patiodog wrote:(Seriously, though, I'm as apt to transmit erroneous speculation as good science. Not enough respect for the forum, I s'pose.)
If I may, caprice -- where do you come by your learnin'? Professional or personal interest?
My learnin'...*grins*... started as personal interest, (I found I enjoyed most of biology in high school) , which led me down the path to professional. Of sorts. I have a BSc in Medical Laboratory Science. A BSc certainly doesn't go as far as it once did! You might as well say you have a high school diploma for all the impact it gets ya. I worked in the field until a little over a year ago. I wanted to change careers, but I'm in limbo about that right now. *sigh* I still REALLY enjoy reading about things that relate to microbiology, immunology and....hmmm....well let's just say DNA/RNA so that it encompasses genetics and molecular biology. Because I did a research project in an HIV laboratory, HIV reports interest me. I read a while back about the discovery of a new protein receptor. In the past CD4+ cells were the only ones considered susceptible to HIV infection. Apparently there were some cells that did not have the CD4 receptor but still contained HIV. With the discovery of an additional receptor, that mystery is now solved. Another discovery was that infectivity rates were higher in cells with both receptors rather than having either receptor alone. There is more, but I've already babbled on enough about it.
So ossobuco, when I responded to your post in the careers section, it really was true that you might be able to help in composing my resume.
patiodog wrote:Only place I've seen a lot of other students really excited about the material was biochem. ... Ah, well. I was bored when I was 20, too.
Really? Biochem? Aside from the DNA section (and that's what they actually called it!) I was bored outta my mind with biochem. Proteins, lipids and carbohydrates were the other sections in that class. Oh my, memorizing the glycolytic pathway and the structure of cholesterol. I couldn't recite those now if I tried!
I can relate to your feelings about the young 'uns in your classes. I was...*ahem*...."older" when I returned to school. Most of the kids in my class sat at the back of the lecture hall, remnants of high school attitudes I suspect. Not that I minded because that meant there was always an empty seat up front! You got to know the profs better and you could see the board when it came to taking notes.
Prostaglandins huh....well we can't all be perfect!
*ducks and runs!!!*
Biochem -- well, it's kind of a specialty at Wisconsin. They discovered a bunch of vitamins here, kind of did a lot of the pioneering research. Part of the reason, I gather, was that they would collect all the hearts from the Johnsonville sausage company up the road every morning, extract a whole bunch of mitochondria, and lab folks would show up with a bucket and a ladle every morning to collect a batch. Grim, but quite an attraction in an era when metabolism was central to study and most folks had to grind up their own meat.
Prostaglandins -- I worked for a guy for three years or so who did a lot of research on the buggers, and I guess the interest rubbed off. Still, I think there's a lot to explore in terms of paracrine activators, and PGs are key in these. (Also, there's a very small chance the gf might develop rheumatoid arthritis, so I keep an eye open for things about NSAIDs, as well.)
Granted, HIV research is way more sexy, as they say...
Phoenix32890 wrote:Cancer is not one disease. It involves a whole spectrum of many ailments. In the time that I have been around, many cancers that once were a death sentence, are now either curable or controllable.
I agree with Occom Bill. I do believe that the use of stem cells will enable scientists to made great strides in dealing with cancer. I sincerely hope that our next president will understand the importance of gving the scientific world free reign with stem cells.
I think you'll eventually see scientists moving to places where they're allowed to do their research. If the US government doesn't support this research, it doesn't mean it will slow down or not happen. It just means that the profits generated by the breakthrough will go somewhere else.
Unless you hold the opinion that such breakthroughs can only be made by Americans in America???
I'll be very curious to see how all this sorts out around the world, for sure. As an observer at the very fringes of medical research, it seems to me that the research concerns of the USA and Europe are very different than the research concerns in "the rest of the world." We (USA/Eur) throw a lot of money at diseases like cancer, which affect a considerable number of people, primarily late in life, while other places seem to throw a lot of money at things that affect larger and younger segments of the population -- like infectious diseases and food production. Not that we don't address these, too, and vice versa, but the priorities do seem quite different.
The announcement from Seoul, though, is I think an indicator of a government that has decided to specialize to push ahead. For their one clone, they started with an enormous number of eggs from only a few donors -- more than any US lab would be able to get their hands on at one time.
patiodog wrote:Interesting. Both of my immunology profs (it was also a unit in my animal physiology course) were women in the 55-65 range. Was this a field that was more open for some reason?
Of the 3 course co-ordinators I've had so far, 2 were women. And with the number of them I see teaching at uni, I'm starting to think that all this crap about women not previously having the same opportunities as men is just that. Crap.
Not in the U.S. Senior faculty numbers are highly skewed toward males. There was not a single full professor of chemistry at the University of Washington when I was there. They comprised a significant percentage of the junior ranks, however.
I don't know about the exact qualifications of them. But there are a plethora of female lecturers with phd's, and females constitute 2/3 of our university enrolments. About 3 years ago the weighting of senior high school subjects (for university entrance) was changed. Maths and science had their weightings reduced while English was substantially increased. Just to skew the educational system in favour of girls. What it literally means (and this very thing happened to the son of one of my workmates) is that a girl taking 3 unit English at high school, is far more likely to gain entrance into a science degree, than a boy taking 2 unit English, even he substantially outperforms the girl in ALL other areas of education. It's an ignorant and short sighted policy for which our country will pay in the future. All in the name of equality.
Hmm. We've got more universities than we know what to do with, and they all (more or less) set their own entrance requirements.
If it actually is the case the high school girls in Oz are underperforming in the sciences (or, conversely, that the boys are underperforming in the humanities), then something needs to be done at that level of education. So far as I know, most U.S. universities just look at aggregate high school GPA. Course, we don't tend to teach a whole lot in high school.
Wilso wrote:I don't know about the exact qualifications of them. But there are a plethora of female lecturers with phd's, and females constitute 2/3 of our university enrolments. About 3 years ago the weighting of senior high school subjects (for university entrance) was changed. Maths and science had their weightings reduced while English was substantially increased. Just to skew the educational system in favour of girls. What it literally means (and this very thing happened to the son of one of my workmates) is that a girl taking 3 unit English at high school, is far more likely to gain entrance into a science degree, than a boy taking 2 unit English, even he substantially outperforms the girl in ALL other areas of education. It's an ignorant and short sighted policy for which our country will pay in the future. All in the name of equality.
Well not all girls are better at English than the sciences. Maybe I'm the odd duck but I hated English and did far better at biology and math. I didn't care for chemistry much either and found it boring. So not all of the sciences appealled to me. I am surprised they weight courses differently. Here it's the overall grade and I'm certain they look at specific course grades when they admit students to whatever progam they have applied to.
patiodog wrote:Course, we don't tend to teach a whole lot in high school.
My niece, who graduated from high school last year, was learning about T cells in biology! Far more advanced stuff than I took when I was in high school. I don't know what else they were teaching but it's obviously at a higher level for each generation.
Well, I'll be. I think we learned, in basic terms, what a cell was...
They don't look at individual subjects here. They look at the University Admission Index (UAI) which is mostly based on performance in English. It's f@cking ridiculous. More so because it's nothing to do with the importance of English subjects. It was done for the pure exercise of skewing the UAI in favour of girls. This is not a subject for debate. IT was made quite clear that that was the reason.
Wilso, it wasn't crap here in 1962, when it affected myself and a lot of other women. That was forty years ago and things opened up for women here about thirty five years ago, although glass ceilings still appear to exist. I know this all seems like ancient history; it isn't. Life goes faster than people think.. and also sometimes slower than one would want.
I was the girl taking triple math, chemistry and physics in my final year in high school, about 25 years ago. I dropped English courses a couple of years earlier.
Admitted to two physics programs, a pre-engineering and an engineering program when I applied to university. I picked the engineering program (huge mistake for a number of reasons), but ... no female professors, and I was one of 5 women in a first year group of 720. There was one female lab tech.
Things needed to change and are changing. The need for change is still there. There may be over-balancing at times, and imbalance ... but there was no chance for balance for women in many of the sciences for many decades/hundreds of years.
I don't really want to talk about what it was like being one of those 5 women in a class of 720, but I will say it was difficult, and often unpleasant. My initial work placement experiences, while beneficial in the long run, had some horrid moments. Employers didn't know what to do about their male employees who harassed young female engineering students. Or maybe they didn't want to do something.
and biology degrees. <sigh> 25 years ago, there were people with bachelor's degrees in biology working as file clerks for various government ministries related to natural resources and the environment - just to work in anything vaguely connected to biology. This never seems to get better.
ossobuco wrote:Wilso, it wasn't crap here in 1962, when it affected myself and a lot of other women. That was forty years ago and things opened up for women here about thirty five years ago, although glass ceilings still appear to exist. I know this all seems like ancient history; it isn't. Life goes faster than people think.. and also sometimes slower than one would want.
That won't make me accept that the total reversal of fortunes and the incredible discrimination that males face here is right!
The incredible discrimination women faced for centuries was not right. Can you accept that, wilso?
Sure, but I never lived through that time and I'm not responsible for it. But I DO have to live in a world (or country) that discriminates against men incredibly. Am I suppose to accept it and not complain, or try to change it?
Because I won't.
