North Hollywood : Students Receive Dose of Science in Lab Tour
Ever wonder what happens to that tube of blood after the doctor draws it from your body?
Students from Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley found the answer to that question while touring Kaiser Permanente Regional Laboratory in North Hollywood on Tuesday.
With the blood, the students learned the cells are separated from the serum in centrifuges before testing.
Fifteen teenagers from the math and science magnet school visited the facility, one of the nation’s largest medical laboratories that performs 10 million procedures a year for the Southern California region.
“This [tour] helps to wake up the students and get them motivated,” said biology teacher Hector Colon. “That’s important, since not all these kids will go to college.”
The students visited 11 labs that deal with such subjects as cytology, histopathology, toxicology and bacteriology.
Reality took a front seat when Beatrice Pelayo, the immunology laboratory supervisor, explained how the lab examines as many as 500 specimens a day for the HIV virus. And there’s only one way to do it, she said. Very carefully.
Although rubber gloves and white lab coats dominated the scene, students learned about career options in the lab that don’t require a medical degree. The laboratory instrumentation department, for example, functions as the facility’s repair shop and requires a more mechanically inclined mind. That sounded appealing to Francisco Loza, 16.
Fellow 10th-graders Alan Rodriguez and Lisbeth Sandoval found the tour a bit overwhelming.
“It looks interesting and they did a good job explaining,” said Rodriguez, 17, who is still undecided on a career. “But it looks too complicated for me with all those microscopes, tubes and medical language.”
For Surama DeLeon, 15, the visit made her dream of becoming a pediatrician seem more appealing.
“I never realized that there were so many different things you could do in a lab,” she said. “So many of my friends don’t know what they want to do, and maybe this could help.”
