No human experiments -please

I consider my present home as a kind of a laboratory, since I am constantly trying new things: kicking, touching, sucking my thumb, drinking, doing breathing-exercises, listening and so on. I do it mainly to pass time, but I overheard my parents the other day (now that my hearing is more or less fully developed) saying that this also stimulates the growth and development of my nerves. But I also go to the laboratory with my mother every day , where she is trying to understand which types of stress can provoke the expression of certain heterochromatin regions. Whatever that is!

But I have my doubts that a real laboratory is a safe place for a young fetus! Of course my mother does her best not to risk my health in the lab: she has not worked with radioactivity since she got pregnant, she uses a facemask even to weigh harmless chemicals, she has worked herself through a mountain of gloves in the past few months and she has stopped filling and carrying around the 25-liter water-tank that she has in the lab -to take some examples! But there are many hidden risks in a laboratory, but luckily there are many people that have voluntarily offered themselves to become some sort of bellyguards for my mother and every time she is about to carry out a dubious task in the lab the bellyguards do their best to stop her -to safeguard me. This is something for which I’m extremely thankful, for it happens to best people to forget themselves in their daily work routine. I, for an example, can get completely caught up in sucking my thumb and dancing the amniotic rumba...!

The other day my mum had to use a sonicator –an instrument made of a metal-probe that transmits ultrasound at a high frequency. It looks something like the one on the picture. When the probe is immersed in a small tube with cells or membranes in it, it will break them up in small pieces. It can even break up the DNA inside the cells! I can't understand why this didn't arise a LOUD alarm in my mother's mind, but she didn't think twice about it and prepared to use it to fluidify some samples for western blotting –imagining that the ultrasound waves would not be transmitted more than a couple of centimeters! But the bellyguards stopped her off. They told her of a girl that used to work in the institute that had used the equipment during pregnancy and noticed that the baby reacted by turning in the belly like an olympic champion of ice-dancing doing breathtaking multi-rotation turns at the end of a gold-winning performance (now that is something I wouldn't mind trying...!). This information raised my mum's curiosity, who started looking for contraindications for the use of sonicators during pregnancy, on internet. As she found none, she decided to contact the producers of such instruments and ask if it was safe for her to use it while carrying me in her belly. Well, here is what they answered:

Dear Dr. Valgardsdottir:

I cannot offer any information. Our equipment is NOT for use on human bodies.
It is only for labartory work.

Regards,

Stanley Goldberg
GLEN MILLS INC.

Well, I’m infinately glad this kind person cleared that doubt, for who knows what my mum might have been up to in case he hadn’t responded so unmistakably! And I can only imagine the terror that this affair raised in Mr. Stanley Goldberg's mind!!! Did you notice that he signed the letter only with "Regards" and not "Best regards" ? He was probably already contacting Interpol at the time that he wrote the email and if my mother hadn't sent him another email immediately to clear the misunderstanding, maybe she would have found herself in some hidden prison on a desert island in a far away ocean, having to answer to much more difficult answers than those regarding her pregnancy!

Anyway, my mum hasn't used the sonicator again and she thinks twice before using any other instrument of the lab -well and also before contacting the responsables of the producers of the equipment, for those seem to have a far too lively imagination -but are rather bad at spelling!