WARNING. What follows is a a bit of a rant. Worse, it’s an undergraduate rant. If awkward phrases, fallacious arguments and poor grammar offends you, I would suggest skipping this post.

It could be that I’m seeing the world through cobalt-colored glasses– it is winter in MN and very cold and dark– and it is highly probable that the onslaught of medical school rejection letters biases me, but I think today was the most depressing day of school I’ve had in recent history.

It started with neurobiology (Ok…this one’s a bit of a stretch) when we learned about the development of nervous tissue and how progenitor cells literally compete via lateral inhibition with each other to see who will become what. Neuroectoderm cells that “lose” become dispensable support cells while the ones that “win” are lavished with ‘cytoplasmic gifts’ (PZ’s words) and differentiate into a neuroblasts. I couldn’t help but think, “Wow, our very cells viciously jockey to establish hierarchies!?” I mean… who wants to be the little peon cell? They lied to us in kindergarden…

Next came ecology. This was a killer. The professor even had a disclaimer before lecture warning us that what would ensue would be upleasant. Yep. It was the global warming lecture. I had seen the “hockey stick” graphs before and the receding glacier pictures and yes, they’re all very disturbing, but what really got me was a picture of the arctic circle in the summer. There appeared to be about half of the ice cover that usually persisted pre-industrial revolution.

Things got worse in ecology lab. We had to calculate our carbon footprint. Apparently I use about 24 acres to support my lifestyle. It would take 4 earths for everyone to live like me (and I didn’t even count this l’il methane producer):

…or these guys…

The final blow was a film screening for my class on human aggression. The movie? Natural Born Killers. It was a double whammy. Even if the self-destructing, unsavory, hopeless nature of the characters doesn’t get to you than the indictment of society’s commodification of violence certainly does.

Man. Days like today almost make me yearn for the good ol’ days when I had my class on” critical pedagogy” with excerpts from Paulo Freire on the necrophilic and dehumanizing nature of oppression.

I… think I need to go hold one of the bunnies…

My fish have (theoretically) been sleep deprived for three days. I can’t tell much of a difference. If anything they seem more active than the other fish, but they do have to constantly outswim a rotating ruler and their tank is pretty small. There is also a bright lamp on a timer that turns on and off every 30 minutes, so even if I can’t prevent sleep I know they’re regularly disturbed.

This is what the set up looks like:

I’m testing the sleepless group against control fish in a behavioral assay. I wanted to use a T-maze adopted from Mark Antimony’s experiment but the initial results were dismal. It took some fish over ten minutes to find the food reward (during which I once left to find a food reward of my own. Sweet sweet NutterButters…).

So… I modified the test. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that now I’m prodding the fish with a pen and timing how long it takes them to “escape” (go to a protected side of the tank). The results are definitely cleaner than the ones from the maze, but I still don’t think I’ll be able to describe a difference between the groups. What is cool is to see the way fish learn. Individuals generally get faster each trail; I think that trend should be significant.

I once overheard an interesting confession from a friend of a friend. This guy had been drinking and was admitting to his buddy that he just wanted to get into a fight, punch the next person that walked through the door, stir things up. That sort of thing. I complained to my companion that it was precisely this attitude that causes so much conflict in society and, though my friend agreed, he sheepishly added that sometimes he too enjoyed the thrill of physical violence.

I was reminded of the incident recently in a class on the origins of aggression when we read a passage from Journalist Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs. Buford spent eight years documenting violent episodes in sports crowds and riots. He wrote of the intensity of a violent experience:

I am attracted to the moment when consciousness ceases: the moments of survival, of animal intensity, of violence, when there is no multiplicity, no potential for different levels of thought: there is only one–the present in its absoluteness

If we really can find a sort of solace, release, or even satisfaction in violence, I think this says something about our race, and it makes me wonder if peace is really attainable. We may find it difficult to identify with violent people as we are now, but how would we react if a loved one were taken from us? Would we want revenge? Maybe revenge is the search for the relief that violence can bring however transient or ultimately tragic.

… well not today. I learned very little today , but generally, here are some interesting things I’ve picked up in class:

-If you sever a cat’s cerbral cortex from its hindbrain it can still walk on a treadmill (in a harness that compensates for the poor feline’s lack of balance). This was the topic of one of PZ’s many tangents.

-One way to inhibit the HIV virus is to make a drug that targets a protein our cells make. The key is to identify a protein the virus needs but that we do not. CYC202, a cyclin-dependant kinase inhibitor, may be one such drug.

-“HIV virus” is redundant, but hey, so is the genetic code.

-If you race flatworms in a maze, grind up the fastest ones, and feed the product to flatworms having yet to try the maze, you might find that they run the maze faster than their non-cannibal counterparts. Of course, you would consider that flatworm may simply be highly nutritious, because you’re a scientist, and that’s what they pay you the big erlenmeyers for.

-Badger culling. That’s right. Badger. Culling. It’s used to decrease badger/cow contact in Great Britain as badgers function as a bovine tuberculosis infection reservoir for cattle.

-EtOH and H20 are miscible. Whew… and to think I almost made myself an acetone martini…