Before last Monday, I hadn’t touched a microscope since I had biology in high school five years ago. I’d never even touched a quality microscope; the ones my high school had used mirrors for light and had limited magnification.
The microscopes the College has, however, are amazing.
As part of a class I’m taking with Dr. Mary, Hair: A Scholarly Untangling, we went to a biology lab with samples of everybody’s hair in little baggies in order to stage two fake murder mysteries, which means the class was split in half and we had to pick the murderer out of the other group.
My group, armed with baggies with names on it and one saying “Crime Scene” to compare the samples to, examined the samples. It was fascinating to see the different components of hair up close and see how different hair is from different people. It has different thicknesses, density of pigments, and there’s a component called a medulla that runs through the center of the hair, but only in some people and it’s not always continuous in people that do have one.
Although I loved to see the hair dyed pink under the microscope and marvel at the differences found in something so common as hair, I most liked to see my own hair under a microscope.
In the end, my group was able to successfully choose the hair that matched the crime scene, while the other group had more difficulty because the hair they had to choose from was more similar in their hair samples than in the samples my group was working with.
I still like my choice to become an English major instead of a biology major, but I did enjoy expanding my horizons for a night and I wouldn’t mind doing it again. That’s one reason I decided to go to a liberal arts college, after all.
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