| I have started a new blog for a new chapter of my life:
http://owhatwasithinking.spaces.live.com
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| So latest news about Bob is at www.top2percent.blogspot.com. Thanks for praying!
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| I started a new blog
to disperse information about my soon-to-be-gone thyroid.
Thanks for your support and prayers!!
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| Holy Moly! Finally Organic is cool again...seriously you are not allowed to tell anyone that there are parts of this class that I actually find totally fascinating and useful...people already think I'm weird. I would like to dedicate this post to neurologist Stanley B. Prusiner. He won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine for this crazy experiment. He was trying to identify the infectious agent in scrapie (the sheep version mad-cow). He made sheep brain mush (not the technical term) and took out all the cell fragments, bacteria, and viruses and found the material to still be infective. Then he started separating out the protein fractions until found an infective protein fraction and hypothesized that scrapie is caused by a protein. I think he is cool because most normal humans would choose to avoid a brain that was still infectious once all the cell parts, bacteria and viruses are removed. I mean at this point we are in the scary science fiction movie arena. But if you want to win the Nobel Prize you have to be willing to die for it - several have, although Dr. Prusiner was not one of them to my knowledge.
These proteins are called prions. They aren't alive, so killing them (or denaturation) has been a problem. We actually keep special surgical tools in our neurosurgery room for people that we suspect might have new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (human mad-cow for all practical purposes) because after the case we have to get rid of the instruments completely (i.e. the autoclave doesn't "kill" them either). Seriously weird. I was sitting in class thinking this must be what biology class was like before we understood how viruses worked.
(Matt you should comment on this post because I doubt anyone else will really share my enthusiam about this.)
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| So I talked to my sister (finally - she has been off scuba diving in Jamaica! - the nerve) and she got the job she wanted in CoMo!!! Now I was momentarily sad that I won't be visiting her in a cool new place like North Carolina or Georgia, but I quickly got over that when I realized that we are finally going to be in the same town, not be in school, and working day jobs - crazy fun!! And if you know us, you know it could indeed mean crazy fun. Woo Hoo!!
Now back to organic chem....
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