So many lectures...so little time.

I liked the very enlightnening lectures that were given to us today. So far, there has been more work performed on all the stuff that I have been reading. It's been pretty interesting lately. Anyway...the lecutres today...what could I say about them? The first one was very interesting. Georg Wondrak displayed a very intereting lecture concerning how Nfr2 works and its association with skin cancer, such as melanomas. Curently, to control such exposure to ultraviolet light, there is sunscreen and QPES (Quenching Photoexcited States) and other stuff. For now, altering human behavior seems to be the best course for limiting exposure to the sun. Staying indoors, wearing clothes that will cover up most of your skin, and putting on sunscreen seems to be the best course to keep yourself from getting sunburnt and/or becoming susceptible to skin cancer.

The second lecture, given by Kathy Honaman, dealt mainly with environmental hazards and research ethics. The environmental hazards was dealt with in a triangle. The investigation then produced the actions that woud control what was going on. We performed an activity to determine various diagnoses based upon environmental hazards. Environmental hazards can affect the diagnosis of the patient.

Another part of the lecture was research ethics, mainly the subject of informed consent. Informed consent is telling the patient, or the patient's relatives, about the various procedures that you will perform. You are required to tell the benefits, risks, projected outcome, and the procedure for your experiment. This information is definitely supposed to be objective, not persuasive. If the subject refuses, you cannot try to convince him otherwise, because that is putting the subject "under duress", violating the whole idea of "informed consent". This definitely came around during the Holocaust, and later the Tuskegee and Milgram experiments. The Holocaust is universally known as a horror, not just because there was Dr. Mengele and his rather inhumane experiments on Jews. Tuskegee is another horror within the scientific community in which doctors performed tests on blacks with syphilis. When the treatment came around, they were denied treatment in order to determine the course in which this ailment took. Another was the Milgram experiment, which Stanley Milgram, a psychology researcher, performed various tests that caused a lot of controversy. Anyway, that is why researchers have to go through the very lengthy process in order to get their research approved and tested on human subjects.

So far in our labs, I finally meet Dr. Camenisch. Like everybody said, he was a very friendly researcher. We went into a very quick discussion of what to do for my project. Other things have gone on, including and H & E staining, which is a rather quick procedure, but there are a lot of steps. There are two dyes, Hematoxylin and Eosin. It's bathe also in xylene, alcohol of various concentrations, and a bunch of other stuff. It definitely required gloves, running water and deionized water.