on life & science

"Science has cast a deep shadow over our ideas about life. We may even have allowed science to define life for us, but life is larger than science. Life is process, and process has Mystery woven into it. Things happen that science can't explain, important things that cannot be measured but can be observed, witnessed known. These things are not replicable. They are impervious to even the best-designed research. All life has in it the dimension of the Unknown; it is a thing forever unfolding. It seems important to consider the possibility that science may have defined life too small. If we define life too small, we will define ourselves too small too."

-Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings p. 345

Anyone who has read this blog or knows me, knows that I'm a big advocate for science. It affects all of life and how we live it, so much of it unknowingly. But reading this book and particularly this passage reminded me that it is easy to put a false label of truth on science. Science is not truth. It is the pursuit of it. And there are so very many things that do not fit in science's little (but expanding) box. And if we strive to define who we are and what we see by what we know, well, it ends as Rachel (who is a doctor I might add) states with us defining our lives and ourselves too small. Science is a tool to explore and observe the world, not a way to define it. And that makes me like it all the more.

you know you're a WHO intern when... part ii

• after 7 weeks you still wear that little, light blue badge like a metal of honor. "Why yes mr. security guard, I do have a shiny badge to show you"
• someone asks where in the organization you work and you've finally got down that you're in the SPP unit, in the DNP department, in the NMH cluster even though you're not exactly sure what all the letters stand for. So many acronyms
• google translate is the most viewed page on your web browser. Czech, Russian, Romanian, French, Spanish, Polish, Indonesian, Portuguese, you name it, I've put it into google translate
• the difference between 79 degrees and 89 degrees has never become so apparent. neither has the fact that I really liked air conditioning. (I realize this is not that hot, but it feels that hot when your sitting at a computer with a big glass window across from you baking you like an ant under a magnifying glass)
• you get told by an expert to check the news that evening... there will be exciting news announced in his field. You're not really in the know, but you feel like you're in the know
• you get the opportunity to meet Margaret Chan, who as it turns out, is extremely personable and rather fashionable.

And one only micro majors would understand:

• you're doing research for a paper and come across a lovely article in pubmed entitled, "Tales of the Rabid Squirrel." yes.

You know you are a WHO intern when... part i

• you step onto the elevator and you have no idea what language the person speaks next to you will speak.
• the halls are lined with hundreds of publications about everything you could imagine in the health world.
• all you can think about is how great it will be when you're a big fancy public health professional and you can get your own Lancet subscription (having access through a university isn't good enough. I want that sucker to have my name on it and be delivered to my house where I can read it cover to cover like a YA vampire novel. A girl can dream). For now you just drool over the online pdfs and wish you had time to read all the articles.
• someone jokingly asks you how the who is (not the W.H.O.) and someone in the room says, "you saw The Who?! When? Where?"
• the bus becomes your best friend.
• you eat sausages in baguettes to represent hot dogs in buns for the 4th of July.

you know you're a public health grad student when... part iii

• you read articles about male involvement in PMTCT just for fun
• your mother sends you clipped out articles about disease outbreaks
• you discuss whether you like bacteria or viruses better with a friend (because they asked) and after you weigh the pros and cons of each out loud they respond with: you are so weird.
• You are really great at understanding acronyms (this also means that you live in DC)
•  the kid sitting next to you at Rite Aid waiting for a flu shot doesn't know what hit him when he asks you, "so they are injecting us with the stuff that would have made us sick, right?" "well..."

you know you're a public health grad student when... part ii

• you subscribe to promed and eagerly await to hear about the latest outbreaks around the world
• you start looking for what statistical methods they used to examine their data in a research paper instead of skipping over that part
• you gasp when you see that your professor has sent you an email describing an outbreak of fungal meningitis that includes the case definition because you just learned what those are (and sometimes school is actually like real life)
• your professor passes around trading cards that have different pathogens on them complete with skill levels in categories like "infectivity," and "virulence"
• you get excited when you see " the follow-up period was 642.31 child-years of observation" written in a study because you know how to calculate person-years

you know you're a public health grad student when... part i

• one of the professors at orientation counts how many people take the stairs and how many people take the elevator
• you get a tube of clean water, a prenatal vitamin, and a condom among other things to represent innovation and intervention in public health
• you download the CDC's free app to get the Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report in an awesomely convenient way
• your mother texts you to tell you about the ebola outbreak in Uganda because she knew you would want to know
• you tell people when they ask what you want to do if they've seen the movie Contagion. And then you say: I want to be Kate Winslet, but I don't want to die.
• The girl sitting next to you in class says she tells people the exact same thing when they ask her.

because I'm that big of a nerd

And proud of it. Happy pi day!

Newsflash: I LOVE MY MAJOR

I do I do. I love that I have professors who love love love what they are teaching and translate that into how they teach. I love that I take classes that push me to think in new ways and are not just about regurgitating information. I love that I am trusted to learn material, to take my own education seriously and not have to babysat through busywork. I love that it's not about getting an A, but about learning. I love that my professors facilitate discussion and push us to learn writing, presentation, and speaking skills.  I love that my classes are small and personal.

Oh and I love when professors say things like: "there you are on a date and then all of a sudden someone sticks you with a dirty knife" to start off a discussion on the immune system.

loving little life (still!),
M

So I decided that

• I should wear red lipstick and ruffles more often. Not necessarily together (although that could be a winning combination). Sometimes it's good to feel extra girly.
• this is the reason why men at BYU are not allowed to have beards:

"Disadvantages of the N-95 masks include the difficulty in ensuring a reliable face-mask seal with each use and impossibility of effective use by bearded individuals"*

Administration just wants to make sure everyone has equal protection from ebola and other VHFs.

• changing the topic of your research paper the day a draft is due is not a smart thing. Changing the topic of your research paper to something that you really don't know how to put into words, is not a smart thing either. However, changing the topic of your research paper to something that is way cooler than your first topic could be a good idea.
• sometimes being too much is not being enough. 
• home-grown potatoes (or pretty much home-grown anything) are way better than store bought.

OK. back to my paper.

M


*Borio, L, et al. "Hemorrhagic Fever Viruses as Biological Weapons." JAMA. Vol. 287: 18. May 2002: 2391-2405.

You know you're a microbiology major when... part VI

Your class field trip is to the sewage plant in Salt Lake.


Guess what? I can't wait.


It's true; I am a nerd.


M

The rest of the series can be found here

that's me

"I thought only the first assistant went to the benefit."

"Only when the first assistant hasn't decided to become an incubus of viral plague*."

-The Devil Wears Prada

*please note that the real plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, not a virus. Not that I'm trying to argue with Miranda or anything...

you know you're a microbiology major when... part V

• You find yourself in the middle of nowhere Provo, in a dark, empty field digging up soil next to the road under what you think is an alfalfa plant, trying to find evidence of the mutualistic relationship between the plant and rhizobia
• you have a class that is solely about pathogens that could be used as bioweapons 
• you find yourself mentally correcting people when they talk about being sick (there is no way you could have strep; you have a cough...)
• you have classes that requiring the reading of novels and you suddenly have no idea how to plan your time or study. You mean I have to read this entire book in three days?
• you are so so so excited for the movie Contagion. Not only that, but everyone you know is excited about it and one of your professor's organizes a microbiology group to go on opening day (which unfortunately I worked during).

As the new semester begins I am finding more reasons to love little life.

cheers,
M

Want to read more?
part i
part ii
part iii
part iv

the science behind

A dear friend recently posted this on her blog:

Did you know that you can melt sugar? And that it turns into caramel? 

I cannot tell you how happy it made me to read that. This is the wonder of science. Watching sugar melt is essentially what I've done all summer in my organic chemistry lab class. Okay I didn't watch sugar melt, but whatever we would make that day and then take a melting point reading on, often looked like sugar, or snowflakes, or smelled like laffy taffys. I felt like I was in a cooking class, learning how to make caramel brownies, only my ingredients often included carcinogens or flammable chemicals and my end products weren't brownies but things like 4-tert-butyl-2,6-dinitrophenol.  Or maybe I was in potions class. I kept having lines from Harry Potter run through my head and occasionally my teacher felt like Snape.

I beyond dreaded taking physics. I had escaped four years of high school and three of college  without having to take the subject. Unfortunately the time came, I swallowed my pride, and... completely fell in love with velocity, momentum, circuits, and the buoyancy factor. I loved that I understood (in a very small and simple way) how the world worked better.  I felt like a new way of seeing and thinking was opened up to me with this new knowledge.

Yesterday my nephew and I went to the Bean Museum on campus to see the black widow spider (ironic that we would go to a museum full of dead things just to see the only living one). As we wandered around and Ry's eyes filled with wonder at the crocodiles and prairie dogs, I was flooded with memories of coming to this place as a child. I am eternally grateful for parents who took the time to teach me to love the world around me. I loved shows like zoom or Bill Nye the Science Guy.  My dad and I would take apart old computers and he would show me what each part did. We would go hiking as a family and my mom would stay up late working on science fair projects with me.

Do I think that science is the only important or worthwhile field of study? Absolutely not. But so often I feel like science gets short-changed by "non-science" folk as being dry, boring, difficult, and nerdy. My friends, you can never, ever escape science. People say "science isn't my thing" but I'm afraid that's impossible. Science is everybody's thing. Everything in this world revolves around it from dancing to baking to candle-stick making.  Science is not without difficulty and there are some things that are indeed boring, but a simple understanding of science opens up an amazing world and I cannot stress that enough.

Is science creative? I cannot answer a big enough YES to make you understand enough how much it really is. Science is governed by our current understanding and rules, but anyone who has worked on a science project or in a lab will tell you that half the time everything that you try that should work doesn't and you are left with your own knowledge and guess work to come up with a solution. We only have the knowledge that we do because of the men and women of history were brave and creative enough to try and fail a million times and to learn from each attempt.

So take some time to become acquainted with science. Your life will be full of so much more wonder and joy because of it.

And that is a promise.


loves,

M

You Know You're a Science Major When... (part iv)

While my list is not limited to just micro majors this time, it still belongs with my other installments:

• you have to have your hair back and wear closed-toe shoes and long pants EVERYDAY to school in the summer because of lab classes (as a result my wearable wardrobe has dwindled. I never realized how much I didn't wear those things until that's all I could wear)
• you spend $600 on books for a semester and think that is the best deal ever
• you have this natural bond with anyone you meet who is also a science major. They have been through what you've been through: Ochem, chem lab, physics, cell bio, genetics, etc. They understand your frazzled look, the glaze over your eyes, the chemicals still left on your hands, the 5 books in your arms, the NMR sheets sticking out of your binder. You have felt each other's pain (and occasional triumph). They are just as crazy as you are
• you joke about getting cancer from the chemicals in lab and then have a lively and informed discussion about all the things that are known carcinogens that are in the lab like it's no big deal
• People ask you what your major is and when you respond they exclaim, "ugh! that sounds terrible" "yes, yes, that's why I chose it you see, because it is terrible"

And a few that only a micro major would really understand:

• you see little seed pods that have fallen off of a tree and think to yourself, "those look just like the larvae that I spend two months injecting with the plague last semester"
• you go to the doctor and when you tell them that your cough was non-productive and that you have general malaise they say "okay, okay, what's your major?"

still loving little life and science (most days)

M

you know you're a microbiology major when (part III)

During your international health final it asks: "List three causes of cancer as discussed in our lecture on chronic diseases."

And you immediately think:
1. tumor suppressor genes acquiring loss of function mutation
2. chromosomal rearrangement causing an increase in transcription of proto-oncogenes
3. mutations in p53 resulting in unregulated cell proliferation

Instead of:
1. tobacco
2. alcohol
3. living a long time

oops. wrong lecture. wrong class.

I think my brain has been permanently altered to science mode.

done done DONE with finals. hooray!

M

ps for part I and part II click here and here

microBIOLOGY part II

Remember this? Well, I have a few more things to add to the list:
You know you are a microbiology major when:

• you gchat your roommate about your viruses forming syncytia
  
• all summer long people were asking you your opinion on swine flu like someone would ask an economist their opinion about the recession
• you think to yourself, "I'd rather someone stole my wallet than my backpack, I've worked way too hard on my lab notebook to redo it"
• when you hear someone has been sick you drill them endlessly about the details: how long did the fever last? What strain of strep did the doctor say you had? Was the cough productive or non-productive?
• you can't see potato salad without thinking: public. health. disaster.
• you spend your Friday afternoon straining your eyes under the microscope looking for CPE
• you read books called The Coming Plague
• you are late to work because you were busy performing immunocytochemistry and you had to finish applying your antibodies to your infected cells
  

loving little life,
M

microBIOLOGY

you know when you are a mircobiology major when:

you hear the words staphylcoccus aureus and your skin jumps with excitement and butterflies flit around in your stomach like kissing the boy of your dreams for the first time.

you climb the 10 flights of stairs to the eighth floor of the WIDB. every. day. .

the only pictures on your camera of late are ones of the bacteria you grew on your petri dish

you spend two hours harvesting and planting seeds so tiny you can barely see them

you spend all day with your hands in inoculated petri dishes full of bacteria ranging from salmonella to some strain that resembles cholera if it infects you and you like it

you start throwing words around like PCR, DNA extraction, inoculate, Agar, infectious, pili, interferon, lipopolysaccharide, and cytotoxic T cell like those were the first words you spoke as a toddler.

you've become a biohazard to the entire BYU campus.

This semester will be interesting,
M