This thing I refer to as My Life

Oh good! Now I have verification that my buddy David is keeping up with my blog site. Below is his corrected version of the dating of the fossils.

Unfortunately, on our way back through Dayton, all of the road cuts were on the OTHER side of the highway! By the time I figured that out it too late. Oh well. I'll have to plan more diligently the next time we go through Dayton. And, since I did not pick up any more rocks, that just means less to move next time we do that. (So there's a plus!)

Here's the skinny on the Dayton fossils:
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The bulk of rocks in the Ohio basin are Silurian and Devonian in age. That means 400+ million years old. The Dayton limestone is Silurian and dates to 430 Mya. Some rocks in the Ohio basin get up to Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian), and that equates to 280 Mya.

Most rocks you find in Ohio that are 2 million years old are probably unconsolidated sediment!

D
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You can see I grossly underestimated the dates. Well, really I just did not remember correctly. Thanks Dave!!

Now I have an essay to go finish. My homework assignment during the break. (Darn medical school!)

Oh, wait! Other points of interest! We drove past the little known but well loved Kentucky state park: Big Bone Lick State Park! What a name! And speaking of what a name, I learned that one of my beloved cousins first name is actually the letter "H", but she goes by her second name. I never knew that. I never knew that my aunt was THAT crazy! What is best is looking at my cousin's driver's license and seeing H as the first name. She told me she used to get a lot of hell as a child about it, but I never got to enjoy it! So, with all due respect:

HiH!

It's all about the Love!

I know it’s been a long time since I’ve posted and I’m sorry but we just finished neurology block and it was really tough! I am curious to see how the class as a whole does. I did pass and depended on how the queries go, I may be a high-pass, but I’m just glad I passed. I suspect there will be a fair number of people who have to remediate this sequence. Yes, neurology has always been a difficult sequence at UM but along with our new curriculum, we had something else new, a new sequence professor that taught about 75% of the course by him self for the first time ever. Now, don’t get me wrong, he seems like a pretty nice person, but he’s not that great of a lecturer and it was obvious he really did not know what he was getting into. To that end, we have all been suffering with his exceptionally high expectations. Oddly enough, the old sequence directory was still directing the laboratory part of the class and she was the teacher in my lab section. You could tell that she felt a little stripped of title since she was no directing the sequence. She did make the observation that in 22 years she was sequence director, no one ever failed. But did the class rumble when she announced that! We’re pretty sure that is not going to happen this year.

Before, neurology, neuro-anatomy and psychology were all taught as one big block. In our curriculum, neuro-anatomy was taught last year and psych was its own block just before neurology. (We ALL miss psych, terribly.) Well, the problem is we have had so much material between neuro-anatomy and neurology that it was really difficult to pick it back up. I’m willing to have them split, but I think they should move them around. Neuro-anatomy should be the last block of M1 and Neurology should be the first block of M2. I know that will make the first block of M2 a little rougher, but cardio was no walk in the part. Then again, if they make M2 pass/fail for the next set of kids then they might as well have them both in M2. (They had moved Neuro-anatomy to M1 so it would be P/F for us and take off some of the stress and to make it a little more in line with gross anatomy. But you really don’t get to do all that much gross with the CNS believe it or not. Well, that’s not entirely true. Me and a couple of my buddies did spend some extra time dissecting the extra hemispheres that were not used in the lab. But I suspect you don’t want to hear about that.)

Okay, back to this neuro block. We had three weeks of at least four hours of lecture per day plus pathology lab. That, in part, made it pretty brutal. The next problem was the material was not very well organized. It was difficult to fit concepts together. The professor claimed that it was to give a framework to the reading assignments, but once you digested the lectures there really was no time for the reading material. And only about half of the classes had a corresponding reading assignment. Did I mention that he wrote the book that was part of the reading assignment, but had gone out of print so most of the class was not able to buy it? It was not a smoothly run sequence. (The test did not seem to come from the book so much anyway.) Oh, and many of the guest lecturers taught from an outline without providing the overheads. It makes it easy to ready but adding note can be quite difficult since much of it is based on pictures. After the first week of this mess we had our first quiz. I think I’ve already mentioned in a earlier post that it did not go well for the class. But once all of the queries were answered (that is where the students call into question the validity of any question in an orderly fashion) the class average went up 9 percent—many of the questions were pretty bad. Here’s an example: I’ll give you the following phrase from our quiz and you tell me who has multiple sclerosis (MS) (and remember, you are supposed to be a type A personality medical student): Identical twins of an MS patient…blah blah blah. Being a type-A personality (or anyone that has a firm grasp of grammar (and keep in mind that English is the professor’s first language)) I read it as the parent of the twins has MS, which, of course, I think is the only way to correctly interpret that phrase. The professor, however, meant to say that one of the twins has MS such as, “An identical twin of an MS patient…” Well, the professor did yield on that question and several others, but he still contends that he’s meaning is one correct interpretation.

Anyway! The short of it all is I passed. If there are some corrections in my favor then it may be another high pass, but I’ll take the pass!

Now, we are visiting my aunt, her kids/grandkids and my dad, step mother and grandmother. I actually wrote part of this on the 6 hour drive down here and now I’m finishing it up in our motel room. We had a really nice mini-reunion and Thanksgiving dinner! We’ll spend tomorrow here too and drive back on Saturday. Since we go through Dayton, OH, we’re going to stop on the way back and pick up some fossils. That is actually something that my friend David and I used to do when I lived in Indiana and David was in geology school. You can stop at the roadside of virtually any road-cut and any rock you pick up will be full of fossils that are about two million years old! It’s way cool!

Can you tell I'm very busy with Neuro?! I will post more after next week's final. Sorry for the silence!

After several weeks of wondering if I was the "real" winner of the Car Talk puzzler, I finally have some conformation (other than being the only one with my name in Ann Arbor). I had been waiting for the snail-mail gift certificate but it never came. I tried e-mail the car talk folks, but I kept getting automated responses. Finally, I drafted another e-mail with the subject of "PLEASE READ THIS!" and it actually worked! You will notice that I have altered my name slightly on purpose. Note how at the end of my message I play up that I used to live in the Boston suburb of Needham. Oh, and one other thing, you'll see a one-liner that must have come up with someone was trying to triage the e-mail and he/she says, "I forget who gets these..." All they had to tell me what it was in the mail.
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Hi E11i0tt,


First of all, apologies for the lack of a human reply to your e-mails. We've had an e-mail backup around here for several weeks, and haven't been able to filter things properly.


You should receive your Shameless Commerce gift certificate within the next couple of weeks. It usually takes us 6-8 weeks to process them.


Regards,


David Greene
Car Talk


I forget who gets these...


Begin forwarded message:


From:
Date: October 30, 2004 1:39:11 PM EDT
To: xxxx@cartalk.com
Subject: esteemed_producer: PLEASE READ THIS!


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From: E11i0tt G0zansky
At:
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PLEASE READ THIS!


Tom, Ray or Doug! HELP!
I won the puzzler almost a month ago! (The airplane puzzler.) I'm E11i0tt G0zansky of Ann Arbor, MI. I have NOT received my gift certificate in the mail. I know snail-mail is slow, but it should not be that slow. :) HELP HELP HELP! This is the second or third e-mail I've written and I keep getting canned responses. HELP! I want the distressed T-shirt. Well, maybe a pair of ball caps for me and my pop. Let me know what to do!


E11i0tt G0zansky
xxxx xxxx Road
Ann Arbor, MI 48105

Help this fellow old Needham, Mass resident out!
Oh, and Go Sox!!

Thanks!!
E11i0tt

So, my dad sent out an e-mail to several folks (friends and family) about my recent publication. In response to his e-mail, I have received a wonderful barrage of congratulations. (Which is very nice, but my modesty leads me to believe that it's just not that big of a deal.) In any case, I was inspired to write a nice statement of purpose for the project that I thought most could understand despite their background and I thought I'd post it here.

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First, I want to thank you all for the veritable flood of congratulatory e-mails spawned from my dad's announcement, but I think its impact is being a little exaggerated. For those of you who may not be aware, publication is the field of science is pretty common and expected (this is just one of several manuscripts I have written or have been a co-author). What does make this one a little special is it was finally finished long after I left the NIH. Usually, if a key person leaves before a manuscript is finished, it never gets finished. What this accomplishment does show is my ability to *nag* my PI for the better part of four years until he finished his part! I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to decided if that quality is worthy of praise.

Several of you have wondered if you would "understand" the publication. All I can say is that depends on your level of scientific prowess. Which means it is unlikely for any of my loving first degree relatives. Some of my more extended family members have a real shot. But, I think you will find the following a good explanation of WHY I was doing the research (please don't be offended if this starts off too basic, but I have a family of lawyers and artists to consider:

In the body, there are tiny molecules called proteins. It's the same type of thing you talk about when speaking of foods that are high in proteins (eg. meat). They're too small to be seen with a microscope so you have to use other devices to construct what they proteins look like. I used a thing called an Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectrometer, which is the predecessor to the better known MRI. No, it is not pronounced nucular. That is NOT a word! Even the spell checker knows it's not a word!

What I was looking at was a protein that is indirectly involved with HIV. When a person gets and HIV infection, the virus has to attack specific cells in your body where it can reproduce and may eventually cause AIDS. You may have heard of these as T-cells, but there are other cells too. These T-cells (and all the others) have little receptors all over their outside. You can think of the receptors like a dead-bolt locks. The HIV virus has a set of keys it can use and it must use two keys to get into the cell. One key, the main key, is always the same but there are a couple of different secondary keys. If the HIV goes up to a cell and the two different keys (the main key and the secondary key) match the two locks on the cell, it can get inside the cell. (This is a bad thing!)

The protein I was looking at (called SDF) is normally produced in everybody and you can think of it as a little key floating in the blood. If that SDF-key is already in the lock on the cell, then the virus cannot get into the cell because it has to use both of it's own keys. And, no, HIV cannot take the SDF-key out and use it's own. There is a small population of people that have naturally elevated levels of the SDF-key already in their blood system and these people generally do *not* contract HIV dispite being at high risk for contraction. So, the question I was trying to answer was what does the key look like and how does it fit into the lock? Knowing that information, a person might be able to make a drug based on the important part of the key. That is one of the main goals behind the field of structural biology. To date, unfortunately, it does not work in practice and that was one of my reasons for leaving the field. But that is another story all unto itself.

Here's some fantastic news: My post-doc work from the NIH was accepted for publication today in the Journal of Molecular Biology. I don't know when it will actually be published, but it was accepted today! (Yes, it only took the better part of three years (actually four) to get it done, but it's done!) What was most surprising to me is the data is still scientifically useful. The subject became not-so-hot right when my research was near finished, but lately there has been another spike which helped me get my post-doc advisor moving again on the project.

I picked up some spring-time pictures I took with my SLR and I think they are much prettier than what I got from my digital camera. Hopefully, when I scan them in, you'll be able to see what I'm talking about. Long live film!

The psychiatry final went pretty well. There was a surprising amount of material covered in a week. I guess I should not be surprised, but I was. More importantly, I posted pictures from Halloween! There is plenty to text over there to read with the pictures, so enjoy! I certainly did! :-)

I guess I should point out the reason there are no pictures of ML is that she went out of town for a retirement party for her old advisor down in Texas. But, I still managed, somehow. ;-)