Arrr, Mateys!
Sep. 20th, 2011 05:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tanarillIt be International Talk Like Ye Pirate Day!
. . . okay, enough of that. It's difficult enough to talk about Science! without trying to use Ye Olde Butcherede English. But, first, yesterday.
My brother JJ, by virtue of wanting to become an industrial design engineer (read: draftsman) apparently has to take an Art Appreciation class. Because being able to draw schematics which accurately represent a thing you want someone else to build obviously requires the ability to appreciate Art 9.9 Anyway, as a requirement of this course, he must visit and give his opinions of two Art Exhibits.
Just now, the Santa Barbara Art Museum is having an exhibit on Picasso, the famous father of Cubism. And since he and MW were now both going to be in SB on Sunday (MW goes dancing at the community center), Panda though to make a day of it. So they arrived with a number of things I forgot to bring up here, and away we went to do some Culture(subsection:Art).
Thing is, as a I discovered shortly into the exhibit, I don't enjoy cubism. It turns out that I think a painting, or picture, ought to make a serious attempt to depict something in a recognizable way. This shit where you paint a bunch of boxes and a few crescent-shapes is in no way a Nude of a Beautiful Woman. It's just . . . shapes and colors. The only one I even vaguely liked was the one that was a painting of a bar, which actually looks barlike, if you assumed you drank your way through it and then painted.
After that, we went to a different gallery, where this fairly small Art museum contains paintings by many of the famous names, including a Degas from the Dance series and a Munch. In addition, the upstairs Oriental Art gallery had a few prints from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji that I'd never seen before. So the Art expedition was not a waste, and I got my Culture quota is for the quarter.
Then we went out to eat, because that's what my family does. We went to an Italian place, where they gave us garlic olive oil to dip the bread in, and the menus were humorous (Fettuccine Alfredo - don't tell your cardiologist!) and the food was good though not excellent. There was a live harpist playing a harp, and the seating was outside, which was quite pleasant. Then we walked down the street and got gelatto, which was good. So I got to see my family :D
Today was again for Science! In the morning, it was library time, where the friendly Grad Student Librarian showed us all the things in the library that we, as grad students, now have access to. It boils down to a room with a fantastic view of the mountains out one side and the ocean out the other side, plus the ability to check out 200 things at once. Why I'd need to, I don't know.
Then I interviews and got a lab rotation doing a neat bit of Science!, which I will attempt to explain. Some people are, through no fault of their own, born without a working copy of an important gene that does an important thing. An example is in cystic fibrosis, when a child has no working copies of a gene for chloride ion pumps, which screw them up. Scientists, once they figured out what was wrong, started trying to give the people a working copy of the gene. They began by trying to use viruses to do this, as viruses have evolved to transplant copies of non-native DNA into organisms. But viruses have some serious drawbacks, not the least of which is that human biology Does Not Like viruses; often, cells will detect when they are virus-infected and commit suicide. This meant that in order to make the treatment work, the immune system had to be disabled pretty much entirely, for the rest of the patient's natural life. So on the one hand, they live past twenty; on the other, they do it in a bubble. Thus, the search for other ways to introduce genes into a cell - one that the cell would not recognize as a virus, and thus accept.
My professor works on a method of encapsulating DNA in fat molecules. The cells, seeing the fat, go "om nom nom" and enclose it. Through a bit of tricky molecule shaping, rather than being digested the fats merge with the vesicle in which they are stored, and release their contents into the cell. At this time, the cell still notices the foreign DNA, mostly because it's in the wrong part of the cell.
However, this does work as a delivery method for a thing called small interfering RNA (siRNA). siRNA is, as the name suggests, a tiny fragment of RNA, usually only ~20 bases long, and it occurs naturally. It binds to sections of mRNA, which serves to tell the cell to destroy that bit of mRNA; that's how you don't have leftover mRNAs floating around inside you all the time. Because they float around in the cell all the time anyway, the cell can't recognize foreign siRNAs. So we can deliver the siRNAs and turn off the production of proteins that should not be produced. Although this doesn't help the people with diseases resulting from not having a protein they should, it helps a lot of people with diseases resulting from having too much of a protein they shouldn't.
At least, that's the theory. It's been shown to work in mice that were engineered to deliberately overproduce a protein, thus making them healthy. But whole blood does not like these things, and tends to rip the DNA-packages to bits before they even get to the cells. And these are general effectors, meaning they can't be told only to affect one cell or even one cell type. The worst is that the fats themselves seems to be distressingly toxic in high amounts; although we suspect therapeutic dose (the dose that makes people better) is much lower than the toxic dose (which makes people sick) we still want to develop a better alternative. To that end, my project is going to see if we can get a modified linoleic acid, which is a fat absolutely required in the human diet, to form these little capsules as well. That way, we don't have to worry about the medicine poisoning the patient XD
Last thing for the day was Safety Training, and I am pleased to say we didn't have to watch the stupid video. Instead, we put out fires. Okay, so they were safely in a bucket the whole time, it was still cool! And there was a lot of less-interesting PowerPoint, but it is still good to know. For example, calling 911 on a cell phone will call the police in Ventura, an hour away, instead of in Isle Vista, just off campus. No, I don't know either. And then I took a pathetically easy quiz. And then I was done.
My life lately has been busy. I will be glad to go home on the weekend. :D
. . . okay, enough of that. It's difficult enough to talk about Science! without trying to use Ye Olde Butcherede English. But, first, yesterday.
My brother JJ, by virtue of wanting to become an industrial design engineer (read: draftsman) apparently has to take an Art Appreciation class. Because being able to draw schematics which accurately represent a thing you want someone else to build obviously requires the ability to appreciate Art 9.9 Anyway, as a requirement of this course, he must visit and give his opinions of two Art Exhibits.
Just now, the Santa Barbara Art Museum is having an exhibit on Picasso, the famous father of Cubism. And since he and MW were now both going to be in SB on Sunday (MW goes dancing at the community center), Panda though to make a day of it. So they arrived with a number of things I forgot to bring up here, and away we went to do some Culture(subsection:Art).
Thing is, as a I discovered shortly into the exhibit, I don't enjoy cubism. It turns out that I think a painting, or picture, ought to make a serious attempt to depict something in a recognizable way. This shit where you paint a bunch of boxes and a few crescent-shapes is in no way a Nude of a Beautiful Woman. It's just . . . shapes and colors. The only one I even vaguely liked was the one that was a painting of a bar, which actually looks barlike, if you assumed you drank your way through it and then painted.
After that, we went to a different gallery, where this fairly small Art museum contains paintings by many of the famous names, including a Degas from the Dance series and a Munch. In addition, the upstairs Oriental Art gallery had a few prints from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji that I'd never seen before. So the Art expedition was not a waste, and I got my Culture quota is for the quarter.
Then we went out to eat, because that's what my family does. We went to an Italian place, where they gave us garlic olive oil to dip the bread in, and the menus were humorous (Fettuccine Alfredo - don't tell your cardiologist!) and the food was good though not excellent. There was a live harpist playing a harp, and the seating was outside, which was quite pleasant. Then we walked down the street and got gelatto, which was good. So I got to see my family :D
Today was again for Science! In the morning, it was library time, where the friendly Grad Student Librarian showed us all the things in the library that we, as grad students, now have access to. It boils down to a room with a fantastic view of the mountains out one side and the ocean out the other side, plus the ability to check out 200 things at once. Why I'd need to, I don't know.
Then I interviews and got a lab rotation doing a neat bit of Science!, which I will attempt to explain. Some people are, through no fault of their own, born without a working copy of an important gene that does an important thing. An example is in cystic fibrosis, when a child has no working copies of a gene for chloride ion pumps, which screw them up. Scientists, once they figured out what was wrong, started trying to give the people a working copy of the gene. They began by trying to use viruses to do this, as viruses have evolved to transplant copies of non-native DNA into organisms. But viruses have some serious drawbacks, not the least of which is that human biology Does Not Like viruses; often, cells will detect when they are virus-infected and commit suicide. This meant that in order to make the treatment work, the immune system had to be disabled pretty much entirely, for the rest of the patient's natural life. So on the one hand, they live past twenty; on the other, they do it in a bubble. Thus, the search for other ways to introduce genes into a cell - one that the cell would not recognize as a virus, and thus accept.
My professor works on a method of encapsulating DNA in fat molecules. The cells, seeing the fat, go "om nom nom" and enclose it. Through a bit of tricky molecule shaping, rather than being digested the fats merge with the vesicle in which they are stored, and release their contents into the cell. At this time, the cell still notices the foreign DNA, mostly because it's in the wrong part of the cell.
However, this does work as a delivery method for a thing called small interfering RNA (siRNA). siRNA is, as the name suggests, a tiny fragment of RNA, usually only ~20 bases long, and it occurs naturally. It binds to sections of mRNA, which serves to tell the cell to destroy that bit of mRNA; that's how you don't have leftover mRNAs floating around inside you all the time. Because they float around in the cell all the time anyway, the cell can't recognize foreign siRNAs. So we can deliver the siRNAs and turn off the production of proteins that should not be produced. Although this doesn't help the people with diseases resulting from not having a protein they should, it helps a lot of people with diseases resulting from having too much of a protein they shouldn't.
At least, that's the theory. It's been shown to work in mice that were engineered to deliberately overproduce a protein, thus making them healthy. But whole blood does not like these things, and tends to rip the DNA-packages to bits before they even get to the cells. And these are general effectors, meaning they can't be told only to affect one cell or even one cell type. The worst is that the fats themselves seems to be distressingly toxic in high amounts; although we suspect therapeutic dose (the dose that makes people better) is much lower than the toxic dose (which makes people sick) we still want to develop a better alternative. To that end, my project is going to see if we can get a modified linoleic acid, which is a fat absolutely required in the human diet, to form these little capsules as well. That way, we don't have to worry about the medicine poisoning the patient XD
Last thing for the day was Safety Training, and I am pleased to say we didn't have to watch the stupid video. Instead, we put out fires. Okay, so they were safely in a bucket the whole time, it was still cool! And there was a lot of less-interesting PowerPoint, but it is still good to know. For example, calling 911 on a cell phone will call the police in Ventura, an hour away, instead of in Isle Vista, just off campus. No, I don't know either. And then I took a pathetically easy quiz. And then I was done.
My life lately has been busy. I will be glad to go home on the weekend. :D
