swine flu
My first day in the hospital as a medical student presenting and making a real clinical diagnosis! AND I had a patient in respiratory isolation with swine flu! :) You might think "Only med students would be excited about swine flu..." but there are some virologists out there....
A brief note on procrastination...
amanda: just remember: A focused mind is one of the most powerful forces in the universe.
me: really?
what drug told u that?
2 comments:
Rawr!
Actually, having had taken a considerable amount of organic chem and bio chem as an undergraduate at UIC with a particular interest in viri, I actually find swine flu and all of it's variants quite fascinating. I was particular interested in the form of swine flu that broke out, supposedly in Mexico, that had the genetic signature from Swine Flu, H5N1 (an avian flu strain) combined with a human flu virus. Oh, how I would love to see that under an electron microscope!
Eric
P.S. I am currently involved with the World Community Grid out of Berkeley, donating my idle CPU time to unlock the secrets of protein folding in the hopes of helping find a cure to a variety of catastrophic diseases.
In my studies of genetics and epigenetics, I found that in order to understand the mechanism of the human genome you have to understand the proteins that serve not only as structural material but as enzyme which are an indispensable component of DNA replication. The problem is that proteins not only have a code in their amino acid or polypeptide sequence, but in their 3-dimensional folding. It is the 3-dimensional folding of proteins that determines their function as well as the amino acid or polypeptide sequence in conjunction with DNA replication that determines the epigentic consequences of our actions and predispositions (both inherited and acquired) that may lead to catastrophic illness.
And no, I'm not a physician. It's just something that I care about deeply. I don't like to see anyone suffer. And if it is in my power to alleviate that suffering, I will gladly do it without expectation of anything in return. The satisfaction of knowing that I have help another human being overcome their suffering is of more value to me than all of the Earthly treasures that this mutliverse has to offer me. ;-)
Eric
P.S.S.
You must forgive my typos. Besides having had to battle dyslexia from since I was first able to read, which according to my mother was at the age of 2....mothers tend to exaggerate LOL, I have also had to battle aphasia as a result of viral encephalitis that I contracted in the first quarter of my freshman year at UIC at age 17. I do the best I can at writing, but it is still a struggle. Poetry, probably because it's metered--even free-verse is metered--is easier for me to write. But, not many people like to read poetry. Most people don't even like to read prose! LOL ;-)
So I stopped writing poetry after I wrote the Stargazer sonnet. What can I say? The Muses have forsaken me. lol ;-)
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