A Good-Natured Resolution

I'm not much for making New Year's resolutions. They seem to stick for about a month, and then ... not so much. But this year, I decided to try what so many millions of people do and make my own resolution, one that hopefully I can (and will want to) keep. There is some additional incentive, other than just meeting a goal -- I invested money in this resolution up front, so I'm betting on that keeping me motivated. 

So what do I want to do? It's not your typical resolution. My goal is to read Nature every week. (Well, not ALL of it, but a good bit of it.) For those of you unfamiliar with this magazine, it's a weekly publication, and is one of the premier scientific journals in the world. Because of its prestige, its articles are only available to its paid subscribers. Countless times I have stumbled across a Nature article on PubMed and salivated over the abstract ... but I had to move on, because there was no way for me to read it. 

Thanks to some Christmas money from my grandma, problem solved! I subscribed the day after Christmas, and will be getting both the print edition, as well as online access going back more than a dozen years. (And of course, there is a Nature app for the iPad!) A subscription -- even a student subscription, which is half the regular subscription price -- cost a pretty penny ($99 students / $199 everyone else). But I think it will be worth it. After all, how can any self-respecting MD/PhD-wannabe NOT be subscribed to Nature? My point exactly. 

Assuming that I do follow through with this "resolution," I hope to post here about some of the things I read. There are very technical articles, of course, but also editorials, features, and other types of material in the magazine. I look forward to my year of Nature, and to writing about what I learn.

And as you may have noticed, I have made a new "discovery" related to blogging, as well. With the iPad blogging app I have (BE Write HD), you can set backgrounds for your blog posts. It took a bit of researching as far as how to reduce an image's opacity so that it would work as a background (I downloaded a photo editor app, PhotoForge2, for that). But I've got it figured out now.

And so here you have in the background a cell -- soon to become two cells -- in anaphase of mitosis. Pretty cool, eh?

Gene-ious!

Geneticists, and scientists in general, may not exactly have a reputation as having a sense of humor. But, I argue, many of them truly do. I have evidence to prove it, which I will present in this post. I stumbled across this evidence when searching for an appropriate name for my iPad. I simply Googled "funny gene names," and came up with a list of sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant, sometimes culturally referenced, names for genes of various organisms (especially my dear Drosophila melanogaster). Here are some of my favorites, taken from a couple of Web sites that I found: jpetrie.myweb.uga.edu/genes.html, www.curioustaxonomy.net/gene/fly.html, and tinman.nikunnakki.info/browser. I hope they bring a smile to your face, as they did to mine.

These are all from Drosophila melanogaster:

Gene name	History behind name
18wheeler	This gene is expressed in 18 stripes in developing larvae.
agnostic	Agnostic flies fail to learn odors in certain temperatures. Agnostic people also have problems making up their minds.
amontillado	Mutant larvae do not hatch. In Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Cask of Amontillado," a man who is still alive is walled in.
brokenheart	A mutation in this gene causes a defect in heart development.
cheap date	These mutants are very sensitive to alcohol.
cleopatra	In these mutants, an interaction with the asp gene is lethal. Queen Cleopatra supposedly committed suicide with a poisonous asp.
clown	Mutants' eyes are red and white.
coitus interruptus	Mutant males literally engage in withdrawal during copulation (it lasts about 60% of the normal 20 minutes).
dachshund	Flies have crippled legs, resembling this dog species.
dreadlocks	The connections between nerve cells of these flies are not correct, and the result resembles the hairstyle of the same name.
drop dead	These mutants' brains deteriorate rapidly; they begin to walk in an uncoordinated way and then die.
dunce	These flies have impaired learning.
glass-bottom boat	These flies' larvae are transparent.
grim, reaper	These two genes together mediate programmed cell death (apoptosis) in the fruit fly.
groucho	Mutants have a greater-than-normal number of bristles (like Groucho Marx).
icebox	Female icebox mutants do not care about courting males.
ken and barbie	Both male and female mutants lack external genitalia (like Ken and Barbie).
limo	This gene is involved in protein transport.
lot	A Biblical reference: mutants like salt more than usual.
lush	Mutation causes increased desire for alcohol.
out cold	Mutants lose coordination when the temperature falls, and eventually become paralyzed.
sarah	Mutants are practically sterile (another Biblical reference, to Sarah, Abraham's wife).
stuck	Mutant flies get stuck in females.
swiss cheese	Mutants have holes in their brains that resemble swiss cheese.
van gogh	Swirling wing hair patterns resemble van Gogh's paintings.
yuri	Mutants have difficulty with gravity. The gene was found on the 40th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic space flight.

Thanks to the tinman Web site I referenced above for these gene names and explanations; visit the site for more. Fun stuff!

INDY: My Techno Bling

Back in January of this year, I wrote a post about things I was looking forward to in 2011. One of those things was an iPad 2. Had my circumstances (i.e., my marriage and living situation) not changed, perhaps I would have pre-ordered one as I suggested in that post. But things did change, in many ways, including financially. So throwing down $1,000 (or so, plus $25/month for a data plan) seemed impossible. 

However, as I was wrapping my dad's gift on Christmas Eve morning, suddenly I began channeling his "if-you-want-it-get-it" attitude. (It didn't help that a good friend had just bought a new MacBook Pro, and we had only a few days ago been discussing our desire for iPads as well.) I put Dad's gift down, hopped on my own MacBook Pro, and went to the Apple.com store. I briefly - only briefly - considered having my iPad 2 to-be shipped to me, but then realized that I desperately wanted it then and there. So I reserved it for in-store pick-up. (And yes, I actually went to the Apple store on Christmas Eve. It was not nearly as bad as I expected, especially since I was only there to pick up, and set up, my new device.) 

Because it is my family's tradition to open our gifts on Christmas Eve, I had little time to play with my new (and very expensive) toy that day, other than to import some of my iPhone apps. One of "Santa's" gifts to me happened to be a $50 iTunes store gift card, which definitely came in handy the next day - Christmas morning - as I researched, imported, and downloaded more apps for both work and play. (One of those apps - BE Write HD - I am using to write this very blog post!) 

So, my dear bloggers, meet INDY: my iPad 2. INDY is a reference to a gene in Drosophila melanogaster (the fruit fly, about whom I have written much), which, when mutated, makes a fly live twice as long. I'm definitely hoping my iPad's "genes" are good! (But I did buy AppleCare just in case.) The gene is called "INDY" in reference to a line from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," in which a person who is being taken to be buried yells out, "I'm not dead yet!" (See the movie still on this page.) The name is a perfect confluence of my interests: words (and more specifically, acronyms), British humor, genetics, mutations, and Drosophila. I think it's just darn cute, too. 

While the device itself is also quite cute, it is also quite functional, given that there are literally hundreds of thousands of apps available to download. Those apps basically enable this little tablet to do much (though not all) of what a laptop can do, for much less than you'd pay for computer software. The most expensive app I bought (QuickOffice, $14.99) allows you to create and edit Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files. Compare that to $119.99 for Microsoft Office. I also bought a PDF reader app (iAnnotate, $9.99) which allows you to do many of the things that Adobe's professional program does. This will save me on printing, because I can use my PubMed or Nature Reader apps to look up research articles, download them to my iPad, and then highlight, draw, or take notes on them. Pretty sweet. These apps will also come in handy for school, of course. As will my favorite flashcards app (flashcards++, $3.99), which lets me import flashcards that I've made online (I use Quizlet.com) and test myself with my iPad or iPhone. I've been using them on my iPhone, but many of the flashcards I've made have graphics or diagrams that are hard to see on the small screen. Having an iPad will make it easier to study, clearly!

Along with reading PDFs, I can also read magazines and books on my iPad. I've already downloaded a book I've had my eye on for some time - "Nature's Robots: A History of Proteins" - through Amazon's Kindle app (which also works on the iPad). 

Then there are games. And more games. Many of them will run you only a buck or two, although I shelled out a whopping $4.99 for Riven, the sequel to the game Myst I played on my Mac desktop as a kid. (Again, compare to the list price of $29.99.) I'm also currently addicted to Bejewled ($0.99), which has a Tetris-like feel to it. I think that's the most use I've gotten from a single dollar in a LOOONG time.  

I've only scratched the surface of the apps and features available on the iPad. This is going to be fun ...

ADCOM Q&A: Dinner Party

It is understandable that admissions committee members would want to know who has been influential in your life. As such, one question that I've seen on a list of medical school interview questions is: If you could invite four people to dinner, who would they be and why? I've given this some thought, and have come up with my short list of esteemed dinner guests:

Morgan with his fly drawings.

1. Thomas Hunt Morgan
While "T. H. Morgan" may not be a household name, this man is legendary in the field of genetics. He worked in the early part of the 20th century, shortly after Mendel's work with pea plants was rediscovered. Morgan worked with Drosophila melanogaster (the same species of fruit fly that we worked with in my genetics class). After much work, he and his students identified a white-eyed mutant fly among the red-eyed wild-type flies. This mutant displayed a distinct pattern of inheritance. Through a series of fly crosses and much analysis, Morgan was able to show that this white-eyed trait is a "sex-linked" trait. That is, the gene responsible for the trait is located on a sex chromosome (specifically, the X chromosome). This was the first direct evidence of the physical basis of inheritance, and it revolutionized the field, leading to scores of other discoveries.

Eleanor Carothers
with Brachystola Magna
(the grasshopper)

2. Eleanor Carothers
The reason I want to meet this woman, who worked around the same time as Morgan, is two-fold. The first reason is that she made a very important contributions to what is called the "chromosome theory of inheritance." This theory, proposed by two scientists named Boveri and Sutton, said that chromosomes carried the units of Mendelian inheritance (i.e., genes). This was a controversial theory at the time, but Carothers strengthened it by demonstrating the presence of independent assortment (one of Mendel's theories) of chromosomes in the testes of Brachystola magna (the grasshopper). The second reason I would want to meet Carothers is that she worked as a female geneticist during a time when the field was completely male dominated. I would be very interested to hear her experiences, and to learn from her dedication and determination.

Watson and Crick in the famous
photo with their model of the
DNA double helix.

3. James Watson
4. Francis Crick
I put these two amazing men together because they worked together on their most significant discovery: the discovery of the structure of the DNA double helix. Their work, published as a one-page article in the journal Nature in 1953, paved the way for future work in just about every field of the biological sciences, especially genetics (my own particular interest). While Crick died several years ago, Watson, in fact, is still alive at the age of 83. How I would love to pick his brain!  

ADCOM Q&A: Showing Initiative

Admissions committee members are looking to fill their open medical school seats with leaders, not followers. With that in mind, one question that often gets asked is something to the effect of: What have you done that shows initiative? What did you learn from that experience? 


As a journalist, my entire job was about showing initiative. People rarely handed stories to me; I had to seek them out. Often, I would hear about something in passing, or I would receive a letter to the editor that piqued my interest. But it was up to me to follow up on these tidbits, and to choose an "angle" from which to tell the story.

One story that sticks out in my mind came about because I received a notice from the local state representative's office that audible crosswalk signals were going to be installed at certain intersections in the town where I worked, thanks to grant money. On its own, that's not really a story. That's a bullet-pointed news item among other bullet-pointed news items. This is where my initiative came in: I decided that the way to make this into a worthwhile, newsworthy story was to find someone - someone who was visually impaired - who was going to benefit from these crosswalk signals, and really make it a story about the mobility of a disabled person.

Of course, finding someone who was visually impaired who was willing to talk to me took quite a bit of initiative. I remember it taking a long series of phone calls (and several dead-ends) until someone suggested I talk to a blind woman named Cathy who lived near one of the new crosswalk signals. I set up an interview with her at her apartment. After talking for an hour or so, we ventured outside with her guide dog so that I could get at least an inkling of an idea of what it was like to cross the busy street without being able to see the cars flying by. Cathy told me that while she trusted her guide dog implicitly, the audible signals would make it so much easier and safer for people in her situation to cross the busy intersections where the signals had been installed.

Through my initiative, I took what we in the news business would have called a "news brief" item and put a human face on it. I raised awareness in the local community about why these audible signals had been installed, and who they would benefit - people like Cathy.

I learned from this experience and other similar ones that contextualizing an issue, whatever the issue might be, allows people to relate to it better. When you focus on a person, and how a problem relates to that person, rather than just describe the problem itself, you give your readers the tools to empathize rather than merely intellectualize.

Putting an issue into its context is something that is important in medicine as well. At the clinic where I volunteer, I have seen some physicians describe symptoms, side effects, etc. without connecting them to the actual patient. When this happens, the patient has little frame of reference for what to do with the information. With a diabetes patient, for example, a physician might tell the patient to eat less carbs, but not take the time to figure out what kind of carbs the patient was eating (in order to steer him or her away from those things), or even whether the patient was clear on what types of foods constitute carbohydrates. Other physicians take the same types of information or instructions and put them in the context of the patient's life, making them more relevant. I translated recently for a physician who was working with a diabetic woman who needed to lose weight. The doctor told the patient that she needed to eat less carbohydrates. She nodded, of course. But the doctor then went the extra step and asked her how many tortillas she was eating every day. His instructions, then, were to cut in half that number as a starting point. This gave the patient something concrete to work with.

Taking initiative - by putting information into a relevant context - was an important part of my job as a journalist, and will continue to be an important part of my future job as a physician. One more reason I am thankful for my past history, and the lessons I have learned.