The bumbling biochemist

#Biochemistry PhD student on a mission to make biochemistry fun & accessible sometimes through my #scicomm superhero alter ego she/her.

 Textbooks Make Me Feel Dirty

The cost of these materials makes me sick, and the prices are rising at an astounding rate. For my college organic text, I paid less than half of what students are asked to pay today. Are today’s books really worth double my book, which remains a valued reference on my office bookcase? Has our understanding of introductory organic chemistry really changed that significantly in the last 15 years? No.

A Treasured Artifact: My First Periodic Table

Sometimes it’s fun to look back and figure out how you got to where you are. When people ask me when it was I knew that I wanted to become a chemist, I always point back to when I was 15 and enrolled in AP Chemistry.

Biochemistry Brings Health Management Up Close And Personal

Blood tests measure biomarkers that can give you a detailed picture of what is happening inside your body. But if all you get is that postcard that says your results are “normal,” you don’t learn very much. If you know exactly what your results are over time, you can see where you are in the normal range and whether the level of a particular biomarker is increasing or decreasing. The key is letting proven science guide an individual’s nutrition and behavior choices. If consumers are provided the data and context they can take appropriate action based on objective and precise insights.

Birthday Meditation

I turned 31 this month, and over the course of the past year, I’ve felt many of the same sentiments as Lewis. If I dropped dead tomorrow, there is no question in my mind that I would have had a net negative impact on the world.

Doctor? No.

I generally like to be respectful of people. Toward this end, I try my best to address people properly. You’ll find that I’m pretty liberal in using “Dr.” when addressing letters and e-mails, because you never know when someone is going to get upset at being called “Mister”. In contrast, few people seem to get upset at being called a doctor when they are not.

Games That Solve Real Problems: Crowdsourcing Biochemistry

Adrien Treuille, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, creates online challenges that tap gamers to solve complex scientific problems. Players of Foldit, an Internet video game he co-developed as a biochemistry postdoc at the University of Washington, recently solved in under three weeks a protein-folding problem that had stumped scientists for more than a decade.

Scope of Biochemistry - Will I get a job ?

While talking to many of the students and to some of my counterparts in the city, I noticed that many of them feel that there is no or little scope for biochemistry. They are actually confusing between the words "Scope" and the "Jobs" after studying biochemistry.

World Cancer Day: What do plants have to do with it?

So, you ask again, “What do plants have to do with cancer?” Here it is- A number of chemotherapy drugs are actually plant-derived chemicals. They may look anything-but-natural when you think about the sterile clear liquids that must slowly drip through plastic tubing and into medi-ports. Yet, before they were FDA-approved and mass-produced, these molecules existed in plants, relegated to the catch-all category termed ‘secondary metabolites’.