I think that it is safe to say that midterm 2 went a lot more smoothly than midterm 1.  That isn’t to say that it was perfect, but by comparison it went much better than the first.  I believe that this has a lot to do with the amount of preparation that I put into the midterm.  I also think that being provided the paper ahead of time helped greatly with the preparation.  I was able to read it several time so that when I entered the exam I hardly had to refer to the paper at all.  In terms of learning, I feel that I learned a lot both by reading the paper and researching background information for it.  In my research I learned about embryonic implantation (the attachment of the embryo to the uterine lining).  I also learned about the morula stage of pre-implantation development (where the zygote divides into 2, 4, 8 and 16 cell stages) and also about the zona pellucida which is a sheath that initially covers that embryo prior to implantation.  In terms of more pertinent details of the paper that were left out of the exam, I learned what cloud RNA was and why it was relevant for the researchers to distinguish it from other signals.  From what I understand cloud Xist represents a functional quantity of Xist or, whereas the pinpoint Xist that was seen was not functionally relevant in terms of the phenomenon that was being studied in this paper.  To conclude, being examined on a paper like this forced me to consider details about the paper that I would have normally shrugged off or disregarded. I was fo  More specifically, I feel like it forced me to take into consideration very small intricacies about the paper, like for example, whether certain controls were valid or not.  As an aside I also remember getting frustrated with the authors use of the word derepression.  To me it seems like a needless double negative, why couldn’t they just use the word activation?  I am sure there is a valid reason for this, but it just seemed unnecessary when I was reading over the paper for the first time.

In class it was mentioned that art is for the consumption of everybody, whereas science isn’t nearly as accessible.  Now although this is true, I feel that there are some similarities between science and art that are not always addressed.  Over the summer I read the book “This is Your Brain on Music” by Daniel Levitin and he raised some interesting points on this issue.  The author actually worked as a music producer prior to becoming a neuroscientist and as such had experience working in both fields.  I am paraphrasing, but as I understand it he basically states that a musician will spend a significant amount of time writing and recording material for an album and upon public release of this material, it enters the hands of critics and the general public, who will assess its merits and produce an opinion on it.  Basically, is it good or bad?  The same may be said of science, from my understanding a group of scientists may work on a paper for years potentially, when it is finished the draft is sent to a journal and reviewers will “critique it”, accept it and provide feedback or they will decline it and the scientists will have to submit it elsewhere.  I am not saying that they are the same thing, an album getting a positive review from an online music magazine like Pitchfork isn’t nearly the same as getting a paper published in Nature.  But the basic idea is that the results of what is sometimes a number of years worth of work gets published and is then subsequently judged and scrutinized by the community, be it the arts community or the scientific community.

The big difference between the two, as we discussed in class is that art can be readily consumed by everyone and everyone has an opinion on it.  With science this is much different.  First of all not all journals are open access, if I was not at UBC I would have to pay a hefty fee to read some journals and furthermore, without my education in molecular biology and biochemistry I would not be able to understand these papers at all ( and I still have trouble understanding sometimes).  Whereas, you don’t need any background at all to enjoy a song on the radio.  But that is not to say that the public can’t enjoy it if they are interested in it.  I would argue that science is for everyone and that it is important for everyone to have some kind understanding of it, especially in health sciences when misinformation is so easily spread.  One only has to look so far as the whole vaccines cause autism thing that keeps getting tossed around to know that information of a scientific nature can be misleading or at least used in a misleading way.  The problem is that science is hard and as such producing information on it that can be readily consumed by the general public without simplifying it too much so that it loses its meaning is also hard.  Additionally, news stories have to generate interest or no one will read them.  This poses a problem for science journalism as well.  How do you make a scientific discovery exciting without distorting it.  A scientist may say “A may be correlated to B” but in a newspaper report that doesn’t really make for a good headline, for them it might be more interesting to say “A causes B” but that would be misleading.  To conclude I don’t think that there is any reason why science can’t be accessible, in fact I think that it should be.  It is just that it is hard to make it interesting and accessible without potentially distorting it.

During the summer I did a co-op term at the Child and family Research Institute (CFRI) in a lab that performed diabetes research and was given the opportunity to perform some mouse work.  What I didn’t realize when I first expressed interest in mouse work, was how much training I had to receive before I was actually qualified to work with mice.  By the time I was certified to perform inter-peritoneal injections on mice it was mid-June and my term was almost half over.  I first had to take an online ethics course, which I did in my spare time while finishing my previous co-op.  Then I had to take a training course in person on how to properly handle the mice, after that I had to take a separate injections course and that was just for subcutaneous and IP injections.  If I wanted to learn other techniques I would have needed more training.  This made me realize that the university does make a fairly serious effort to ensure that animals are only used when it is necessary for the research and that when they are used that they are treated as ethically as possible.  If anything scientists want the animals to behave as they would naturally, that way experimental results can be interpreted as a result of treatment rather than an artefact of they way they are being held in captivity.  Those condition are not easy to replicate, but the scientists that I worked with did there best to ensure that the mice were psychologically healthy.  Furthermore, none of the scientists that I worked with enjoyed injecting mice-it’s not fun to stress the animals out and everybody does their best to make sure that the animals suffer as little as possible.  There is no doubt that it would be far more ethical to not perform animal research.  But, nevertheless, it is a necessary if you want to understand a biological system more completely.  The alternative to in vivo work in diabetes research is to use insulinoma cells or human pancreatic islets from donors. Insulinoma cells are immortalized cancer cells, and although they work well as a proof of concept they can hardly be considered representative of the complex in vivo systems that are being studied.  Human cells are obviously desirable, but they are precious and hard to come by.  So the next best option is to study mice as a model mammalian system at least until other more humane alternatives are developed.  To conclude, I think that providing that the animals are treated as well as they can be considering the circumstances, I feel that the possibility of contributing to research that may one day alleviate the suffering of many people justifies the use of animal models in research as I am not sure how much progress would be made without them.  If there was a viable, more humane alternative to the use of animal models it would definitely be preferable to use it.  But until then, it is necessary for the progression of a lot of research that is performed in the lifesciences.

During the summer I came across this Land Rover advertising campaign, (which is posted in the link below if you are interested) which equates its brand of sport utility vehicles with adventuresome types who like to base jump and do all sorts of exciting things like that.  It does this by explaining excitedly about this so-called “adventure gene”, known as DRD4-7R, which supposedly drives humans to explore and discover new things.  Now as a science student I was obviously skeptical of Land Rover’s claims that one single gene can be associated so strongly with a personality trait and at the same time I was curious about the scientific research regarding the 7R variant of DRD4.  A quick Google search containing the words adventure gene yielded a Nature article published in 2001 regarding the 7R allele of Dopamine receptor D4 and its association with novelty seeking.  This article was mostly geared towards psychology but from what I gather there was some controversy back then regarding findings related to this gene. Apparently, novelty seeking decreases with age so most of the test subjects were fairly young-aged 12-35 in studies that found a positive correlation, whereas  studies that failed to find a correlation used subjects aged 18-62.  In spite of this however, the writers of the article  concluded that there may be a correlation between the DRD4 long repeat allele and novelty-seeking, which is basically what the ad claimed, except that the article doesn’t feature any of the  enthusiasm exhibited by the Land Rover ad.  Additionally, the review seemed to also correlate the gene to substance abuse problems or at least an increased likelihood for the development of drug related dependency. A more recent review from a psychiatric journal (although it was citing papers from 2002 and earlier…) seems to implicate that the R7 allele has a role in substance abuse as well.  Now obviously Land Rover isn’t going to associate its ad campaign with negative high-risk behaviour like hard drug use, but in the end it is still an aspect of the same high-risk, high reward behaviour.  The conclusion I have come to, based on the little research that I have gathered is that the research related to DRD4 is more complicated then the ad lets on, which is obvious I guess considering that Land Rover is only interested in making their product sound exciting, they don’t want to let esoteric scientific minutiae get in the way of that.

As a side note, I think it is interesting to see Landrover use popular genetics for the purposes of advertising.  To the best of my knowledge I have never seen an advertising campaign do something like this before, perhaps we will see more advertising like this in the future.  More specifically, ads that use genes associated with personal qualities that will make the consumer feel like they to possess those qualities if they purchase said product.  I can see the ads now: “People with the cool guy gene use brand X, do you?”

Here is the write up land rover gives on DRD4-7R:

http://www.landrover.com/above-and-beyond/adventure-gene/adventure-gene.html

Here is the Nature article:

http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v6/n5/full/4000918a.html

here is the Psychiatric review:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26146874

I think it is safe to say that this one did not go so well…  That being the case, I think it would be a good time to re-assess and reflect on my performance so that I can improve for next time.

One thing that I should do next time is to read through the questions and do the lengthiest questions first to give myself more time to think about them.  That way I won’t feel rushed to complete them at the end.  I panicked and I think that it shows in my answers.  I became more concerned with just filling space in each question rather than stopping to actually consider that what I was writing was correct.

I studied the wrong material, I didn’t actually preview the practice questions until the day prior to the exam.  I made the assumption that the course reading would play a bigger role in the exam and so I spent a fair bit of time reviewing the course readings and trying to focus on understanding the specifics that went into the papers.  Rather than doing that I should have focused on clearing up lecture material that I didn’t understand and possibly focusing on the lecture questions, making sure that I understood the biology behind the conclusions that we made in class.

I did reasonably well (by my standards anyway) on the first two questions.  I was tripped up by the 3rd and I didn’t have enough time to properly consider the 4th as there was a lot of information in the description of that question and I was in full on panic mode at that point.

You would think that by 4th year I would know how to properly prepare for exams.