Graduates From j.o.h.n. walker’s Flickr photostream

When we ask students what drives them crazy, they sometimes respond that they wish we had given them a packet describing everything they would have to do to graduate.

There is, and we do tell them. The thing here is continuity of service. They start getting these packets from day 1, before they even sign on to the college. Some things are verbal, some things are written. All get repeated.

The problem with being a student is the continuity. Most students don’t realize that the program that they are in is fluid, so students admitted the year before and students admitted the year after may well have a different curriculum and requirements.

This shocks students. It is their education, it seems to the students that it is a giant monolithic event, one unchanged path towards a degree. Yet for faculty and administrators the curriculum and requirements are a fluid space, different for almost every year.

So back to continuity, how do we take the two perspectives and bring them into one place, where students are satisfied and faculty understand. Students should allows have access to a forward and backward look across their own curriculum and requirements, but currently that takes some work to figure out.

Yes, I can hear you thinking, as a school we already have allot of this functionality, but we don’t use it.

The Rx system we use here, or really, any portfolio system could be used this way, students get a pre-formatted space when they arrive. Pre-formatted in the sense that their handbook goes from a dead pdf online to a more interactive space that they (the student) fill with their grades and accomplishments, as it fills, they can check items off and see how close (or far) they are from reaching their goals, that year, that rotation, ultimately graduation.

Tough request, but there are places were we could do a better job. Since students get packaged by “year of entry” we could probably use the same system as is in place now, but we would improve the continuity for the student by moving it to a live space online where they could look at it when they are ready.

We tell them everything they will have to do in the beginning of their first year, but all they hear is “and that concludes our presentation”. Towards the end they ask us what is it that they have to do and are they almost done, but all we hear is our own perspective whispering, “they didn’t listen”.

That is the divide that we have to cross.

Right…

It turns out that restoring from a NAS like the Drobo FS is not as straight forward as hoped. I popped in the install usb that I carry around and dropped into the restore form Time Machine option and off the software went to search and search, and search.

Nothing. No networked backups appeared. So it was off to Google and this solution by Urban Toronto. Oddly or perhaps predictably, terminal saves the day… again.

So next time, just so I remember:

Create a mount point on the target disk:

 mkdir /Volumes/TimeMachine

Mount the network share to this newly created volume:

mount -t afp afp://YourDroboFSAdminUserName:YourDroboFSAdminPassword@IPAddressOfDrobo/YourDroboTimeMachineShareName /Volumes/TimeMachine

Finally mount the actual image of your Time Machine backup to make its contents readable:

hdid /Volumes/TimeMachine/yourMacsTimeMachineFile.sparsebundle

If you don’t know the name of your sparsebundle image, just cd into your /Volumes/TimeMachine directory and use ls to look it up.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 11,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 18 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

The New York Times has a couple of good writes-ups on this. At the time of this post, this is the most recent.

This is where Brandon Keim starts in a post on a chemists ability to churn out legal analogues of illegal compounds.

The question is a good one for medicinal chemists, policy makers, and emergency room clinicians, but all for different reasons.

Chemists Outrun Laws in War on Synthetic Drugs | Wired Science | Wired.com.

I think this will make a good first lecture for the my toxicology students, framing the unusual mix of stakeholders when we discuss abused drugs.

The Burden of Disease and the Changing Task of Medicine

There is a growing field of work here that is really interesting. Here is the NY Times article:

Studies of Human Microbiome Yield New Insights – NYTimes.com.

And here is the link to the Microbiome Project Site:

http://www.hmpdacc.org/

Genetic analysis of radiation-induced changes in human gene expression. Smirnov DA, Morley M, Shin E, Spielman RS, Cheung VG. Nature. 2009 May 28;459(7246):587-91. Epub 2009 Apr 6.

Abstract
Humans are exposed to radiation through the environment and in medical settings. To deal with radiation-induced damage, cells mount complex responses that rely on changes in gene expression. These gene expression responses differ greatly between individuals and contribute to individual differences in response to radiation. Here we identify regulators that influence expression levels of radiation-responsive genes. We treated radiation-induced changes in gene expression as quantitative phenotypes, and conducted genetic linkage and association studies to map their regulators. For more than 1,200 of these phenotypes there was significant evidence of linkage to specific chromosomal regions. Nearly all of the regulators act in trans to influence the expression of their target genes; there are very few cis-acting regulators. Some of the trans-acting regulators are transcription factors, but others are genes that were not known to have a regulatory function in radiation response. These results have implications for our basic and clinical understanding of how human cells respond to radiation.

This paper described the reseachers efforts to identify classes of genes that may serve as potential markers of radiation sensitivity. To accomplish this the investigators examined gene expression patterns of radiation exposed cells.

Tox1401 Students: How did the reseachers do this? What cells did they use and why? What is the difference between cis-regulatory and trans-regulatory factors? Give an example of each from the paper and describe the function.

Reblogged from Contagions:

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Parameters that should be theoretically equal often aren't so in the real world. Ideally everyone should have the same potential to transmit an infection during a given outbreak, but it has long been observed that this isn't true. Super-spreaders play an extraordinary role in driving outbreaks of infectious disease. A super-spreader is a person who transmits an infection to a significantly greater number of other people than the average infected person.

Read more… 953 more words

Here is why:

Pharmacogenomics is required by our accrediting body.

The 2007 accreditation standards set forth the need for education in not just pharmacogenomics, but genomic variability and the genetic basis of disease. In the AACP’s 2007-2008 final report from the “Bylaws and Policy Development Committee”, the educational challenge was further refined:  “personalized medicine, including relevant competencies in cell and systems biology, bioengineering, genetics/ genomics, proteomics, nanotechnology, cellular and tis- sue engineering, bioimaging, computational methods and information technologies”. Our charge is to insure that our students are prepared to be fluent in this emerging field.

Numerous pharmacy schools have decided that they must include more pharmacogenomics in our curriculum.

School after school has determined that there was insufficient coverage or breath of genomic and proteomic material in the curriculum. They have identified modules in a few courses that could be expanded, but the general feeling of the faculty is that improvement is needed and would be part of a new curriculum. Surprisingly as the pharmacogenomic field grows, surveyed faculty are less optimistic that pharmacy covers this area sufficiently.

Pharmacogenomics is not just warfarin and cytochrome P450s

There is a perception that pharmacogenomics can be defined by its most cited cases, warfarin and cytochrome P450 alleles. 

This is not the case.

Pharmacogenomics is an intersection of numerous different fields of study, including (but not limited to) human genetics, protein biochemistry, population biology, evolutionary genomics, molecular biology, pharmacology, systems biology, and toxicology. The perception that one can learn pharmacogenomics by covering a limited number of case studies of warfarin followed up by a review of cytochrome p450 alleles is misfounded, particularly when the majority of individuals asked can’t even define what an allele is, let alone how such information can be assessed clinically. Going forward pharmacists will be in an ideal position within the healthcare system to use, disseminate, and educate their patients on genomic issues. We must train students to be prepared to serve in this role.

We have an opportunity to lead in pharmacogenomics/biotechnology/genetic therapy instruction

One of the most consistently repeated challenges in pharmacogenomics education is the lack of foundation. We have direct experience with this in our current toxicogenomics class, TOX1401. Students are unprepared for concepts that serve as the foundation for pharmacogenomics. Concepts from basic gene expression to genotyping using single nucleotide polymorphisms require considerable educational investment. To be direct the PHS department has worked hard to fit this content into a 3 credit course with an additional 1 credit of lab. Pharmacogenomics now consists not only of fields previously listed but also relies heavily on bioinformatics. Our students need a solid understanding of computational approaches that are already in use from the drug development phase to public health outcomes studies. This is part of a pharmacogenomics course. See the PharmGKB dataset for examples: http://www.pharmgkb.org .

We need to invest now in order to prepare our students

If we do not invest in fully preparing our students for this field we are failing them. We are not discussing a new technology that may show up in a few year, but rather it is here now. Teaching our students that a few gene products have allelic differences and relating this concept to a few drugs is a huge disservice. The field is growing in ways that will shortly include true gene (siRNA) based therapies. We have to invest in a real foundational course taught by professionals who have a deep understanding of the concepts. This sort of approach will insure that our students are prepared to understand new technologies. 

As a school we have an opportunity to lead here, we should. A two credit class is a salve, a 3 credit class at least gives us a shot at getting a foundational understanding. A three credit class and a lab would be better.