A Day of Interesting Lectures

This morning, our class returned to where we left off last Friday, with learning how to understand scientific graphs and figures. We were practicing these skills on an article about the Zika virus and a possible vaccine for it. We reviewed a bit of what was discussed last Friday to refresh everyone’s memories before we finished analyzing two more pages of graphs. I had never known that looking at figures could tell you so much about the paper; we basically were able to summarize the entire experiment explained in the paper just from the graphs.

Continuing from last Friday

Afterwards, we took fifteen minutes to write a summary or reflection on the article. Dr. Fineschi also had us write down an “exam question” based on what we read. However, many of us ended up writing just any questions we had, so it led to another discussion about each question. I really enjoy how Dr. Fineschi never outright tells us the answer; she always makes us discuss it with partners and share out loud. Only if we were still on the wrong track then or still slightly off does she reveal the right answer. I think that is a great teaching method because we really learn a lot from the struggle.

Then, we headed to lab for about an hour. Today’s work was pretty easy. Throughout this week, we will be doing experiments testing antibiotics resistance and mutations in a species over time. We plated cultures on diluted and undiluted E. coli samples on LB plates and another plate specifically covered in rifampicin, an antibiotics. The lab teacher will incubate them overnight, and hopefully, we will see some growth tomorrow!

In the afternoon, we had lecture on viruses and their biology. We touched upon briefly the still ongoing debate within select members of the science community about whether viruses are considered living things or not. Many of us were taught in school that viruses are not considered living organisms, as they do not metabolize or reproduce, but even so, this has always been a topic of much contention.

After lunch, walking back up the stairs, I though my eyes were going bad. 

Then, we also learned about influenza virus and how the vaccination works. Perhaps not so comforting to know was that the flu shot is always a hit-or-miss guess by scientists. Vaccines take time to make, and there is no way scientists can know for sure which of the many strains of flu will be the most dominant the next year. Therefore, flu shots are produced based on educated guesses.

Lecture on viruses

The silver lining, though, is that these scientists do extensive research and monitoring before choosing the next strains of influenza to target, so their predictions are usually not too far off, even if sometimes there are unexpected strains becoming frequent in the population. To end the day, the class split into three groups to make our own influenza vaccine in preparation for the next season; it was a really cool activity, even if the vaccines we came up with were revealed in the end to not be the most effective.

After class, I did homework in my dorm for about an hour and a half before I set off to the gym, which was becoming my favorite place on campus after my dorm. I spent about 40 minutes there, running on the treadmill once again, but today, I went at a harder pace. I felt very good about myself afterwards because I know how important it is to take care of myself, and I’m doing just that by exercising and maintaining a healthy lifestyle (although I’m not sure how healthy I’m actually being by eating ice-cream during dinner afterward; oops).

Tomorrow morning, we will have an hour and a half with a guest speaker who will be talking to us about pharmacogenomics, which sounds super cool and something I would definitely want to learn more about. I’m super excited!