The health care debate is deadlocked. Too many Americans don't want government bureaucracy interfering with their lives. But if Congress will help us buy a new truck, we'll line up around the block. We love a good upgrade opportunity.
While the car companies made all the headlines with Cash For Clunkers, the high profile stimulus spending, the NIH quietly offered stimulus package funds to advance science students and science educators. The media didn't notice it. We picked up on it, and produced a summer intern program for 13 high school juniors and seniors and their biochemistry teacher. I doubt that creating a dozen minimum wage, half-time jobs for the summer will turn around the economy, but all of us involved found it very stimulating. The energy of kids in the building, and the challenge of putting together a curriculum on flow cytometry for high school level certainly energized our office. Even the office dogs seemed to enjoy it.
We had concerns about explaining immunology and statistics, microbiology and fluorescence to kids without much science background. Not a problem, it turned out. They jumped in. We asked them to write the curriculum for high school science teachers. They came up with three different lesson plans, depending on whether the students were concurrently enrolled in Physics, Biology or Chemistry. They then advocated using flow cytometry as a bridge between these and math classes, i.e. expanding it from a single unit to an ongoing thread.
We gave them the lab activity of sorting M & Ms by their color. Our class rewrote the protocol, coming up with a variation adding in Skittles, another candy with similar color and shape but measurably different in weight. Next they added Nerds, a multicolor, asymmetrical candy that looks like edible aquarium gravel, mixed with actual aquarium gravel, to the mix. The challenge is to eat the yield. Every discussion added a new dimensionality, with new sort criteria, and ultimately over a dozen individually identifiable populations.
Whenever we tried to dumb down the content, they asked for more detail. I gave them work on one of the dialog boxes in FlowJo, which defines which keywords you want visible in the workspace. They removed its modality, reorganized the layout using an Apple Interface Builder, and added an interactive filter to the list.
As I write this, one of the students is adding key frame animation to our 3D viewer, so you'll be able to produce a fly-through visualization of your data. They have higher standards for software performance, and fewer inhibitions about designing complex tasks that contain unknown hurdles. They taught me a lot about FlowJo, and you will see the next generation of the program reflects a lot of new ideas they inspired
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My previous employer had demo's of all the most used [flow cytometry software] as part of a product development team. FlowJo remains the most user friendly and trainable for processing digital data.
The tables and batch processing abilities of FlowJo are extremely useful for analyzing my data.
FlowJo is indispensable for my analysis of flow cytometry data. The more I use FlowJo, the more I am impressed with its simplicity and functionality.
