Odd Jobs that Keep the Area Humming

Annalisa Scimemi slices brains.

The brains generally belong to rats and mice. The other day, at the National Institutes of Health laboratory where she works, Scimemi reached into a takeout soup container and pulled out a little black mouse. In an Italian accent that bared her roots in Tuscany, Scimemi said, "He's going to have a short life."

She dropped the mouse into a plastic chamber where he was quickly put to sleep. She gently pulled him out, moved over to a sink, and sliced off his head. She cut the bones of the skull, dug out the brain, dropped it into some cold solution, and then, with a scalpel, carved out an area including the hippocampus, the brain's center of learning and memory.

In the knowledge economy that has emerged in Washington, Scimemi's job is hardly among the most glamorous. Brain-slicing is a rote procedure and, to Scimemi, simply a means to the end of one day running her own lab. But it is also among the thousands of positions that have helped turn Washington into one of the richest and most educated metropolitan areas in the country. Often two-sided in nature, they are jobs that might be filled by a PhD and have deeply creative elements, yet still involve the type of repetitive tasks more associated with work on an assembly line.

In Scimemi's case, brain-slicing puts her among the 3,500 workhorse scientists the National Institutes of Health rely on to churn out basic research and help decipher the mysteries of the human body. They are typically PhDs working on postdoctoral assignments, and their research can eventually lead to the types of discoveries that lead to the formation of companies that lead to the creation of jobs -- further reinforcing the area's wealth.

Scimemi works in a cramped nook of an NIH lab, preparing tissue samples for study.

The hippocampus is soft and pinkish; it looks like children's aspirin. Scimemi lines it up on a $14,000 slicing machine that slices brains much like a deli machine slices Parma ham, only with a tiny razor. In a few minutes, the machine makes a dozen slices, each thinner than a postage stamp.

Scimemi, 31, works 10- to 12-hour days in the Synaptic Physiology Unit run by Jeffrey S. Diamond, whose title -- principal investigator -- is one she covets. Slicing brains is something he did many years ago when he was a postdoctoral fellow. It is simply a rung on the scientific ladder.

The lab's overall goal is to understand the synaptic connections between brain cells and ultimately to get a better idea of how different drugs work. To do that, postdocs such as Scimemi apply drugs to the nerve cells, which stay alive in the thin little slices for up to eight hours.

But first they have to get the slices, which is how Scimemi begins many of her mornings, separating heads from mice and rats. Her colleagues in the lab also slice rat retinas.

"The usual question: Why do you do that?" she said. "Can you cure people by doing that? The honest answer is that I don't know. This is basic research. It's an investment but there is no guarantee on the outcome. It's the first step.

"When I first started, of course nobody wants to work with animals. You maybe feel attached to the animal. But the reason for which you are doing it justifies what you are doing. From my point of view, I am doing it for a good purpose."