SRP Week 6 : Books made of Papers

It has been quite a while since my last post! A lot of events have transpired since then but thanks for sticking with me so far~!

A major resource that I have found at Banner is it's medical library. When I first entered it, I thought it was just a small room with a single shelf of books to the side and computers at the far end. Turns out the single shelf of books are just reference books if the doctors need an immediate source (some chapters have more than 200 references... ). The majority of books are stored in the section called the "Stacks" (so cool!!! the name that is [I'm pretty sure that's a generic name but oh well]. Reminds me of Name of the Wind). The Stacks is pretty much a giant collection of journals, textbooks and a few novels. Some of these books are older than I am!

I initially searched for something related to the genetic component of gastronomy. I wanted to find a specific organ that I could use to calculate the dose absorption and was wondering how various sections developed cancer. Although I did find a few books, they were very difficult to read. Initially it took me about 15 minutes to read a single page because I had to search up every single word I didn't know (and there were a lot) and the background to the term. Eventually I realized that most of the information that I was looking for is close to the end. The passages of medical journals seem to be similar to mathematical proofs except instead of numbers, there are words. I've decided to stick with the liver at the moment because of my previous interaction with the theraspheres.

I've grown particularly fond of scientific magazines, especially Nature and Science. When I read these magazines, I feel as though I am part of an elite group of people who can read scientific articles. I am sure this hubris will eventually come back to bite me in a posterior area. There was an article in Nature that particularly interested me titled "MTH1 inhibition eradicates cancer by preventing sanitation of the dNTP pool"(the article only has MTH and NTP capitalized...). I have an extremely vague idea what the article is saying and can only grasp at a few important things (thank goodness I can understand a professional scientific abstract (I now know why abstracts are so important)). But pretty much it talks about dNTP pools which are the building blocks of nucleic acids and how they are oxidized which mess up the DNA chains (super shortened explanation).

Pretty much all I am saying is that there are dozens of factors (like Protein Kinase Inhibitors) that I have probably not taken into account. I can only probably attempt to find the possible number of mutations.

While I knew that multiple codons coded for the same amino acid, I did not take them into account. Although I found molecular biology fascinating, the amount of variables that codon usage bias would introduce would destroy my brain. Masatoshi Nei why you do this to meeeeeee (I spent a whole day just reading up on molecular biology literature even though I have no use for genetic evolution).

Another factor that I did not think of when analyzing dose absorption is the breathing patterns of the body. Because your body continually moves with each breath cycle, the exposure rates start to differ (basically your body is constantly moving and the dose absorbed changes with that). Although the change in the amount of dose absorbed is probably very small, it should not be completely ignored. In medical imaging, they have ways to get around breathing cycles by doing gate-controlled imaging (I think that's what it's called). And there is something called manifold learning which is an automated program/algorithm that balances out the image/data. So when you add in breathing into your image, you get into 4D imaging (so cool right?) and apparently it can go up to 6D imaging if you take into account all of the factors (I don't have a great idea on how that works).

Manifold learning : (I imagine this is what it looks like?...)

I have slowly been able to read research papers (although most of it has too much context for me to make head or toes of it). There was one discussing the development of making new organic compounds (I understood about 2/50 of the reactions) and another having a heated debate over catalysis (catalysis = the increasing of the rate of a chemical reaction)\(apparently the exact reaction of catalysis has not been agreed on yet?)). (People can calculate the number of electron transfers to palladium? cool)

I have found the exact copy of the article discussing the bad luck factor in cancer rates (reference week 3). What it is actually discussing is the possibility of genetic corruption based upon stem cell replication. The data from the actual article was somewhat lacking and only provided a few graphs discussing log 10 values. But perhaps I can gleam a little more from the references the authors use.

My current favorite book in the library is On Being a Doctor 2. It provides great stories and insight into the world of patients and doctors. In addition, it addresses multiple viewpoints and beliefs.

Well thanks for reading! Until next time!