The 8008 1750

That reminds me of an amusing story from my undergraduate days. I was working on trying to find some reliable means of cutting serial sections of Argasid (soft bodied) tick eggs on a microtome to study the reproductive cycle using a light microscope. The problem was that the chitin shell was difficult to penetrate and the interior was a brittle fatty yolk that tended to shatter on contact with the knife.

I had tried all the most modern methods, using ultra low viscocity epoxy embedments and an ultramicrotome with a glbutt knife.

Nothing seemed to work.

So, I went back to a century old technique, double embedding in nitrocellulose and paraffin. The problem was that I didn't have any nitrocellulose and the commercial lab grade stuff cost nearly a thousand dollars a pound, way out of my lab budget.

So, I set out to make some using a well washed linen sheet and some concentrated nitric and sulfuric acid. The problem was that I neglected the exothermic nature of the reaction. Upon pouring the acid mixture over a bunch of linen strips in a beaker the solution erupted violently, spraying acid all over the inside of the fume hood and turning the linen into charcoal.

Ironically, after spending a few hours cleaning up the mess, I noticed a bottle of collodion sitting on a high shelf. Collodion used to be used as a "liquid bandage" for first aid use and is a solution of nitrocellulose in alcohol and ether.

Since the collodion had approximately the final concentration called for by most protocols which started with pure nitrocellulose, I just used that instead.

Result was perhaps the first perfect serial sections of gravid Argasid tick oviducts ever made in human history.