level deck, put in your test tubes of protein samples then it gets lowered into the magnet. The magnetic force aligns the protein strands and whatnot, and then you read the output on the …

Computer in the outside room.

The magnet isn’t invasive and leaves the proteins much as they are. After testing they are taken to be stored in liquid nitrogen or something. Hey never know when you may need them again eh?

You can only get into the magnet building with a keycard, and you have to sign up ahead of time to use it as there’s always a queue.

I also had a quick walk around the organic chemistry labs, which generally does research on a much smaller molecular level than Peter’s protein research.

Super powerful X-ray machines for photographing structure of molecules

pH meter

Machine that tests for compounds

Commonly used in drug testing, this machine tests for all sorts of compounds. As you can probably tell, this system is a bit… haphazard. The sample is injected into this hole (the black circle which is just above the clampy thing holding the diagonal metal tube) then passes through some metal coils. It then mixes it up with the different solvents in the manky cardboard box on the left. The output is then shown on the computer on the right. You can kind of see a network hub balanced on the machine just above the big glass bottle of solvent. The metal tube clamped at a diagonal angle is a like a mini liebig condenser IIRC.

This is Peter’s old desk/workbench.
Actually there’s still a sample of old nutrients for the bacteria there (the bottle that has dark amber liquid it that looks like urine, on the first shelf up on the right, next to a little white box with blue markings on it). It’s made out of yeast which is probably why it smells a bit like vegemite…

But anyway it’s probably really old…and yet you can still feed it to e. coli. See? No wonder those chem students love using e. coli.

So after that I went to the Moreno-Ocampo lecture (“The New System Of International Justice In The Wake Of The International Criminal Court”) at the ANU Law School. It was presented by Mr Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the First Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. It was pretty interesting. There are all sorts of human rights abuses that just aren’t well-reported on in mainstream Australian news!

The ICC basically brings justice to the fore as a restraining force on human rights abuses internationally (the others are just political might and er….more war). It also promulgates what amounts to an international criminal code and defines what human rights abuses are, eg genocide. And if these crimes occur and they are of sufficient magnitude and the signatory state it occurs in doesn’t do any action to prosecute such crimes, the ICC can intervene to bring those responsible to justice. Read more about it on the wiki.

It was brought into force with the passing of the Rome Statute on 1 July 2002 and can take action against any crimes that took place after that date. (Personally I think they should have made it 4 July just to annoy the Americans.)

Very interesting man although unfortunately I lost about 30% of what he said due to his thick accent >_<

The question time at the end was pretty interesting too even though there were some stupid questions, one from an American (Q: don't you think the new policies in place (ie defining mass civilian casualties as a crime) prevent troops from protecting themselves adequately? A: Well, we think that killing lots of people is a bad thing that should be avoided.) and another from a try-hard.

Australia is a signatory to the Rome Statute. Alot of Asia (including China), much of the Middle East, Russia and most notably the US (who has publicly said they would never send a citizen of the US to the ICC) are not signatories. Read more about the US and the ICC here. And don’t blame Bush, it started with Clinton.

As of August 2007, 104 countries have ratified or acceded to the court, including nearly all of Europe and South America, and roughly half the countries in Africa.

Japan will become a state party on 1 October 2007, bringing the total number to 105. A further 41 states have signed but not ratified the treaty; the law of treaties obliges these states to refrain from “acts which would defeat the object and purpose” of the treaty. In 2002, two of these states, the United States and Israel, “unsigned” the Rome Statute, indicating that they no longer intend to become States Parties and, as such, they have no legal obligations arising from their signature of the statute.

The ICC are pretty selective with the cases they prosecute. Take for example a simple murder in a house. Normally the police would come and ask the neighbours if they witnessed anything. But imagine the number of witnesses involved when it comes to large scale human rights crimes that pass the “magnitude” test. So generally they will only prosecute certain events, and try to cut down on number of witnesses too. However this selection process only prosecutes the most damning cases and guarantees a 100% win rate for the prosecutor.

Anyway, all in all a very educational day!

After that I rounded it off with dinner at Milk and Honey with some old law school mates! Yum.