(no subject)
I just finished watching Elizabethtown. THe movie was mediocre, but I was struck by an idea. I want to be cremated, and I want my family to take a vacation and spread my ashes in several places. Here are the first few areas:
1. The Pack River, Sandpoint, Idaho
2. Issaquah Creek
3. The Thames
4. The Missippi River
Okay, this sounds as if I am planning to die soon. Not really, I kinda wanna live to at least sixty, have 3-4 children, get my PhD in Neurobiology and MD. I am planning to back to Issaquah after I get married and work as a neurologist. School is going well, and I am really excited for spring. History and Evolution of Disease has been an awesome combination of human evolution, skeletal anatomy, medical anthropology, epidemiology, history/philosophy of science, and public health policy. It's ironic that my class is a combination of biology and health, my two worst subjects in high school, and it is utterly compelling to me. It is a very scary time to be alive though. If nukes and terrorists don't kill us, disease definetly will. Avian bird flu is the least of our worries: the disease just doesn't pass from person to person well enough and won't solve this problem in the near future. The real problem is prions. Prions are proteins in the brain and are the evolutionary cause of the cultural taboo of cannabalism. Mad Cow Disease (Kuru in humans) is an example of a prion disease. Kuru is a disease which causes severe tremors and essentially destroys the brain. Kuru is acquired by eating an animal with mad cow disease. The scary part about this thing is that it takes about twenty years to become symptomatic. In other words, you could eat a steak with MCD and twenty years later get fatally ill. In populations that had Kuru, 1% of the total population died. Two weeks ago, the second case of mad cow disease was discovered. It is entirely possible, indeed propable, that there are more asymptomatic cases in the cattle population. We won't know for twenty years how many people have been exposed, and that will be twenty years too late.
...anyways... I'm back in Issy. Give me a ring at 425-557-9027 if you wanna meet.
1. The Pack River, Sandpoint, Idaho
2. Issaquah Creek
3. The Thames
4. The Missippi River
Okay, this sounds as if I am planning to die soon. Not really, I kinda wanna live to at least sixty, have 3-4 children, get my PhD in Neurobiology and MD. I am planning to back to Issaquah after I get married and work as a neurologist. School is going well, and I am really excited for spring. History and Evolution of Disease has been an awesome combination of human evolution, skeletal anatomy, medical anthropology, epidemiology, history/philosophy of science, and public health policy. It's ironic that my class is a combination of biology and health, my two worst subjects in high school, and it is utterly compelling to me. It is a very scary time to be alive though. If nukes and terrorists don't kill us, disease definetly will. Avian bird flu is the least of our worries: the disease just doesn't pass from person to person well enough and won't solve this problem in the near future. The real problem is prions. Prions are proteins in the brain and are the evolutionary cause of the cultural taboo of cannabalism. Mad Cow Disease (Kuru in humans) is an example of a prion disease. Kuru is a disease which causes severe tremors and essentially destroys the brain. Kuru is acquired by eating an animal with mad cow disease. The scary part about this thing is that it takes about twenty years to become symptomatic. In other words, you could eat a steak with MCD and twenty years later get fatally ill. In populations that had Kuru, 1% of the total population died. Two weeks ago, the second case of mad cow disease was discovered. It is entirely possible, indeed propable, that there are more asymptomatic cases in the cattle population. We won't know for twenty years how many people have been exposed, and that will be twenty years too late.
...anyways... I'm back in Issy. Give me a ring at 425-557-9027 if you wanna meet.