[block 1] [block 2]

“My library
Was dukedom large enough.”
~ William Shakespeare

so, this was the first block that i actually spent any significant amount of time in the library.* the last week before exams i was tiiiired and my bed was looking way too appealing at 6pm. in an effort to get another few hours in on a couple of nights, i drove back to school and cooped myself up in the back room of this strange little building with lots of books and power cords and bats and flying shoes and diet A&W root beer.

did it work or totally throw my groove off? guess we’ll see when the grades come down…

genetics
- multifactorial inheritance
- familial aggregation and heritability
- mutation and polymorphism
- effects of recombination
- germline mutation rates
- Rh blood grouping, MHC I, II and III
- allele and genotype frequencies
- Hardy-Weinberg
- methods of nucleic acid analysis
- restriction fragment length polymorphism
- polymerase chain reaction
- DNA cloning
- library construction
- comparative genome hybridization
- human gene mapping by linkage analysis
- logarithm of the odds
- mapping of complex traits
- disease association
- another 25 diseases (symptoms and mode of inheritance)

most interesting thing learned: there was a tiny bit of C.S.I. in class this block, as we learned about DNA fingerprinting and the use of polymerase chain reaction in forensic analysis. watch out, cake thieves. Grissom is on his way over with a dot blot as we speak.

we also added a few more diseases to our cumulative list and every time we talk about Huntington’s, i can’t help but think about #13 from House, MD. speaking of which, i haven’t made time to watch the season finale yet… must prioritize soon.

neuroscience
- basal ganglia
- hypothalamus
- thalamus
- reticular formation and limbic system
- cerebral cortex
- visual systems
- special senses

most interesting thing learned: falling asleep might feel like a passive process, but the reticular formation in the pons is actually working very hard to shut everything down when it comes time for lights out. damage in this area can result in constant wakefulness! i definitely know more than a few med students who might think that would be a great idea on block weekend.

if you damage (stroke, etc) a specific part of your non-dominant hemisphere (in R-handers this usually the R hemisphere, but can be variable in you wacky L-handers) you can end up suffering from what is called “neglect” — basically believing one half of your world no longer exists. you’ll only shave the right side of your face and dress the right side of your body. you won’t see cars coming from the left when you cross the street. when asked to draw a clock, you will only fill in one half. you will even look at your left arm and believe it belongs to someone else!

the brain is soooo coool.

oh, and another important thing i learned: i can identify a “Talladega Nights” audio quote** within 0.5 seconds in NeuroJeopardy.

microbiology
- antimicrobials and antibiotic resistance
- gram-positive cocci
- gram-negative cocci
- gram-positive bacilli
- gram-positive, acid-fast bacilli
- gram-negative bacilli
- spirochetes
- anaerobic gram-negative bacilli
- virus structure, replication and genetics
- growth and lab diagnosis of viral diseases
- viral pathogenesis and host defenses
- antiviral drugs and vaccine review

most interesting thing learned: bacteria have sex. no, seriously! there are only two bacterial infections that present with a rash on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet (name, em!). a lot of the symptoms of infection actually come from your own immune system. killing off a huge amount of bacteria all at once can result in a ton of toxins being dumped into your system and result in even more severe symptoms than when the bacteria were still alive. there are more kinds of food poisonings with heat-labile (can be killed by cooking) and heat-stable (can’t be killed by cooking) pre-formed toxins than i imagined. beware of Bacillus cereus being served up at the Chinese buffet! there are WAY too many types of diarrhea and causes out there. some people recovering from typhoid fever can actually become chronic carriers and harbor it in their gall bladder, excreting infectious bacteria constantly.

block 2 of micro ran a little short on time and a little long on material. so we (rather unfortunately) did several hours of make-up time this block and basically crammed 4 weeks worth of material into 3. yes, it was painful. but yes, we will be better prepared for the shelf exam next month.

frig, there are a TON of those tiny little infectious things. they are so neat! i love how our lab director talks about them as if they were little people.

oh, and “Micro Made Ridiculously Simple” has the most Ridiculously Weird drawings.

epidemiology
- cohort types, issues, analysis and interpretation
- evaluating chance
- inference
- hypothesis testing & confidence intervals
- intervention study types and problems
- clinical trials: stopping rules, ethics, etc
- surveillance scope and types
- disease prevention in public health
- population vs. individual risk

>> most interesting thing learned: after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, a prospective cohort study followed all of the children born in that year in two regions of the Ukraine. we all know that the study found that the relative risk of those children developing acute lymphatic leukemia was significantly higher than the control uncontaminated population. tons and tons and tons of radioactive material. duh. however, what’s interesting is that only the finding for males (4 times higher) was statistically significant. females were found to be at 2 times higher risk, but that confidence interval was not statistically significant.

block 3. done and done. over halfway through. all downhill now till August 14th. whew.

————
*one of the reasons i never really became a library hermit is because i didn’t have a vehicle before this semester and riding my bike at night was never a viable (aka: safe) option.

**all i needed was the first “shake” of “shake and bake, baby.” THAT JUST HAPPENED.

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