"Are You Ready, Are You Excited?"

These are the two questions I've heard repeatedly for the last 2 weeks and up until now they have just made me want to scream, "NO, I have a list of about 1400 things that still need to be done and right now I'm just exhausted and daunted."   Somehow in the last 36 hours I've actually started to realax.  I know part of it is because I've had awesome help from friends.  I can't tell if we are through the storm or if we are just in the eye.  My loving husband to be has become a full fledged and embraced the fact that he is a groomzilla.

 So in between creating detailed notes for our posse so they know what they are doing I have to keep reminding him that he won't be there to make sure it is done correctly.  We'll be taking pictures :-).   Meanwhile my wedding has become a full fledged family event.  So I knew they were going to have a celebration for my Aunt's 80th birthday the afternoon of the day after the wedding.  But what I was not expecting that my informal Sunday brunch to become the formal celebration for her birth.  I also get company when getting my nails done, but not for the bride to be, to celebrate my cousin's birthday.  So now members of my family are now talking about how great it is to be there to celebrate everyone else and I'm thinking. . . Is it wrong to think my wedding weekend should be about my future husband and me?   Alright back to washing dishes and getting ready for the weekend.  So am I ready and I excited. . . I'm starting to be.

Unforeseen Wedding Crazies and Match Day Results

So,  I see myself as a pretty low key non-stressy bride.   I intend not to be a Bridezilla and have made it so those participating in my wedding have max flexibility.  For example,  I'm not choosing dresses for my party but allowing them to chose their own within a certain color spectrum.  So far my fiance has been way more of a Groomzilla with demands that no sneakers be worn and that certain members of the party should wear hats, and freaking out when little things don't come together.

However, there is something about weddings that make people lose their sense of agency and need to ask the bride about every little thing.  I've been asked everything from what shoes (which I think is reasonable) to how to wrap our wedding present (which is not).   It's like we are Ta'veren and everyone is just waiting for our approval.  More frustrating is the lack (possibly American lack as I've talked to others before) of ability to look things up.  Though the website is chock full of info and we've sent out numerous emails & google docs with information people still ask me.  Even though I've clearly said in other emails that I don't have this information, people still ask me.

 Apparently I was looking so defeated today that everyone seemed to feel the need to console me and tell me not to worry.  All of our service people have been super excited and we're crossing fingers for no rain next Saturday.

Of Match Day I will be heading down to wonderful Asheville, NC to join the Mountain Area Health Education Center MAHEC.  That's right I get to be warm have a beautiful view, southern hospitality, in a hippie liberal refuge. That's right it's NC version of Austin or Yellow Springs on steroids.  :-)  Here's a shot before we found out where were going.

Now we're heading to Shadowbox for a combined Bachelor Bachelorette-esque party.  Can't wait to chill out and have some fun. On other news I gave a successful talk on White Privilege to FreeThought thanks to TWIB NET. Shout out to the chatroom and all my wonderful friends who are helping me remain sane by tying ribbons and gluing corks.  ONE WEEK LEFT.

3, 2, 1 AHHHHHhhhhhhh

So I'm at O'Hare airport on my way to Kansas City for AAFP's cluster, and I stil can't get myself to focus enough to completely read through last year's report.  So apparently I'm blogging

For the last couple weeks I've been having fun saying , "In 4 months I'm graduating, 3 months getting married, 2 months Matching, and going to  Swaziland in 1 month.  Then it all crashed down.  Wait no, not 4 months, 3.  I'm going to Swaziland next month (which is a whole other discussion) . . Ahhh wait no I did again.  I'm going to Swaziland next week.  Actually this time next week I'll be landing in Johannesburg.  So with the realization I'll be basically out of touch with everyone for a month I've been trying to get things squared away.  Like emailing the entire family to RSVP for the wedding since for some reason most of my family didn't.  This is especially important since we have an A, B and C list and people keep wanting to bring guests.  120 people can come to the wedding.  That is it we are against fire codes here people. 

To add to the craziness I have to make sure my schedule is finalized. Work on my talent show entry (since I am the reining champion for the last 3 years).  Make sure my research FINALLY gets through IRB so I can graduate. And oh yeah at some point I should pack for leaving the country.  But wait there are some wedding things that I need to tend to before I go.  And I have to turn in my badge for my Women's Health elective and, and and . . . . 

At least my Rank list is done.

I'm pretty sure I don't look as crazed as I feel since Airport Security haven't dragged me away yet.  Okay.  I'm going to get back to actually preparing for the thing happening later today.  Fingers crossed there are no more delays. 

Wedding in less than 3 months!!

 So my wonderfully DIY wedding seems to becoming less and less so by the week.  So first we were going to do a DIY photobooth.  Then my great friend Jared found me an amazing photographer for a very reasonable price so we had it in the budget to just rent a booth.   Now the dessert buffet that we were going to have Stephan's Dad make for us.  But he said he's not going to be able to take the time off and is willing to just pay for us to have a local Baker make the desserts using our recipes.  On the up side we are still mostly local, and of course there is the center pieces etc that are all DIY as well.   Finalized my wedding hair style today :-) Which will be a slightly messier version of this.  Now I just have to figure out my make-up and underwear and I will be all ready for the wedding . . . well ready look wise.  I still have to do favors and a bunch of other stuff as well.

Meanwhile on the Residency front Stephan and I are going to sit down and figure out what we are putting first 2nd and third tomorrow.  And enter the RANK LIST.  I have my fabulous Excel spreadsheet and residency rater app to help.  Which has me down to a top 3, but figuring out after that may be harder.  Hopefully I'll get it done.

Why I'm Pro Choice

I was raised to be pro choice, literally.  My father is a medical doctor who was trained during the pre- roe v. wade era.  He saw first hand the effect that lack of legal and safe abortion had.  I remember him coming home from work one day and stating how important it is that it is legal and safe because otherwise women die.   Remember the scene from Dirty Dancing when Penny is crying on the bed and Baby runs to get the doctor?  My Dad was that doctor in a rural part of Kentucky for many years.  I heard stories about the bleeding, the hangers, and the self sterilization that occurs when abortion is not safe and legal or even when women are just too afraid to seek it due to the stigma. My family is Christian and I was raised that sex before marriage was a bad choice.  In my family you lived with your poor choices, because choices had consequences.  Because of this much of my youth I was personally pro-life.  But because of the teachings of my father I was always politically pro-choice.  Who was I to tell someone else what to do.

As I grew older I learned how many children were stuck in the foster system, how many American children go unadopted every year.  I started to understand that there are good and bad times in life to have children, and talked to friends who had abortions.  Through my young adulthood I became personally and politically pro-choice.  These convictions were solidified as I worked in Reproductive Health throughout my time in Peace Corps Namibia, America Service Corps in India, and my Masters in Public Health in the US.  All over the world and here girls and boys, women and men are given incorrect and half information about their sexual health.  Reproductive health in all it's aspects became one of my passions.

Now as a future (in 4 months) physician being trained in Family Medicine I am seeking training to become an abortion/termination provider.   I love to have prenatal visits and deliver babies.  I also love to educate about contraception.  As a family physician I look forward to being able to take care of women and families throughout the different stages.  To me providing comprehensive care means being able to provide most all of the clinic services my patients need.  As a family practice doctor providing safe legal abortions I know I will be living up to the lessons my father taught me as a child and saving women's lives and futures.

Finished Interviewing and Small Wedding Rant

So I finished interviewing. . . HOORAY.   I had Wright State today and Lancaster on Monday.  My Rank list is going to be difficult.  What's more. . . taxing is all of the kiss up letters - AKA - stay in contact letters I'm going to have to write.  I know my number one (wouldn't you like to know :-p)  but the rest of my list is totally up for grabs.

As for wedding stuff.  There are some details that still left to be in done: Hair, Mehndi, Chuppah, Make-Up still all need to be decided and defined.  Oh How I wish People would RSVP !!!  More than 1/2 the list hasn't yet, and the ones who have want to bring other people.  It's like. . . uhmmmm where are they going to sit?  We are literally against fire codes here.  120  that is all.  But here's the real rant.  When looking up garters for larger thighs why do they always show skinny little thighs in the picture?  I asked for plus size.  Seeing this woman whose thigh is as large as my calf doesn't help me determine if this will fit on my large thighs.  A very poor selling point and just darn annoying.  Yes I know my thighs are large, don't keep rubbing it in!!!

Alright.  Back to writing thank you emails.  They say 4th year is fun. . . I'll let you know when it starts.

The "Aha" Moment

The other day while in neurology I had a patient's room number I didn't recognize.  "Where is 5702" I asked my colleague.  "Oh it's in the new cardiac building.  I think you have to cross over on the 4th floor or something."  "Oh yeah."  Though I only vaguely thought I knew where the floor was, I proceeded to go down to the 4th floor,  through ICU to the new building and immediately find my patient on the 5th floor.  Then I realized . . . I know my way around.  All hospitals are mazes and starting at community hospitals in 3rd year I was pretty sure I'd only know where a few things were (residents lounge, cafeteria, patients for one service).   Then to my surprise I find by the 3rd month of my 4th year I actually know my way around.

Every year of medical school seems to have an aha moment.  A moment where you're doing something you never thought you would.

• 1st year you realize - wow I am actually reading all of this information.
• 2nd year - you have the moment when you are not actually panicing about Step 1 of the boards (at the moment
• 3rd year- Is the moment when an attending tells you to go see a patient and you do.  You don't think about it.  You don't freak out and go through in your head what am I supposed to ask them.  You just see the patient
• Now 4th year when you realize you know your way around.

I've often heard from attendings that 3rd year is the transition from patient to doctor for medical students and by the time you are at the end of 3rd year and beginning of 4th you are pretty much a doctor.   What I didn't realize is that certain things just become automatic when that happens.  Like doing an History and Physical and finding your way around.  Here's to Fourth Year !

--> Interview Update <-- amaze="amaze" an="an" and="and" another="another" as="as" asheville="asheville" at="at" atividad="atividad" aybe="aybe" be="be" but="but" change="change" cherry="cherry" coast="coast" coming="coming" could="could" did="did" do="do" done="done" end="end" fall="fall" for="for" get="get" group="group" have="have" health="health" hill="hill" i="i" idn="idn" in="in" ind="ind" interview="interview" interviews="interviews" it="it" list="list" love="love" me="me" my="my" nbsp="nbsp" nc.="nc." now.="now." now="now" of="of" p="p" place="place" rosa.="rosa." santa="santa" stands="stands" t="t" the="the" this="this" ut="ut" week.="week." west="west" will="will" wish="wish" with="with">

Wedding Planning Interrupted by Residency Interviews

So I kinda fell off again.  Mostly due to 3rd year craziness. Here's a hint of what I went through

  Now it's Fall and Interview Season.  I'm interviewing for Family Med. So far I've interviewed at Beth Israel in NY, and Washington in PA.  Next up are Williamsport in PA, Asheville and Hendersonville in NC.  Then I start on my west coast set in northern CA and Seattle.  There's only one I'm waiting to hear back from (and of course it is my number one right now) Santa Rosa (sigh).  Every time I go to the website I find something new I love about the program. Anyway.  The website is done.  Invitations are out and I'm just waiting to get all of the RSVPs back at this point.  Will post how all of that looks.  Through the help of friends we found a brilliant photographer jennifer elizabeth and did some amazing engagement photos.

Now I Just have all the personal stuff to finish.  Find makeup, and work on hair.  Oh yeah and I really need to find who is going to do my mehndi.

The Hair Delema

So this isn't quite in pattern with wedding decisions but is is one of the things I worry most about.

Just Curly  and Free

Anyone who knows me knows about my thick, curly, sometimes unruly hair.  I love my hair.  I have extremely thick and curly natural Black American Hair.

Somewhat contained

Due to how long it takes to blow out my hair (3 hours) and flat iron it (another 2-3 hours)  I only wear my hair straight when one of my friends is willing to do it this, usually at their request, and usually they only do that once. 

Blown Out

Twisted

I have plenty of fun styles I like to wear,  but weddings are supposed to be something great.

Normal day to day look

Out and Free-er in Israel

So now for my rant, inspired by I Do My Do

There are almost NO good ideas for naturally curly wedding hair styles.  Most of the ones I find just show people who have their hair either in a 'Fro, twisted, or straightened for the wedding.  I know there are natural styles out there, why don't people display them more.   Moreover when they do show a curly style it is for someone who has extremely loose curls or very thin hair.  ARGH!

On the upside I have managed to find a great, affordable hairdresser in Dayton who is creative and willing to work with me.  Best believe there will be plenty of pictures posted when we do it properly.

So for anyone who has naturally curly hair and wants wedding hair style ideas, here are some pictures from my idea folder that I've been collecting for the last 3ish years.   I don't own the rights to any of the pictures and hope I'm not violating any laws.

And I challenge Pantene, Carol's Daughter, or any of those hair product places who love to rave about how they can do anyone's hair to try mine  ;-)

Choosing the Date

Solitaire Trillion Sapphire in White Gold.  I know it's hot!

I got engaged April 19th, 2008 to a fabulous man.

Our first decision, as prompted by most wedding books, was to choose a wedding date.  I still had a year left of my masters degree, and was applying to medical school (which would add on another four years). With a bit of consideration we thought it would be great to have the wedding around the same time as the engagement.  We wanted an outdoor wedding so it had to be warmish.  Since we are paying for the wedding ourselves, we also wanted time to save money.  So we finalized the date

April 20th, 2013.

This would allow us plenty of time to plan, bargain hunt, and save money along the way. It also would not interfere with my schooling or his, and there would be less expectation to be Dr. Goodwin instead of Dr. Shegog (more on this later). It was a Saturday, between our two birthdays (February and July) so no build up of present buying; silly but yes I think about these things.

So here are some things to consider when choosing the date

• Who is paying? (saving money takes time)
• What else is going in the next year or so (multiple big life changes take time to prepare for)
• Do you really have time to plan a wedding (the more time you have the less you have to spend on it right now)
• Indoors or Outdoors?  (Big consideration for seasons and dress - check average forecasts for your location)
• What is there to wait for or rush for (Job changes or other big family event may call for a longer time line, Elderly grandparents may cause a rush)
• Fridays and off season is usually cheaper for everything (Photographer, flowers, DJ, name it, it's cheaper)
• Notification timing (If you really want your uncle the surgeon to come, you should give him a years notice or at least 6-8 months)
• When do you want to celebrate your anniversary (Do you really want to overlap on big holidays)
• Beliefs and Custom (Will it require you not living together and in a long distance relationship,  or do you think it is more important that everyone have the right to marry before you tie the knot?)

Still some ask "Why so long an engagement."  When we get married we will have been engaged for 5 years, and together for more than 6.  With finishing my thesis, moving to a new city, starting medical school, the last 3 years have been busy.  But we've had the time and could look for things on non-exam weekends and over breaks.  Now with 2 years to go, most of the big stuff (location, flowers, dress, food, centerpieces, etc) are done, purchased, or decided.  Such a time line has even given us time to grow our own plants for centerpieces and find some incredible deals. 

Though many, MANY of my friends have gotten engaged and married before we will, I still appreciate the time I took to plan.

The day I got engaged I sent this picture to my friends and family

So choose a date,  even a far one.  What's the rush?

New Rationale Wedding Blog

Whereas: I have now been engaged for 3 years and much of our wedding planning is done.
Whereas: Our wedding is going to be extremely different from the "typical"
Whereas: Friends and family who hear about our wedding keep saying that we should be on a television show it will be so different.
Whereas: There is probably someone else who would like to know what I know.

Therefore Be it resolved that Yop, while having a few updates on my life in Medical School, will now be a outlet for the interesting things I've learned about in wedding planning and detail some of the fun things we are doing.

Yop!!! Lives

6 or so months later

I'm still working on my thesis. Oy they seem to last forever. I've now officially been on the project team about a year. But I should start making some great strides soon . . . like tomorrow. Still engaged. Still hoping to hear back from another school. However I did make it in to Ohio State's Medical Program. It's a five year instead of a four year program, but I'm in, which is the important thing.

That time of the year again

Yes it is that time when money seems to fall away like the cold rain off my window shield and the biggest question of the day is how will I make it to next quarter. The second biggest question of the day is what am I going to get my family for Christmas.

Meanwhile back at the macbook I'm still chugging away at a few more secondaries before Dec 1st. No matter how much I planned to have them done a month ago things just got drawn out. On the up side of things I'm submitting a mini grant proposal today for my thesis project and my adviser doesn't seem too put out that I ended up about a month behind where I wanted to be.

MIA for a Year or So

So I realized I haven't posted in a really. . . really long time. That's mainly because I haven't had time. I don't really have time now. I'm doing research for my thesis, working on medical school secondaries, starting a new job tomorrow, starting my last year at OSU School of Public Health Wednesday, and. . . something else maybe. Life hasn't been this busy the whole time, but nearly so. There is the added fact that I'm engaged and try to spend as much time as possible with Stephan. Which isn't much since he lives two hours south in Fairfield Ohio. Anyway, I will try to be a bit more diligent, or at least give more than one post a year.

Sunny Days

Interesting statement on the reality (or lack thereof) in children's programing. I still love it though and am glad to have volume one. :-)Sweeping the Clouds Away



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By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: November 18, 2007

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.
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The Medium

For adventures in digital culture, don't miss The Medium, a blog by Virginia Heffernan.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.

The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.

Oh, what’s that? Right, the trance of early “Sesame Street” and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show’s devotion to its “target child,” the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain — black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America’s farms uniquely on “Sesame Street.”

In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.” The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn’t much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that “Sesame Street” played, because the Children’s Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy — an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.

The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.

People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.

Science always makes things intersting

NYT Science
Within Discredited Stem Cell Research, a True Scientific First

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By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: August 3, 2007

The world of stem cell research was set reeling two years ago when its most successful practitioner, the Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk, was found to have fabricated much of his work. But according to a new post-mortem of his research, he did achieve a scientific first, though not the one he claimed.
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Ahn Young-Joon/Associated Press

The Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk was found to have faked data.

Dr. Hwang said he had derived embryonic stem cells from the adult cells of a patient, but the claim was discredited after parts of his research were found to have been faked. A team of Boston scientists has now re-examined stocks of Dr. Hwang’s purported embryonic stem cells and arrived at a surprising conclusion: His embryonic stem cells were the product of parthenogenesis, or virgin birth, meaning they were derived from an unfertilized egg.

A team led by Kitai Kim and George Q. Daley of Children’s Hospital Boston reports this conclusion today in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

Embryonic stem cells derived through parthenogenesis cannot develop normally, so they are free of ethical objections. The cells could perhaps help treat degenerative diseases in women capable of supplying eggs, should effective treatments ever be developed.

Other researchers have since developed embryonic stem cells from parthenogenetic eggs, but Dr. Hwang’s team would have been the first to do so had its members recognized what they had done.

“It could have been a seminal finding if they hadn’t had their blinders on,” said Kent E. Vrana, an expert on parthenogenesis at Pennsylvania State University.

John D. Gearhart, a stem cell expert at Johns Hopkins University who had a ringside view of the Hwang affair as a member of the journal Science’s advisory board, said parthenogenesis had always been a possibility.

“I’m delighted there was an explanation that didn’t involve fraud,” Dr. Gearhart said.

Dr. Hwang soared to prominence after asserting in a report in Science in 2004 that he had developed embryonic stem cells from a patient, the first hurdle in the idea of rebuilding patients’ tissues with their own cells.

He said he had removed the nucleus from an unfertilized human egg and inserted a new nucleus from the adult cell of the patient. The egg developed into an embryo, from which his team claimed to have developed embryonic stem cells.

The editors of Science, the journal that published his claim, later retracted the article because the Korean committee that investigated Dr. Hwang’s work found that the supporting data had been faked.

As to the source of Dr. Hwang’s embryonic stem cells, the Korean committee said parthenogenesis was possible. But this could not be proved with the methods then available.

Dr. Daley has been studying parthenogenesis in mice with new devices that can analyze DNA at up to 500,000 sites on the genome. Recognizing that parthenogenetic cells have a special and unexpected genetic signature, Dr. Daley realized he could resolve the origin of Dr. Hwang’s cells.

“It becomes an historic irony that Hwang was the first to produce the parthenogenetic stem cell but didn’t appreciate what he had,” Dr. Daley said.

Although some creatures can reproduce by parthenogenesis, virgin birth would be a miracle in humans because the chromosomes from the mother and father each carry special chemical imprints, and both are required for normal development. Parthenogenetic embryos, in which both sets of chromosomes carry a female imprint, are not viable.

But Dr. Daley said that a case is known of a male patient who is a parthenochimera (“chimera” meaning an individual who is composed of two different types of cell). Two embryos, one normal and one parthenogenetic, fused in the womb. Some of the patient’s cells have the X and Y chromosomes of a normal man, but his blood has the two X chromosomes of parthenogenetic cells, evidently an instance of semi-virgin birth.

Dr. Hwang seems unlikely to get much scientific credit for developing embryonic cells via parthenogenesis because he said in his 2004 article that he had done tests showing that parthenogenesis was unlikely. He also said he had removed the nucleus from every egg, which he could not have done in the case of the egg that developed parthenogenetically.

NIH & DC

Greetings all who still may actually read this. I'm working up a storm in DC. My internship at the NIH is going pretty well. I have 3 projects and two focus on social networks and how they relate to cancer prevention (screening mainly). I'll be presenting a poster next week. Maybe I'll post it here too. . . . maybe. It's looking at the risk beliefs and barriers to genetic testing for certain cancer mutations in a Mexican American family. Pretty cool.

DC is great I had a wonderful birthday with food and friends. Thanks to Lauren I also participated in my first Crab Feast. A very special east coaster thing. Reading Harry Potter 7, on the long commute I have every day.

I'm living with my sister Mychell which has turned out to be not bad at all. Actually quite good except for that whole "I'm used to living alone thing" so I occasionally for get to do some common sense things that wouldn't cause issue in my house (like forgeting to replace the tp in one of the bathrooms.

On the whole all is pretty good.

Spring Stuff

So I've been very lazy over the last few months, that's partially do to my crazy school schedule and the fact that my friends made me (well coerced) me into joining Live journal and facebook, and I've realized I when spread over many blogs, I tend not to.

So I'm insane and taking 19 credit hours, originally so I could finish my dual focus MPH in two years so I could start my MD in '08. Well this plan completely backfired as I don't have enough time to study and take the MCATs again and will have to wait until '08 to apply. Leaving me with at least 9-6 months of working (hopefully) somewhere. Which everyone (everyone being my study partners Tony and Morgan and my sisters Mychelle and Marya) thinks is actually a good thing.

Maybe it is, but I dislike when my plans are rearranged.

Meanwhile. . .work work work. I do have some friends and my friend Stephan comes up to visit from Cincy so I do take time out. I'll post some pictures soon, meanwhile here's my favorite new clip.

Dorky Clip of the Month

Occasionally I'll put up fun dorky clips that we all can enjoy. Well this one is interactive, and I thought it was really cool. I think it's a bit sad that as brilliant as Bobby is he is usually only known for this one thing. But it is pretty fun.

So watch it then join in the fun.



Do try the link it is pretty fun

Proof !

That there are people sillier than I am, and have exellent friends as I do. Don't worry no one in my Wedding Posse will have to participate in this particular act. Though I might think of a different one. :-)


The Proof