More interesting times in Oklahoma

Just wanted to share a great news article we had here in Oklahoma. A pair of conjoined twins were separated! I believe these girls are thoraco-omphalopagus conjoined twins. I got to see their heart catherization on my cardiology rotation. Fascinating!
Here's the article:
http://www.oumedcenter.com/body.cfm?id=2601
and pictures:
http://www.oumedcenter.com/body.cfm?ID=2602

TQT Time and What is Up for Tomorrow

Bios,

Again, I encourage you to post comments to the posts of the other authors. It could start interesting conversations.

Now to school - Tomorrow is TQT and you should send them as comments to this post. We will begin tomorrow with a few comments on FRQ-12 then we will see if you have questions regarding FRQ-13. After, we will take a look at the fruit flies. I will demonstrate how to anesthetize the flies and show you how to sex and distinguish the phenotypes. Finally, you will have an opportunity to work with and observe the flies. If we have time we will discuss how the experiment will be conducted.

Be reading the text. You should be through chapter 14 and beginning 15. Read, Read, Read. Trust your intelligence and keep pushing. The AP test is on May 11.

Mr. Baker

Medicine!

Hi!
I'm Ken, another former Mr. Baker student. I took his AP biology class in 1999-2000, and I can honestly say that without Mr. Baker's class, there's a good chance I would not have ended up in the biosciences. You're lucky to be where you are! I remember drawing diagrams of helicase unzipping a coil of DNA, and that's still pretty much the model I have in my head.

After high school I went to the University of Washington, double-majored in Computer Science and Molecular Biology (and minored in math for good measure). At the same time, I shot pictures for UW's student newspaper, which is where I learned I needed a career where I was intimately involved with all types of people every single day. So I went to medical school! I'm in my fourth and final year at Columbia in New York, where I've confirmed that medicine is exactly the right career for me. And it opens doors to do anything from solely practicing clinical medicine, to answering the unanswered questions of life (and that's what biology is, anyway), to teaching next year's doctors.

There are many, many, many questions yet to be answered in medicine and in biology. Science gives us the tools to answer these questions. The most popular article on the New York Times' website right now is about a possible link between coffee drinking and lowered dementia risk (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/health/research/24coffee.html). The research is preliminary (they allude to why in the NYT article) and there is a lot of work to be done to either prove or disprove this hypothesis. Are you going to be the one that solves this? If you're really interested, you can dig up the actual article - an abstract, or summary, is at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19158424

Goodbye Chapter 14

Bios,

Tomorrow, we will be wrapping-up chapter 14. I will focus on reading pedigrees and you should read pages 252-258. Pay particular attention to learning the particular examples of human genetic disorders, fetal testing, and neo-natal testing. I will not discuss these directly and will rely on you to ask questions.

Later this week we will dive into chapter 15 and begin to understand the relationship between chromosomes and genes and how the chromosome theory of inheritance was first formed. To supplement this learning we will begin the Drosophila genetics lab. It is great fun seeing Mendel's ratios in action!

Be sure to ask the blog co-authors questions when they submit a post. They are an excellent information resource.

Mr. Baker

Applied Sciences: Medicine

Hello!
My name is Samara Mohamed. I'm also a former student of Mr. Baker, who took general biology in 1994, genetics in 1997, and was formally introduced to the wonderful world of genetics bench work by Mr. Baker in 1997.

I went to Seattle University, and Majored in Biology and Chemistry with a minor in Physics. I did continue to do research in college: various collegiate projects and even a 2 summer internship with the Merck pharmecutical company in their vaccine department. However, I felt a greater need for human connection which led me to medicine.

I went to Midwestern University--Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine. Osteopathic medicine is a parallel track to allopathic medicine with a focus on holistic treatment of the patient and includes additional manipulation treatment. I graduated in 2002 and started a Pediatric Residency at the Oklahoma State University Medical Center in Tulsa, OK. I'm currently 6 months from finishing my residency and will be deployed by the US Army for general practice. Since the military paid for my medical school bills, I will repay them with 4 years of Active Duty service. I do plan on pursuing a sub-specialty in Pediatrics in the near future--possibly Adolescent medicine, palliative care, emergency medicine or interventional cardiology.

I like to think of medicine as applied science. I have been amazed at how helpful basic chemistry, genetics, and newtonian physics have contributed to my understanding of the human body. It's been invaluable to have good research background to decipher the mounds of research that comes out daily.

I don't have any cool articles to post at the moment, but I'll try to post some as I come across any.

Cells, Molecules, Neurons & Synapses

Hi everyone,

My name is DJ Brasier. I took Mr. Baker's freshman biology class back in 1994, and my senior year he taught an advanced class in genetics instead of the AP biology that you all are taking. In college, I majored in biology with an emphasis on cellular and molecular processes.

I went to graduate school at Univ. of California, San Diego in Neurosciences where my dissertation focused on how the synaptic connections between neurons change as your brain learns. Aside from my dissertation work, I've done molecular neurobiology research on protein structure and function. Currently, I'm working as a postdoctoral fellow at UC - San Francisco. I've had to reacquaint myself with the details of genetics that I learned in Mr. Baker's genetics class in my current research using fruit fly genetics as a tool to look at synaptic function.

The research that I do is basic science: which means that instead of working on curing a particular disease like Alzheimer's, I am working to understand the basic biological processes that go on in all of our neurons. That isn't to say that my work doesn't have relevance for diseases. In fact, problems with synaptic function are known to contribute to almost every known neurological disease from epilepsy to Parkinson's to schizophrenia. I believe that we need a much more complete understanding of the basic biological processes in order to know how healthy as well us unhealthy brains function and to provide more intelligent treatments.

I'm going to steal Jonathan's idea and post a couple of interesting articles. The first is from Scientific American and it shows how modern brain imaging equipment can be used first to watch brain activity and the coordination of different brain areas as a subject (in this case a monkey) makes a decision. Then, after the task becomes familiar, the imaging is used to see how the pattern of brain activity is different than it was when the subject was first learning the task.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=decision-making-in-brain

The second article discusses a rare neurological phenomenon called synesthesia, when sensory input from one of the senses (such as vision) activates the area of the brain that normally processes information from a different sense. In this case visual input activates the auditory region of the brain, so people with this experience "hearing" a visual stimulus. Only in the last few years has it even become accepted that this actually happens and it's not just people speaking metaphorically. I think the most interesting thing about this is that essentially no one has the first clue how this is happening or what goes on genetically or developmentally to cause this.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7545888.stm

Happy reading!

DJ

No TQT This Week

Hey Bios,

Because I have been getting many good questions in class this week I have cancelled TQT for this week. Please complete your FRQ-12 by Friday. On Friday I will be distributing FRQ-13. This is a genetics problem set that extends simple Mendelian genetics. Read the remainder of chapter 14 to get acquainted with this material.

Also, two more former students have accepted my invitation to join the blog. Ken Michelson is studying medicine at NYU (right Ken?)and DJ Braiser is working on a post-doc project at the University of California San Francisco. So feel free to ask these guys about life after high school and in particular studying science.

Tomorrow, the remainder of chapter 14.

Mr. Baker

What to Read For Your FRQ This Week

The information needed to understand the FRQ for this week can be found in chapter 14 on pages 239-247. Take time to learn the vocabulary and Mendel's laws of segregation and independent assortment. Becoming familiar with terms such as P generation, true-breeding, allele, and others is essential in order to understand the genetics problems. Next week you will receive questions that cover the second part of chapter 14. I will be monitoring the blog this weekend so if you have questions be sure to write and remember that you can help each other. Finally, welcome Jonathan Richardson to the blog, read his post, and ask him questions.

Mr. Baker

An Interlude for Ecology

Hi Everyone,

I just wanted to quickly introduce myself and post links to a couple of articles that you all might be interested in. My name is Jonathan Richardson and I was a student in Mr. Baker's AP Biology class back in 1999-2000. We certainly didn't have a blog back then, so it's been interesting to see how this one has started and been used by Mr. Baker and you guys. Anyway, I'm currently a graduate student at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences here in New Haven, Connecticut. My dissertation research deals mainly with the intersection of population ecology and evolution, both topics that you will cover soon enough (at which point I will probably be of more use to your class). Specifically, I study amphibian populations (spotted salamanders and wood frogs native to the eastern US and even into Alaska) and how landscape structure (as in intact forest habitat vs. habitats with barriers to these guys moving to other areas) can alter the long-term persistence of populations. Hopefully my own research will more interesting to you and germane to your studies once Mr. Baker starts to talk about ecology and evolution. In the meantime, I just wanted to introduce myself and I'll also attach links to 2 very interesting articles.

The first is from the Seattle Times in 2005, and discusses the reintroduction of wolves to the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. When wolves were hunted to extinction, their prey no longer needed to worry about being killed, so they (elk, in this article) consumed more of the vegetation, which in turn led to a dramatic shift in the tree species regenerating and forest ecology. The wolves were reintroduced in 1995, so now ecologists have a fantastic opportunity to see how things change when the top predator is returned to the ecosystem. One of my good friends is currently tranquilizing wolves from a helicopter as a student at the University of Wyoming as part of this project. Ecologists get to do some amazing things in amazing places!

The second article is from this week's New York Times Science Tuesday section (a great read every week!). It discusses a phenomenon called artificial selection. This is analogous to the natural selection Charles Darwin described, however the selective force here is introduced by humans (hence the term "artificial"). A quick example of this is fishing - if you only catch and keep the large fish and throw the small one back, you are "selecting against" big fish and selecting for small fish within the population (it sounds counterintuitive at first), and the size of fish within that population will decrease. Dog breeding is also an extreme form of artificial selection (from wolves originally?).

Anyway, take a look if you have some time. Hopefully they will get you excited for the evolution and ecology sections of Mr. Bakers class - definitely my favorite! Have a great weekend.

Jonathan

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20050211&slug=fearfactor11

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/science/13fish.html

Three Question Thursday for 1-15-09

It is that time again! Send me your TQTQs as a comment to this post. As before, I will try to answer as many as I can.

Mr. Baker