How many interns does it take to clean a room of rat cages in less than 15 minutes?
In our third week, our first full week, Will Plantz (fellow Pintern) and I, along with our San Diego counterparts, Rio and Kirollos, have become very efficient at cleaning the self operant chambers. While this task may not seem important, a dirty self administration chamber could skew the results of an important experiment. These results may even affect your friends and loved ones. If we put rat #2 in a chamber that smells like rat #1 that was in the prior experiment, rat #2 will have a different experience during its 30 minute session, and his levels of alcohol intake may be altered.
The rats that we handled last week were tested this week, and we tried to to get them used to pressing the lever and associating this action with receiving alcohol, the reward. When the rats are learning to press the levers they generally do an overnight session with one lever and water as the “reward”, and then they proceed to do a two-hour session the next day with alcohol. When we did the alcohol session we accidentally made a mistake thinking that we were supposed to do alcohol and water (two levers). While it wasn’t a huge mistake, the two levers confused the rats, meaning it will take longer for them to learn how to use the levers. So for next week we are hoping they will reach a state in which they consistently press around 45-80 times in a single session so that we can move on with the experiment.
These animals will become dependent on alcohol with the use of vapor chambers (8 hour 
session). This is done to create dependence similar to that of a human that abuses alcohol. The goal of this experiment is to test pharmacological drugs on these animals in the hope that their alcohol use will go back down to baseline when a drug is tested.
We also weight and tail mark the rats twice a week to ensure that they are healthy and make sure we know which rat goes where throughout the experiment.
Outside of the lab, Will, Angel Enrique, and I have really enjoyed what San Diego has to offer. We generally go the beach after work to surf, boogie board, body surf, and swim. We have also become more familiar with the area.
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